Go Tell the Spartans is a 1978 American war film directed by Ted Post and starring Burt Lancaster. The film is 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, when Ford was a correspondent in Vietnam for The Nation. Plot In 1964, infantry Major Asa Barker, a seasoned but weary veteran of World War II and Korean War, is given command of a poorly manned US Army advisor outpost overlooking three villages in South Vietnam. He is ordered to reoccupy a nearby deserted hamlet named Muc Wa on the Da Nang-to-Phnom Penh highway - which a decade ago had been the scene of a massacre of French soldiers during the First Indochina War. Barker and his executive officer, the career-orientated Captain Olivetti, get four replacements for the mission. Second Lieutenant Hamilton, who hopes volunteering for Vietnam is a way to being promoted after being passed over for promotion. The burnt-out First Sergeant Oleozewski, who served with Barker in Korea, and has already done three tours in Vietnam (his last assignment saw his previous unit massacred). Corporal Abraham Lincoln who is a combat medic and a drug addict. The fourth man mystifies Barker. Draftee Corporal Courcey is a demolitions expert who extended his enlistment by six months to serve in Vietnam. Maj. Barker sends the new men plus Corporal Ackley, a communications expert, to garrison Muc Wa with a half-French, half-Vietnamese interpreter/interrogation specialist named Nguyen "Cowboy". A hardcore squad of Hmong mercenaries and a motley mob of about 20 South Vietnamese Popular Force civilian "troops", equipped with various firearms. After the group encounter a booby-trapped roadblock on the way to Muc Wa, they capture a lone Viet Cong soldier who is beheaded by Cowboy when the man refuses to divulge information. On arrival at the hamlet, Lt. Hamilton follows Oleozewski's defensive advice so the unit can be resupplied by helicopter. Courcey discovers the graveyard where 302 French soldiers were buried after being massacred by the Viet Minh. He translates a French inscription at the entrance as "Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by. That here, obedient to their laws, we lie" which references the Battle of Thermopylae. Courcey spots a one-eyed VC soldier scouting the area. Courcey leads a patrol that finds Vietnamese women and children fishing along a small creek despite intelligence saying