Go Tell the Spartans

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)...