wounded VC raises his rifle at Courcey before dropping it out of exhaustion. Courcey wanders out of the graveyard onto the dirt road leading away from the ruins of Muc Wa. Cast Burt Lancaster as Maj. Asa Barker Craig Wasson as Cpl. Courcey Jonathan Goldsmith as 1SG 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 Production Development Director Ted Post persuaded Avco Embassy Pictures to produce the film on a limited budget. 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). 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. Writing 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. 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 foreshadowing of the narrative arc, 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. The project was turned down by Paramount and 20th Century Fox. Unlike the elite US Army Special Forces of Ford's original