While at the "town", the Cajun Hunter, played by Sonny Landham, shoots Hardin (Powers Boothe) in the left shoulder. Spenser comes in the room and fires his M-16, drawing attention away from the Hunter trying to finish the job on Hardin. The Hunter then turns and raises his rifle to shoot Spenser, then Hardin stabs the Hunter in the groin with a knife he took from a table. After the hunter falls to the floor in pain, the camera cuts to Hardin, who is seen with the bullet wound and blood on his right shoulder. The shot was obviously reversed for some reason.
When Fred Ward's character, Reece, is loading the live rounds into the magazine, the bolt is locked to the rear. When he loads the magazine, the bolt is forward and he cycles it to load a round, ejecting a live round already in the chamber.
The M-60 machine gun and the M-16 rifles are repeatedly shown firing blanks on automatic and semi-automatic fire settings, respectively, but without the required blank adapters covering the muzzles. Blank adapters cause a back-up of gas pressure within the barrel, a function normally performed by fired bullets, which allows the weapons to cycle and reload automatically. Blank adapters are clearly visible attachments; without them, the weapons would have to be cycled (i.e. reloaded) manually after each individual blank is fired. These are obviously Hollywood weapons which have had their barrels partially plugged sufficiently to perform the function of blank adapters, while making them appear more like weapons that most viewers are familiar with.
The movie was filmed in Texas at Caddo Lake around Uncertain, TX, not in Louisiana. Caddo Lake spans the Texas and Louisiana border but the cypress swamp part of Caddo Lake is on the Texas side of the lake.
Reece (Fred Ward) wears a 4th Infantry Division patch on his right shoulder, indicating a prior assignment to that division, presumably in Vietnam. However, he wears it positioned 45 degrees off, with the squared sides incorrectly on the top, bottom, left and right. Positioned correctly, it should be like a baseball diamond, with the four corners on the top, bottom, left and right.
Within one sentence, Sgt. Casper describes his unit as both a "squad" and "Team Bravo" (meaning a fire team). It could be either a small squad or a large fire team, but not both. A platoon generally consists of three or four squads, and a squad generally consists of two fire teams. A fire team consists of roughly four to six individuals, and is the smallest infantry unit in the Army.
A key reason the squad is lost and cannot find their way out is the loss of the map and compass. However, everyone in the squad has a compass pouch in the normal location (the small snap closure pouch on the upper left shoulder), and they are all clearly full of something, that is the shape of the boxy US issue compass.
During the dog attack, the protective pads on the men's arms are clearly visible.
Actual M16 rifles are replaced in many scenes, when they are being carried but not shot, but MGC M16 Replica rifles. These, made by the Model Gun Corp are metal non-guns which cannot fire, from Japan. They were heavily used for this in filmmaking in this period, but are visibly different. In several scenes, these differences (such as a strange lump in place of the forward assist on the right side) are clearly visible.
When Tyrone Cribbs sees the dead deer, he makes the statement "..damn, somebody shot Rudolph". When we hear this the words don't match the movement of Cribbs's lips. He's seen saying something entirely different.
At approximately 1:27 into the movie when Spencer and Hardin find Bowden hanging from the railroad bridge, you can clearly see the ratchet winch and cable used to support Bowden's body harness. This can be seen to the left of Spencer and Hardin when they are looking up at the trapper pointing his gun down at them.
Blanks are not entirely safe when in use, so even when shot at each other for training, you are not supposed to fire directly at other people less than about 20 feet away. Multiple times this is violated, including during an early range practice scene where multiple troops are doing work immediately in front of a firing line.
Hardin grabs Reece from behind and puts a knife to his throat to get him to turn over his live ammo. However, Reece has his finger on the trigger and could have fired off a round when grabbed.