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Author, lyricist, and veteran of two wars, Robin Moore
is perhaps most famous for penning The
Green Berets, later to become the film of the same name starring John
Wayne, and for co-writing "The Ballad of the Green Berets" with
Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. It
was actually Moore who encouraged Sadler to write the song. Moore was already a World War II vet
when his fellow Harvard student Bobby Kennedy aided him in getting involved
in a Special Forces unit in Vietnam.
He had been a nose gunner over Germany at the end of WWII. Now he was helping to train a new
generation of soldier. To this
day, Special Forces soldiers cite The
Green Berets as one of the things that inspired them to enlist. Moore is so respected in the Special
Forces community he has been allowed access to a couple of modern military
theaters, including Uzbekistan, where he gathered information for his book The Hunt For Bin Laden. He later washed his hands of the
book when he found out that his main source had exaggerated his role in the
operation and had misrepresented facts. The book is now out of print. In spite of this literary mishap, he
went to Iraq in 2003, at the age of 78, to research the similarly titled Hunting Down Saddam. A prolific writer, Robin Moore has
left a legacy in film, as well.
In addition to his work on The
Green Berets, he has written other books that have made it to the big
screen, most notably The French
Connection: A True Account of
Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy, and The Happy Hooker: My
Own Story, which was co-written with Yvonne Dunleavy and Xaviera
Hollander. Not all of his movie
endeavours have been successful, however. Hot
Pants Holiday is unlikely to be on any AFI lists soon, and Moore is
also responsible for the screenplay of 1982's Inchon, one of the biggest box-office flops in motion-picture
history. It cost an estimated
$46,000,000 to make and took in less than a quarter of that in ticket sales. He also lent his voice to an
animated film called Blinky Bill,
in 1992. His latest book, The Wars of the Green Berets: Amazing Stories from Vietnam to the
Present, hit the shelves in June 2007.
Barry Sadler
recordings
The Ballad of
the Green Berets (Robin Moore/Barry Sadler)
Sources:
1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Moore
2.
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/contributor/1808947904
3.
http://www.sfcrowsnest.com/scifinder/a/Robin_Moore.php
4.
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=9780312329167&atch=h&atchi=100110209
5.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084132/business
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