Captain Jim Hopper led six Green Berets, a United States Army Special Forces team, into the Central American jungle in Predator. Al Dillon of the CIA sent them to recover agents whose helicopter guerrillas had shot down, and to reach the rebel camp that held those men. The Jungle Hunter killed the team on that march. Dutch Schaefer's rescue team later found Hopper and two of his men skinned and hung from the trees. Paul Monette's novelization calls the same officer Captain J.S. Davis.
Past With Dutch
Major Alan "Dutch" Schaefer recognized Captain Jim Hopper from the dog tags. Paul Monette's novel names that officer Captain J.S. Davis, called Jack, a Green Beret from Fort Bragg. Dutch and Davis had served together since boot camp, nearly twenty years before the hunt. In 1979 they got out of a secret mission in Malaysia, and Davis, a helicopter pilot, twice flew in under fire to pick Dutch up. Dutch last knew Davis as a pilot flying officials to Camp David.
Billy's tracks at the wreck separated two groups. Ten or twelve guerrillas had pulled prisoners from a surveillance helicopter whose pilot and copilot each had one round in the head. About six more men, each in the same size of U.S. jungle boot and each about 160 pounds, had come in from the north and followed the guerrillas. After the camp fight, Dillon told Dutch that Davis had volunteered to recover the CIA men once the camp was located, then flew too close and was shot down. Those six boot prints ran on the trail behind the guerrillas, separate from the two dead pilots in the wreck.
Firefight With The Jungle Hunter
In 1987 the team was in the Guatemalan highlands. In the novel, Dutch was briefed in Conta Mana before that border crossing. The mission formed part of the Val Verde operation. Between the agents' helicopter and the guerrilla camp, the Jungle Hunter caught them under its cloak, and they fired in all directions without a target they could see. It skinned and gutted Hopper and two of his men, hung those three by the ankles, and left their skulls and spines in the bodies. Billy found the other three in the trees above the clearing, and those bodies were never recovered.
In Monette's novel, Billy found the three bodies behind a curtain of moss, hung by vines through the Achilles tendons, with vultures on them and some of the exposed muscle twitching. The clearing held four or five hundred spent rounds and no tracks of a target. The other three of the six had not walked away. Billy's account was that they never left the firefight and had disappeared there. When Dutch later reached the hunter's ship, he found about thirty flayed bodies, guerrillas and commandos together, some hung the same way Davis's three had been, with human skins stretched on wooden frames. The novel does not name the missing three in that clearing, or say the hunter carried them to the ship.
Discovery By Dutch's Team
Dutch's squad reached the hanging bodies after Billy followed the tracks away from the crashed helicopter. Dutch lifted a dog tag on a broken chain and read the name Jim Hopper. Dillon had carried Hopper as missing for two weeks, and Dutch rejected that, because the bodies showed Hopper had been skinned alive. Billy found the rest of the men in the canopy overhead. The squad went on toward the guerrilla camp, treated the rebels as the killers, and Mac had Blain bring out the minigun they called Ol' Painless.
In the novel, Dutch ordered Mac to climb the tree and cut the bodies down, and Mac recovered two more tags for soldiers who are not named. Dutch held Davis's tag up to Dillon, who claimed he had not been told of any covert unit in the area, and Ramirez blamed the guerrillas. After the hunter killed Hawkins and hung him by the ankles in the same way, Billy connected that killing with Davis's men. Dutch held the tags out again, because the hunter that had taken Davis had moved on to the squad.
Merchandise
NECA released the Predator Deluxe Accessory Pack, item 51550, in October 2016, scaled to the company's 7-inch Predator figures and packed in a window box. The new piece was a skinned body meant to hang by the ankles, cast in lightweight rubber, painted a dark red, and finished with a clear coat so the muscle looked wet. NECA's own text calls the figure a skinned victim, and that hanging body is the piece that matches the three men Dutch's squad found in the trees.
The set also held two plasma-cannon blast effects, a Xenomorph skull, a plain human skull, a bloody skull and spine, and a clean skull and spine, plus a thermal-vision jungle backdrop. The skulls had shipped in earlier assortments. The skinned body and the blast pieces were new for this pack. The blue blast is molded for Jungle Hunter cannons, and the orange blast is molded for City Hunter cannons.
Behind The Scenes
The dog tag in the close-up is stamped C.E. Hopper, and the religion line reads Catholic, while Dutch's line in the scene uses the name Jim Hopper. Jim Thomas and John Thomas wrote the screenplay, and Paul Monette novelized an earlier draft, in which the officer is J.S. Davis, called Jack. The stamp on the prop, the name Dutch speaks, and the name in the novel are three names for that one captain. The three hanging bodies were physical props hung in the trees for the discovery scene.
John McTiernan directed Predator, and Arnold Schwarzenegger played Dutch. The hanging bodies were filmed with the rest of the ground unit in 1986, in the jungles around Palenque and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Seven-foot-two Kevin Peter Hall performed the Jungle Hunter in the Stan Winston Studio suit that replaced the failed early creature. Hopper's men in the trees were props built for that same location shoot, and the dog-tag chain is in Schwarzenegger's hand when the squad identifies them.
Conclusion
Jim Hopper's team was the six-man Special Forces unit Al Dillon sent into the jungle ahead of Dutch Schaefer in Predator. The Jungle Hunter caught them on the way to the guerrilla camp, hung three skinned bodies in the trees, and left the other three unrecovered. Dutch's squad found those bodies and went on to the camp. Paul Monette's 1987 novel covers the same stretch with Captain J.S. Davis, a Green Beret Dutch had known since boot camp, dead before the rescue team arrived.
Appearances
- Predator (1987)
- Predator novelization (Paul Monette, Jove, 1987), under the name J.S. Davis
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore
