April 1967: Sorcery in Saigon

By 1967, putting a positive spin on the Vietnam War would have required a miracle.

Enter Super Green Beret and his magical powers.

DC’s superheroes generally stayed out of politics, but Stan Lee, wanting to keep his a little more grounded in the real world, ran to anticommunist themes in the early Marvel adventures.

I could understand how a successful capitalist and munitions manufacturer like Tony Stark might loathe communism, but it surprised me when even a Norse thunder god had jingoistic political opinions.

By 1967, Lee had backed away from that. Even Captain America, who was thawed out in 1964, made only a couple of forays to Vietnam, and then forgot about it.

With body counts rising and the military draft in force, Vietnam War protests were in full swing by the time the short-lived Lightning Comics’ short-lived Super Green Beret appeared on the newsstands, then swamped with superheroes because of the success of both Marvel and the Batman TV show.

But the Lightning effort lacked any spark, and its timing was off. In October 1967, 100,000 protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and 30,000 of them marched on the Pentagon.

Long-time Captain Marvel writer Otto Binder echoed the then-defunct hero’s origin in Tod Holton, Super Green Beret. An actual beret substituted for the magic word “Shazam,” providing the feature’s suspense, such as it was. Teenager Todd Holton would lose his powers whenever he lost the hat.

Tod’s uncle, Roger Wilson, was an actual Green Beret who’d saved a mysterious far-eastern monk and been rewarded with a magical beret that would confer super powers on “…one who is young and noble by nature.”

His powers were more than impressive, and included telepathy, teleportation, invulnerability, super strength, time travel and the ability to transform objects. He could even walk on water.

So Super Green Beret was virtually omnipotent and yet as innocent as a child — a pretty apt metaphor for America’s self image.