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Go Tell the Spartans is a 1978 American war film based on Daniel Ford's 1967 novel Incident at Muc Wa, about U.S. Army military advisors during the early part of the Vietnam War in 1964, a time when Ford was a correspondent in Vietnam for The Nation. The film's title is from Simonides's epitaph to the three hundred soldiers who died fighting Persian invaders at Thermopylae, Greece: "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie." It's 1964 in the period when American troops were euphemistically termed "military advisors" in Vietnam. Major Asa Barker... MORE

Go Tell the Spartans is a 1978 American war film based on Daniel Ford's 1967 novel Incident at Muc Wa, about U.S. Army military advisors during the early part of the Vietnam War in 1964, a time when Ford was a correspondent in Vietnam for The Nation. The film's title is from Simonides's epitaph to the three hundred soldiers who died fighting Persian invaders at Thermopylae, Greece: "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie." It's 1964 in the period when American troops were euphemistically termed "military advisors" in Vietnam. Major Asa Barker (Burt Lancaster) has been given this command: a poorly-manned outpost named Muc Wa in rural Vietnam somewhere near the Da Nang to Phnom Penh (Cambodia) highway that a decade earlier had been the scene of a massacre of French soldiers during the First Indochina War. Barker is a weary infantry veteran in his third war, who provides veteran supervision to a cadre of advisors attached to a group of South Vietnamese who garrison the deserted village of Muc Wa. Barker, as a seasoned officer, knows that he cannot defend his position due to lack of numbers and the quality of his local troops. He is still LESS