A Blond Boy, a Long-Ago War

He could almost smell the polish from the brass, there were so many high-ranking soldiers gathered nearby last Sunday afternoon. It was an uncomfortably warm day in Washington, D.C., but the officers had to be there in full-dress regalia for the occasion. James McEachin couldn’t recall ever having seen so many generals in one place.

At his table sat Janet Langhardt Cohen, whose husband, William, is the secretary of Defense.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

McEachin said the secretary had been kind enough to send him an invitation.

“Oh, but this ceremony is for men much older than you,” she said cheerfully.

Laughing and assuring her that a youthful face belied his 70 years, McEachin sat back and enjoyed the reception for Korean War veterans such as himself, observing the 50th anniversary of the conflict’s beginning.

He enjoyed the social aspect, anyway. McEachin was genuinely moved, though, by the ceremony itself, the laying of a wreath at the Korean War Memorial, the missing jet in the formation overhead.

“I’m normally a crusty old person, too old to be anything but blase about this kind of thing,” the longtime Hollywood actor and Encino resident would say later. “But this was incredible. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house, including mine.”

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Men do tend to get a little extra patriotic this time of year. Like a lot of combat vets, though, Jim McEachin doesn’t generally care to talk about wartime and what happened to him. Those memories are often best left unstirred.

He was just a kid when he enlisted, back in the summer of 1947. Trained in a segregated infantry outfit, McEachin liked the service life enough that in 1950, he signed up for another hitch.

“I was 20,” he said. “I thought I was invincible.”

A little more than a year later, he found himself in the bitter cold of a Korean winter with a carbine in his hand.

He was one of the few black soldiers in King Company, but race rarely presented itself as an issue there. The regiment had too much else to worry about.

One night the following summer, it came under attack by Chinese forces. To this day, McEachin can’t forget the sight of a man from his unit who was captured.

“He was taken back to the Chinese lines, stripped, and his body was tied, spread-eagled, on the side of a mountain. With the use of binoculars, his white skin could be clearly seen against the dark, shell-stripped side of the mountain.

“It haunts me to this day.”

As if in a scene from a movie made by a director he would later come to know, Steven Spielberg, a rescue patrol from King Company was formed. McEachin and a dozen others inched forward under cover of darkness--directly into an ambush.

He heard explosions, then . . . nothing.

“I awoke to the sounds of fading Oriental voices. It was apparent that no one in the patrol had survived.”

He crawled to a creek and scooped water from it. His other hand covered a gunshot wound to his abdomen. A young, blond American soldier from another unit turned up a while later, and together they crept, still behind enemy lines. Their misery was such that McEachin thought momentarily of shooting them both.

When finally rescued, McEachin woke up in a hospital with a bullet in his stomach that remains there today.

He was eligible to go home, but instead rejoined his outfit and attempted unsuccessfully to locate the blond boy. At night he began trembling as never before. Tree stumps began to resemble enemy soldiers. Army doctors made it an order. McEachin’s war was over.

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Winner of seven medals of valor, he returned home to New Jersey and became a policeman, then a fireman. But he had contracted a serious illness from drinking dirty water from that Korean creek while wounded. He also suffered from what later came to be known as post-traumatic stress syndrome, suffering dizzy spells and blackouts.

One cold night he saw Norris Poulson, the mayor of Los Angeles, being interviewed on television by Mike Wallace about trying to lure the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball club west. The idea of a warm climate sounded appealing.

McEachin would in time become an actor who appeared in more than 150 television shows and films. He had his own NBC series in 1973, “Tenafly,” playing a private eye. And he is a successful author whose fourth novel, “Say Goodnight to the Boys in Blue,” will be on shelves in a few weeks.

His war was long ago. But when you’ve just returned from saluting fallen comrades and posing for pictures with the president of the United States, it isn’t easy to approach a Fourth of July and not feel a patriotic twinge or two.

It also recently occurred to Jim McEachin that, in each of his books, there’s a character who looks just like the blond boy he met by that creek.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to: Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com.