advanced help and hello!

Hey there. I'm working on a game in flash, and I'm having a major issue. The bullets are duplicated from a main bullet instance as are the enemy ships. The names are randomly generated. At this point, the bullets can be shot at the enemy ship and keep hitting it until its gone off the screen. I got the information from a tutorial on this site, and when I return to the tutorial, i find that it too has this problem. I was hoping to use a variable on the ship instance to set 0 or 1 (hit / not hit) but i seem to have trouble sending or recieving values from it. I have no problem jumping frames on the movie clip, but I can't get the variables. I'm fairly new at this more advanced action script, and there may be some syntax i'm unsure of. Sugesions are more than welcome! Also, I am using Flash MX

http://www.lordofdance.com/yup/gametest.fla