Semper Fi, fair winds and following seas.
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After seeing his first movie at age 10, he knew he wanted to be an actor, but he took an unconventional career path to get his start in Hollywood and joined the Marine Corps. He was only 16 years old and had to lie about his age, which even the Department of Defense admits was a pretty common practice at the time.
After joining the Corps in 1947, he first served as a radio operator before making a move into broadcast journalism, becoming an announcer on Armed Forces Radio. But the Marines of Hackman's era weren't just reporting the news. He was sent first to Qingdao, then Shanghai in the middle of the Chinese Civil War with the mission of destroying Japanese military equipment to keep it out of the hands of the communists.
Hackman participated in Operation Beleaguer, the Marine Corps' occupation of China's Hebei and Shandong provinces that sought to repatriate displaced Korean and Japanese people after World War II. In Shandong, where he was stationed, the communists were far stronger than other areas of China and controlled most of the countryside outside of Qingdao. The operation was not without incident: Thirteen Marines were killed and 43 were wounded in ambushes and skirmishes with the Chinese communists.