Tales of the Green Berets

(Avalon, 2000)
™ and ©2000 Joe Kubert

In the mid-1960s, the Special Forces of the army known as The Green Berets enjoyed an inordinate amount of popularity, due in no small part to “The Ballad of the Green Berets” which was a number one hit on the pop charts. Dell Comics published a comic book with this same title, but this book from ACG contains reprinted newspaper strips, (printed in landscape format), from the same era by Robin Moore and the incomparable Joe Kubert.

The presence of journalist Chris Tower in this strip connects these stories to the series from Dell in which he also appeared. Though that title was set in Vietnam, this newspaper strip takes place in Latin America where the Green Berets are aiding the Peace Corps in constructing a bridge for a small country that is beset by communist revolutionaries. Influenced by the rule of Fidel Castro in Cuba, the revolutionaries see the bridge as evidence of American imperialism. The action here has a cold war sensibility rather than the usual battle scenes as the Green Berets are charged with overseeing the bridge construction and diffusing the anti-American sentiment.

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