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“””Don’t know anything about the guy but I always liked Michael Caine as an actor, he seems like an alright sorta guy from interviews.”””

Micklewhite (Michael Caine) was sent to the front along the Samichon River Valley, where he fought the Chinese and North Koreans in raids and patrols, often at night. In 1953, he contracted malaria and was sent home.
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In 1951, he was called up to serve in the British Army.
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Nothing, he says, could have prepared him for what happened during his first watch on guard duty during the absolute darkness of the Korean night.

From his trench, the night was split open by enemy flares lighting up the battlefield and by the hordes of the enemy charging toward him. The first time he heard a Chinese trumpet break the stillness, he barely had time to ask his buddy what that was before hundreds of trumpets joined in.

“There in front of us, a terrifying tableau was illuminated,” he recalls. “Thousands of Chinese advancing toward our positions, led by troops of demonic trumpet players. The artillery opened up but they still came on, marching toward our machine guns and certain death.”

Caine describes the minefield they’d constructed to defend themselves from such a human wave as “suddenly irrelevant.” Wave after wave of Chinese infantry committed suicide, throwing themselves onto barbed wire so their bodies could be used as a bridge.

“They were eventually beaten off,” the actor says of the Chinese soldiers. “But they were insanely brave.”

After getting sent to war so early in his life, Caine came to believe that war ages kids well beyond their years. He and his mates were approaching 20 years old when they went to the front lines of Korea. On the way back, they encountered the units who would be replacing them.

“They were 19-year-olds, as we had been when we went in,” Caine says. “I looked at them and I looked at us, and we looked 10 years older than they did.”

The actor recalls the closest he came to death during the war, on a nighttime patrol in no man’s land. It was a moment that he says still haunts him to this day.

Three British troops covered themselves in mud and mosquito repellant in order to make their way deeper into the valley, an area they had been fighting to take for weeks. They were headed for the Chinese lines to try to gather information. On their way back to their own lines, they suddenly smelled garlic in the air.

“The Chinese ate garlic like chewing gum,” Caine says. “We realized we were being followed.”

The fusiliers threw themselves on the ground as a unit of Chinese pursuers began searching the brush for them. Rather than die in the weeds, the trio charged the enemy, guns blazing.

This incident comes back to the actor when others try to attack him or bring him down. He thinks about what happened on that hill in Korea, and realizes that no one could ever make him feel hopeless again.

“I just think, as I did on that Korean hillside, ‘You cannot frighten me or do anything to me, and if you try, I’ll take as much or as many of you with me as I can.’”

Listen to Actor Michael Caine Talk About Fighting in Korea
https://www.military.com/history/listen-actor-michael-caine-talk-about-fighting-korea.html