Parts of the screenplay bear little relation to the novel, although the portion in which a woman seduces a North Vietnamese communist general and sets him up to be kidnapped by Americans is from the book.

John Wayne was so concerned by the anti-war sentiment in the United States, he wanted to make this film to present the pro-military position.

He requested and obtained full military cooperation and materiel from 36th President Lyndon B. Johnson and the United States Department of Defense.

A few days later, while accompanying Kirby and his team on a patrol in the nearby mountains, Beckworth finds that the granddaughter of a village chief he had befriended earlier has been tortured and executed by the Viet Cong for cooperating with the Americans.

With the base in enemy hands, Kirby requests an airstrike by an AC-47 gunship, callsign Puff the Magic Dragon, which annihilates the Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese Army regulars within Camp A-107.

Colonel Cai uses his sister-in-law Lin, a fashion model, as a honey trap to lure General Ti to a former French colonial mansion in a well-guarded valley in North Vietnam.

"Doc" McGee, and two of Cai's men stay behind at a bridge over a river to set explosives to blow it up to stop pursuit by the enemy forces, while Kirby and the rest of the team head towards the plantation.

At dawn, the survivors cross the bridge; it is destroyed, but McGee is seriously wounded as he and Muldoon escape, while the others airlift Ti out of the area by a Skyhook device.

Although The Green Berets portrays the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army as sadistic tyrants, it also depicts them as a capable and highly motivated enemy.

The Army also objected to the portrayal of the raid where they kidnap a NVA general because in the original script this involved crossing the border into North Vietnam.

[11] Wayne wished the screenplay to have more development of the characters, but Warner Bros. made it clear they wanted more action and less talk, as The Alamo was heavily criticized for having too much dialogue.

Department of Defense cooperation with the film was extensive, with the United States Army providing several UH-1 Huey attack helicopters and a C-7 Caribou light transport.

Colonel Lamar Asbury "Bill" Welch, the actual commander of the United States Army Airborne School at Fort Benning in 1967, makes a brief cameo Skeet Shooting with John Wayne.

The movie camp set, which was constructed on an isolated hill within Fort Benning, had barbed wire trenches, punji sticks, sandbagged bunkers, mortar pits, towers, support buildings and hooches.

[9] Other realistic "Vietnamese village" sets were left intact after the shooting ended so they could be reused by the Army for training troops destined for South East Asia.

The original choice for scoring the film, Elmer Bernstein, a friend and frequent collaborator with John Wayne, turned the assignment down due to his political beliefs.

Rózsa provided a strong and varied musical score including a night club vocal by a Vietnamese singer Bạch Yến;[14] however, bits of Onward Christian Soldiers were deleted from the final film.

Upon its cinema release, movie critic Roger Ebert gave it zero stars and cited extensive use of cliches, depicting the war in terms of "cowboys and Indians", and being a "heavy-handed, remarkably old-fashioned film.

His then-rival at the Chicago Tribune, Clifford Terry, described the film as "both predictable and tedious" and added that its "most fatal mistake" was "presenting the United States' most complex war in the simplest of terms.

His movie, The Green Berets, which opened yesterday at the St. Francis, Coliseum, El Rey and Geneva Drive-In, will without question unite the doves and the hawks.

[17] It is mocked in the Gustav Hasford novel The Short-Timers in a scene where Joker and Rafter Man find the Lusthog Squad watching it at a movie theater.

"[18] John Pilger, a strong critic of American foreign policy, described his reaction to The Green Berets in a 2007 speech he gave criticising the media for its coverage of the Vietnam War.

Levy also notes that Wayne acknowledged that war is generally not popular, but the soldiers who serve face the risks and dangers of combat nonetheless, and must be prepared to sacrifice themselves, regardless of their personal will or judgment.

"[20] In 2003, Richard Roeper, who was then the co-host of At the Movies with Roger Ebert, put The Green Berets on his list of his forty least favorite films of all time to that point.