Goofs

In the scene where Col. Childers is approaching the entry to the base where an angry crowd of protesters and reporters awaits him, his drivers side window is clearly closed. The next second he encounters the crowd the window is suddenly open, proven when one of the protesters spits on his uniform and he gets out of the car grabbing the protester by the collar and slamming him into the car.

When the Marines board the helicopters on the aircraft carrier, they are initially CH-46 Sea Knights, a twin rotor Marine helicopter with three landing gear. However, all the subsequent shots show the much larger CH-47 Chinook with four landing gear.

As Col. Childers gets out of his car to confront a man who spits on his uniform, many people in the crowd of reporters move positions between shots and a large boom microphone appears overhead.

During the attack on the embassy, a plastic bottle is used for a petrol bomb but it smashes like glass on the wall.

When Hodges is talking to his father in the garage, he screws a wing nut down on the air cleaner of the antique truck twice between shots.

Accent of the people speaking is not Yemeni but Moroccan. Anyone who has been to Yemen would find many things inaccurate such as the 'Taj Sheba Hotel' sign, which is a 5-star hotel in reality.

During the Yemen scenes, the colonel's camouflage uniform has a flag stitched onto the left sleeve, when Marines don't wear those.

The USMC does not use Chinook helicopters. They used the Sea Knight instead.

During the retirement party, Col. Hodges is presented a shadow box with his decorations and the Mameluke sword. Several of the medals present in the shadow box are not decorations that Col. Hodges wears on his Class A uniform including the Silver Star, Legion of Merit (may be awarded later during retirement), Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, Army Good Conduct Medal, and 2 foreign decorations from Operation Desert Shield/Storm. Likewise several decorations he does wear are missing from the shadow box, e.g. Defense Superior Service Medal, Joint Service Commendation Medal, etc.

When Col. Hodges confronts William Sokal in his office about the missing videotape, he exits Sokal's office at an uninterrupted walk. Sokal's office door is heard to close even though Hodges never touched it when exiting. Since the sound is heard in about a second after Hodges walks through the door, it's doubtful that he could have reversed direction in order to close the door nor could Sokal or his secretary have reached the door in that short an interval.

When Colonel Hodges is drinking on the plane ride back to the US, his glass has ice in it, but when he puts the glass down, there is no ice clanking.

When General Perry is telling Colonel Childers of the charges against him, his lips say "four charges" but the sound that comes out is "three charges".

During the fight between Hodges and Childers, just after Hodges throws the pillow and knocks Childers to the floor, you see someone from the crew slide across from right to left, pick up the pillow, and toss it to Childers.

As Col. Childers is lowering the US flag at the embassy, a rope can be seen at the end of the flag, near the top of it, keeping it extended as it's lowered.

During the fly-over of the aircraft carrier you can see the shadow of the video crew's helicopter in the ocean.

The Arabic language spoken by the officers in Col. Hodges' inquiry is the local Levant dialect spoken in Israel and Jordan, and not the Yemenite dialect.

The Vietnam scenes were shot at Hunting Island State Park in Beaufort, South Carolina.

In the beginning southeast Asia scenes, the forest contains large old-growth trees with thick, heavy bark, south-facing moss, and large broken logs. This type of forest structure is indicative of old-growth northwestern United States forest and is not found in Vietnam, where tropical forest layers compete for available sunlight. In tropical forests, the trees have thin, whitish and tall canopies with hanging vines and even moss layering. Also of note are the ground palms which are too uniformly planted and the lack of thick dead ground mulch found in tropical forests.

Several strange things about the inability of anyone to testify that the crowd was armed and hostile. First, Colonel Childers' initial orders were to engage hostile targets, to which Red Six replied that there were women and children in the line-of-fire (tacitly admitting that there were hostile targets). Childers' reply was to question whether or not Red Six heard the order. Red Six requests clarification, asking if he is to fire into the crowd, and Childers replies "Yes, Goddamn it!" This exchange was taped and used in the trial. The problem is that Red Six is the one who first mentions the crowd, in direct response to Childers' order to engage hostile targets. By inference, he stated that there were hostile targets in the crowd.

National Security Adviser Bill Sokal is worried about political pressure from other countries about the internationally publicized "slaughter of innocent civilians in Yemen", so he hides the one piece of evidence that would exonerate Col. Childers: a video tape of the crowd initiating contact with the Marines. Sokal does this as a means of "throwing Childers under the bus". The problem with that is that not only would that tape reveal that Col. Childers was innocent and performed his duty admirably, but it would remove all political pressure from the US - thus removing the reason why Sokal hid the tape in the first place. Couple that with the evidence presented in the courts-martial that proved Col. Childers innocent, and it would have been painfully obvious that Col. Childers performed his duties honorably and, therefore, would have been returned to active duty. In short, Sokal helped propagate the very problem he was trying to solve: political pressure against the US, that would cause embassies to be removed around the world.

There is indication that the vindication scene was a hallucination. The filmmakers are saying that the entire crowd was armed with weapons, but if you pause the film at 30:28, where are the weapons? If the crowd was really armed, you'd see dozens of guns around and on top of them. Anyone looking down on the crowd would be able to see after the massacre.

In the closing scene Col. Childers breaks rank with a unit in training, when he walks in front of a gunnery Sgt.