This movie takes place during the early stages of the Vietnam War with an American military adviser named "Major Asa Barker" (Burt Lancaster) receiving orders to reoccupy an abandoned French garrison in the vicinity of a small deserted village called Muc Wa. Although he sees no strategic value in establishing a garrison there--and expresses his concern that this will only encourage the Viet Cong to begin operations in that particular location--his words fall on deaf ears and he is forced to comply with these orders. To make matters even more difficult, the only soldiers Major Barker can allocate to that area are a couple of newly assigned personnel along with a few ARVN troops and a handful of Vietnamese mercenaries. In any case, just as he feared, once the soldiers get to Muc Wa they begin to attract VC attention to the extent that it now becomes a major focal point of the current war climate and things go downhill from there. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that, unlike "The Green Berets" made ten years earlier, this film essentially adopted a more left-wing sentiment which was shared by other films of this type for the next few years. But for what it's worth, regardless of the political bias, the realism portrayed in this movie was rather impressive and for that reason I have rated this film accordingly. Above average.
Review of Go Tell the Spartans
