This exceptional, totally deromanticized and unjustly forgotten knockout got undeservedly lost in the shuffle in the late 70's when it had the grave misfortune to come out around the same time as such more widely recognized 'Nam features "The Deer Hunter," "Coming Home," and "Apocalpyse Now." The film depicts the early stage of the war circa 1964, when American troops where initially sent over strictly as "military advisers." Burt Lancaster gives one of his finest, grittiest and most appealingly ragged performances as a rugged, irascible, foul-mouthed major in charge of a ragtag army base who's beginning to have serious misgivings about America's involvement in the war. Equally crackerjack characterizations are contributed by Craig Wasson as a naive, soft-hearted raw recruit with romantic notions about the glory of war who quickly learns that war itself is an intrinsically ugly and unfair thing, Joe Unger as a foolishly gung-ho corporal, Jonathan Goldsmith as a frazzled, alcoholic, battle weary combat vet, Dennis Howard as an oblivious to the world dope-head, an especially chilling Evan Kim as brutish, bloodthirsty South Vietnamese mercenary Cowboy, Marc Singer in his film debut as Lancaster's loyal, yet cynical aide-de-camp, Dolph Sweet as Lancaster's stern, overbearing, overconfident superior, and James Hong as a helpful elderly villager.<br /><br />Ted Post's strong, precise, tough-minded direction, ably packed up by Harry Stradling, Jr.'s crisp, skillful cinematography and Dick Halligan's tense, shuddery, moody score, injects a genuine heart-rending sense of loss and anguish into the grim proceedings, therefor adding the right element of roughhewn authenticity to the movie to make it poignant and convincing. Wendell Mayes' sterling script -- it's profane, dryly perceptive and often sardonically funny, with a laudably obdurate refusal to resort to either cheap macho heroics or mushy patriotic sentiment which goes a long way in explaining exactly why it spent seven years languishing on a shelf before third-tier studio Avco Embassy finally decided to make it into a movie -- spells out the savage, upsetting reality of war in very stark, bleak and no uncertain terms: It's nothing more than a horrendous, chaotic, futile ordeal in which the participants do their utmost to stay alive and intact under circumstances of ever-increasing severity. An absolute powerhouse.