A recent USA Today appreciation for James Garner, the iconic actor
who
died Saturday at age 86, called him “the
epitome of the reluctant hero.”
The examples cited involve Garner’s on-screen choices and
characters as well as his off-screen battles with studios. But before all that
— before a career that spanned from Maverick to The
Rockford Files to … well, to Maverick, and
plenty of stops in between — Garner was in Korea, quite literally trying to
avoid getting his ass shot to pieces.
Then-Pvt. James Bumgarner received his second wound during
his time in Korea (multiple obituaries say he was the first Oklahoman drafted
during that war) on April 23, 1951, while serving with the 24th Division,
according to 30-plus-year-old Associated
Press article.
He described the injury to the AP thusly: “As a matter of fact, I
got it in the backside. I went into a foxhole headfirst and I was a little
late. There’s a lot of room for error with a wound in the rear. It’s a wide
target.”
The posterior puncture was the second wound Garner suffered during
service; his obituaries list him as earning two Purple Hearts. The medal for
the foxhole incident came three decades after the war, with the Army reportedly
making the presentation after Garner mentioned never receiving it during a TV
interview.
He was, at the time, promoting one of many military-themed
projects of his long career — the early-80s comedy “Tank.”
A New York Times film reviewer wrote that the
movie’s “screenplay wobbles uncertainly between sadistic melodrama and populist
farce,” showing that, if nothing else, NYT writers probably got paid by the syllable
in the 1980s.
A better-known military role for Garner was alongside Steve
McQueen in “The
Great Escape.” He also played an aging bomber
pilot-turned-preacher-turned-astronaut in 2000′s “Space
Cowboys” and played the leader of the 1st Ranger Battalion during World
War II — an early big-screen starring role — in 1958′s “Darby’s Rangers.”
His view on real-life military service came through fairly clearly
in the AP report: “Do I have fond memories? I guess if you get together with
some buddies it’s fond. But it really wasn’t. It was cold and hard. I was one
of the lucky ones.”
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