Go Tell the Spartans

“We're getting strafed, shelled, bombed, and blasted. And it isn't even our damned war!”

Major Asa Barker (Burt Lancaster) is a weary career officer commanding a small group of American advisors in Vietnam in 1964, long before the war becomes a national cause. Ted Post films his outpost as a place nobody at home is watching, with the Viet Cong pressing in and the ruins of a French unit's earlier stand a decade old. Barker keeps giving orders to men he suspects will be forgotten.