Corrected entry: When Garlick is telling Cronauer about Sergeant Major Dickerson, he tells him that he was once the commander of some elite special forces unit. Enlisted people can't be commanders, only officers can as it is a commissioned rank.
Corrected entry: When Cronauer and Garlick get stuck in traffic with the Army trucks, Garlick asks the assembled troops to guess who is in the Jeep with him. One of the troops shouts "Mork". Robin Williams played Mork in Mork & Mindy, but not until 1978, well after the setting of this film.
Correction: The soldier shouts "Groucho Marx".
Corrected entry: Adrian arrives/departs Saigon with a small kit bag. He couldn't fit all the uniforms he wore into that bag.
Correction: He could have sent for his bags once he arrived, or picked them up from the base, or sent them ahead seperately because he only wanted to take a carry-on bag.
Corrected entry: In the scene in the Jeep when Garlick announces to the passing troops that Cronauer is in their midsts and Adrian does his riff, after the convoy starts moving again, more than a dozen trucks go by with all the troops grinning broadly and giving Cronauer "kudos," even though the majority of them couldn't possibly have heard or seen his Jeep "performance," and wouldn't even know who he was.
Correction: Or someone spread the word via either CB, Grapevine-telephoned it down the line, or ran the news? Ask any soldier, they'll tell you how highly the entertainers are valued, how hard they'd listen, how fast the news would spread.
The "correction" is mere conjecture, not based on any evidence from the movie itself, but rather simply an opinion of how the plot could have been written and portrayed. I wrote up the actual scene as it played out on the screen as a mistake because without any supporting evidence from the movie makers this scene is a mistake. If one was to invent potential back stories for each scene in a movie then just about any mistake could be explained away as intentional, depending on the extent of one's imagination. But it wouldn't be a commentary on the movie.
Correction: Enlisted personnel CAN be in charge of a unit. I was a Sergeant 1st class in TACTICAL command of a unit in Special Forces. It is possible.