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Purple Hearts Movie

Clips from Purple Hearts, in which Eric was an extra!

When I was in the Philippines, attending High School in Manila (1982), a production company was looking for American kids to play extras in the movie "Purple Hearts". I spent a week on the set pretending to be an Army grunt.

The movie never made it into theaters, but it did make it to VHS in 1984. Unfortunately, the transfer was pan and scanned. In particular, the scene where I was most visible was "formatted to fit your TV" in such a manner that I was eliminated!

Fast forward nearly 30 years later, and I've found a source of the movie in its original aspect ratio with my "big" scene intact! Here follows are clips from that movie in which I participated.

Here are some photos of the set and high school friends of mine who also participated.

The movie poster. I have one myself! Here, at the beginning of the movie, they have us running around a rice patty being ambushed with mortars. They soaked cork in gasoline to make the explosions. They were quite percussive! I'm somewhere out there.
Probably the highlight of the week was when they handed out real M16's (modified to not shoot real ammunition) and 16 fake rounds. They lined us up and let us loose! This scene was filmed the first day on set. Wounded are airlifted to a mobile hospital. When the doors of the airplane are opened (the airplane was not airworthy), I can be seen slumped at the back of the plane on the right in the shadows.
This is my big scene! I'm preparing a body (of the lieutenant killed in the opening scenes) to be shipped back to the states. I'm the one standing up in the back. Here I walk across the scene as two actors are talking. I enter the scene at 0:19 on the right, adjusting my cap. Dang I was slender!
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