Green beret
The 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) had many OSS World War II veterans in their ranks when it was formed in 1952. They began to unofficially wear a berets of varying colour while training. The color green became favored because it was reminiscent of the World War II British Commando-type beret. The 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) deployed to Bad Tolz, Germany in September 1953. The remaining cadre at Fort Bragg formed the 77th Special Forces Group. Members of the 77th SFG began searching through their collections of berets and settled on the Rifle Green colour of the British Rifle Regiments (as opposed to the Lovat Green of the Commandos) from Captain Mike de la Pena's collection. Captain Frank Dallas had the new beret designed and produced in small numbers for the members of the Special Forces.
United States Army Special Forces in popular culture
The 1st Special Forces Group on Okinawa provided a number of troopers to act as extras in director Samuel Fuller's "Merrill's Marauders" (1961) and were credited at film's start. On U.S. television, a March 1962 episode of "Surfside 6" titled "The Green Beret" featured SF training. Henry Fonda appeared in, and narrated, a 1962 "Special Forces" episode of "The Big Picture" series of U.S. Army-produced films that found their way to U.S. television. In 1963, a Green Beret appeared in the episode "In Praise of Pip" of "The Twilight Zone" though the U.S. Army told the CBS television network to not name the Southeast Asian country where the story occurred. The Green Beret's first Hollywood appearance is in the futuristic thriller film "Seven Days in May" (1963) wherein Andrew Duggan is a Special Forces officer loyal to the U.S. President, not the traitorous JCS Chief Burt Lancaster; the film also gave the U.S. filmgoer a first glimpse of the M16 rifle.