Incident at Muc Wa (a novel of Vietnam)

This is the story that inspired the acclaimed Burt Lancaster movie, Go Tell the Spartans. It's 1964--early days in South Vietnam--and the U.S. Army Raiders garrison a town that the French abandoned ten years before. Charlie attacks, the Raiders reinforce, and the violence spirals upward until the Americans are ordered to "exfiltrate" in a denouement that foretells the eventual abandonment of South Vietnam.

• "Sad, bawdy, and compelling." -- Detroit Free Press

• "A sergeant forms an attachment of the flesh to a local girl and a corporal forms an attachment of the spirit to the pestilence-ridden hamlet and its people. The corporal's involvement has built-in hazards, which Mr. Ford develops in a series of deftly stated ironies." -- New York Times Book Review

• "A fine novel. Recommended." -- Library Journal

• "His hero is a likeable and dogged young man who believes that anything worth doing is worth doing well, and whose career is a grim illustration of the consequences of the human capacity to devote a single-minded idealism, energy and generosity to any object, good or questionable, that presents itself." -- New Statesman

Publishing history

Incident at Muc Wa was published in hardcover by Doubleday & Co. in 1967 and by William Heinemann Ltd. in 1968. Pyramid Books published a paperback edition in 1968, Arendt translated it into Dutch in 1973, and Jove Books re-issued it as Go Tell the Spartans in 1976 to follow the release of the Burt Lancaster film. When available at secondhand bookstores, these books can command very high prices (I've seen $195 asked for a far-from-perfect first edition, and $45 for the Pyramid paperback). In 2000 the Author's Guild published the book as a quality paperback through its Backinprint program. The price is $15.95.

Digital edition published for Amazon's Kindle device, November 2007, and for PCs and small devices using the free Mobipocket software, April 2008.

The author

As a novelist, Dan Ford is best known for Incident at Muc Wa and the acclaimed Vietnam film Go Tell the Spartans that was based on it. This and two other novels were published by Doubleday & Co. and are still in print. As a military historian, Ford won the 1992 Award of Excellence from the Aviation-Space Writers Association for Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and the American Volunteer Group, published by Smithsonian Institution Press and in a revised and updated edition by HarperCollins. "War history as it should be written!" exclaimed the reviewer for the Naval aviation journal The Hook.