Go Tell the Spartans

Major Asa Barker has been given command of a poorly manned outpost overlooking three villages named Boo Jum, Mung Tau and Hat Song. Barker is ordered to reoccupy a nearby deserted hamlet named Muc Wa in South Vietnam near the rural Da Nang-to-Phnom Penh 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 (having served in the Pacific during World War II as well as in the Korean War) who provides veteran supervision to a cadre of advisors attached to a group of South Vietnamese ordered to garrison Muc Wa.[2]

Major Barker and his executive officer, the career-orientated Captain Olivetti, receive four replacement troops. Second Lieutenant Hamilton has been passed over for promotion and sees volunteering for Vietnam as a way to obtain a promotion to remain in the Army. First Sergeant Oleozewski served in the Korean War under Major Barker and is burnt out from three tours in Vietnam; his last assignment saw his previous unit massacred. Corporal Abraham Lincoln is a combat medic and a drug addict. The mystery to Major Barker is the fourth man, the draftee Cpl. Courcey, a demolitions expert who extended his enlistment by six months to serve in Vietnam. Major Barker sends his four new men plus Cpl. Ackley, a communications expert, to garrison Muc Wa with a half-French, half-Vietnamese interpreter/interrogation specialist named Cowboy, a hardcore squad of Hmong mercenaries and a motley mob of about 20 South Vietnamese Popular Force civilian "troops", armed with shotguns and old rifles with a sprinkling of machine guns, to attempt to create a defensible outpost at Muc Wa.

On their way to Muc Wa, along a dirt road, the column encounters a booby-trapped roadblock. They capture the lone Viet Cong soldier manning the roadblock, who is beheaded by the over-enthusiastic Cowboy. On reaching the hamlet, Hamilton follows Oleozewski's advice to set up his defenses in a triangular formation and the unit receives supplies brought in by helicopter. At the rear of the hamlet is a graveyard of 302 French soldiers, massacred in a Viet Minh attack ten years earlier. Courcey translates the graveyard's French inscription as referring to the Battle of Thermopylae, in which 300 Spartans died. While he is investigating the graveyard, Courcey spots a one-eyed Viet Cong soldier, who is presumably a scout.

During a patrol, Courcey spots a group of nine Vietnamese women and children despite intelligence that no civilians live in the area. Courcey befriends one of the teenage Vietnamese girls. That evening, the Viet Cong attack Muc Wa and Lincoln is wounded. Courcey leads an ambush patrol that kills the Viet Cong mortar crew, which included one of the women seen earlier.

The next morning, Barker travels to Saigon to meet with Colonel Minh, the military chief of the region, and tries to persuade Minh to send reinforcements of at least 300 ARVN troops to Muc Wa. But the corrupt Minh refuses, claiming that he needs the troops in Saigon to prevent a potential coup. Minh offers the requested troops in exchange for 1,500 shells.

That evening, the outpost is attacked. A patrol from the outpost led by Sgt. Oleonozski returns to safety but leaves a badly wounded man behind. Ignoring Oleonozski's warnings, Lt. Hamilton tries to rescue the man but is killed. The next day, Oleonozski commits suicide rather than face the pressure of command. When Barker is informed of the deaths, he wants to pull his troops out now that they lack an experienced leader, but this request is refused by Gen. Harnitz, forcing Barker to send his own deputy to Muc Wa.

That night, the outpost is attacked again by massive numbers of well-armed Viet Cong, not the few dozen predicted by high command. Several helicopters and flare ships arrive just in time to stop the Viet Cong attack.

The following morning, Barker receives orders from Harnitz to withdraw all American troops from Muc Wa, which is believed to be besieged by the 1,000-strong 507th Viet Cong battalion. The evacuation mission leaves behind the South Vietnamese troops and the walking wounded. Barker stays to help evacuate the remaining troops.

The Vietnamese civilians that Courcey found and brought into the base camp steal several weapons and try to escape, forcing Cowboy to kill all of them. But the Vietnamese teenage girl that Courcey befriended gets away and informs the Viet Cong scouts of the Americans' plans to withdraw, thus revealing that she and all of the other civilians were in fact Viet Cong supporters, as Cowboy had predicted.

Barker and Courcey are forced to destroy all of the arms and equipment left behind and then lead the group on the road departing the village, as friendly artillery fire begins raining down on the area. But the group is ambushed and surrounded by the Viet Cong, led by the civilian girl. Courcey is wounded but taken to shelter and hidden under some bushes by an elderly militiaman. Barker is killed by enemy fire.

After the final battle, Courcey is the only survivor. He wakes to find that everyone else is dead and that the soldiers, including Barker, are stripped of their fatigues. The VC have withdrawn. As Courcey wanders to the French graveyard, he finds an enemy survivor: the wounded, one-eyed VC scout whom he had seen earlier. The VC points his rifle at Courcey before dropping it out of exhaustion. Courcey wanders off the graveyard and onto the dirt road leading away from the ruins of the village.

• Burt Lancaster as Maj. Asa Barker
• Craig Wasson as Cpl. Courcey
• Jonathan Goldsmith as Sgt. Oleonowski
• Marc Singer as Capt. Olivetti
• Joe Unger as Lt. Hamilton
• Dennis Howard as Cpl. Abraham Lincoln
• David Clennon as Lt. Finley Wattsberg
• Evan C. Kim as Cpl. "Cowboy"
• John Megna as Cpl. Ackley
• Hilly Hicks as Signalman Toffee
• Dolph Sweet as Gen. Harnitz
• Clyde Kusatsu as Col. "Lard Ass" Minh
• James Hong as Pvt. "Old Man"
• Denice Kumagai as "Butterfly"
• Tad Horino as "One-eyed Charlie" (Vietcong scout)
• Phong Diep as Minh's Interpreter
• Ralph Brannen as Col. Minh's ADC
• Mark Carlton as Capt. Schlitz

The story was inspired by a futile 1964 special-forces operation at Tan Hoa in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, an objective that turned out to be an abandoned settlement containing only a field, an abandoned airstrip and three or four French gravestones.[3] The graves inspired the film's title, taken from Simonides's epitaph to the 300 soldiers killed in the Battle of Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 B.C.: "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie." The film's name thus constitutes a deliberate spoiler, as the film's soldiers–like the Spartans at Thermopylae–are sent to their deaths.

The screenplay by Wendell Mayes was shopped around for years with various older leading men such as Robert Mitchum, William Holden and Paul Newman offered the role of Major Asa Barker.[3] The project was turned down by Paramount and 20th Century Fox.[4]

Unlike the elite US Army Special Forces of Ford's original novel, whom he called the "US Army Raiders", Mayes' screenplay of Military Assistance Advisory Group military advisors comprised a collection of misfits. A female reporter character in the novel was removed from the screenplay.

In 1977, the producers sought assistance from the U.S. Army, who responded that assistance would only be forthcoming if modifications to the script and characters were made. The Army response stated that its advisors to Vietnam in 1964 were "... virtually all outstanding individuals, hand picked for their jobs, and quite experienced ... in presenting an offhand collection of losers it is totally unrealistic of the Army in Vietnam in that period".[5]

Director Ted Post persuaded Avco Embassy Pictures to produce the film on a limited budget, with the film shot in Valencia, California.[6] He sent the script to a friend of Burt Lancaster, then 65 years old, who was recuperating from a knee injury (his character limps throughout the film).[7] Calling the script brilliant, Lancaster agreed to star in it, and when the 31-day production budget ran short, he paid $150,000 to complete it. The younger actors cast were Marc Singer as infantry Captain Al Olivetti, a gung-ho career officer seeking to earn the Combat Infantryman Badge, and Craig Wasson as Corporal Courcey, the idealistic college-educated draftee who wants to see what a real war is like.[8]

Go Tell the Spartans was released in the United States on June 14, 1978. It was re-released on September 7, 1987, and released on VHS cassette on May 13, 1992. It was released on DVD by HBO Home Video on August 30, 2005[9] and as a limited-edition Blu-ray by Scorpion Releasing in June 2016.[10]

Though the film had a limited release in the United States, critics, especially those opposed to the Vietnam War, praised it: "In sure, swift strokes," wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in the Saturday Review, "it shows the irrelevance of the American presence in Vietnam, the corruption wrought by that irrelevance, and the fortuity, cruelty, and waste of an irrelevant war." Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic found it "... the best film I've seen about the Vietnam War." Roger Grooms, in the Cincinnati Enquirer, judged it to be "... one of the noblest films, ever, about men in crisis."

Over time, the previously overlooked film became an antiwar classic. At one of its revivals, it was described as:

A cult fave – and deservedly so – Go Tell the Spartans was hard-headed and brutally realistic about our dead-end presence in Vietnam; released the same year as Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, the film won critical admiration, but audiences preferred individualised sagas, sentiment, and romantic melodrama. Rather than tackle the effects of the war on physically and emotionally wounded vets, this brave film exposed the fundamental, tactical lunacy of the war as perceived by an American officer (Burt Lancaster) who knows better, but must follow through on stupid, self-destructive orders from above. This is one of Lancaster's best performances: embittered, a cog in the military juggernaut, this good man foresees the killing waste to come.[11]

In 1979, Wendell Mayes' screenplay was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for "Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium (Screen)".

• Go Tell the Spartans at IMDb
• Go Tell the Spartans at Rotten Tomatoes
• Go Tell the Spartans at the TCM Movie Database
• Go Tell the Spartans at AllMovie
• Daniel Ford on the novel and film