🎖️ Before he was Maverick, James Garner was wounded twice in Korea. He didn’t get his second Purple Heart until 32 years later. He was born James Scott Bumgarner in Oklahoma in 1928. In Korea, he served 14 months as a rifleman. Mortar fragments hit him in the face and hand, and that earned him his first Purple Heart. His second wound came when American fighter jets fired on his own position. He was diving into a foxhole and, as he put it, “I was a little late.” Because of a paperwork error, that second Purple Heart never arrived. It was finally presented to him in 1983, after he mentioned it on Good Morning America. His reaction: it was “better to receive this now than posthumously.” Back home, a producer he’d met at Hollywood High talked him into a non-speaking role on Broadway. Garner sat there night after night, watching Henry Fonda work. Then the studio put “James Garner” in the credits without asking him. He kept the name. Maverick. The Rockford Files. An Emmy. The easygoing charmer on screen was a combat veteran who’d been there.