SAYBROOK TOWNSHIP — Jim Blake’s primary memories of the Korean War are not of the artillery fire and hollering he saw and heard most every night, but the destitution of the Korean civilians.

“I realized there are things we simply take for granted here,” says Blake, who served with the U.S. Army in Korea from December 1952 to October 1953. “I have never seen any poverty here that even comes close to the poverty over there.”

The poverty, and the stench that comes with it and war, greeted Blake when he arrived in Korea on Dec. 7, 1952. “Pusan was the filthiest city in the world,” Blake said of the bombed-out landing point. “All the money was going to the war.”

The first night Blake was in the Army compound there, a chaplain brought in two young orphaned Korean girls, dressed in native costumes, to entertain the soldiers. Blake said they sang “Jesus Loves Me” and “Work for the Night Is Coming” in their native tongue.

“There they were; they’d lost everything in the world, but they were singing,” he says.

The troops were transported to Seoul on a single-track railroad pulled by a locomotive about the size of a switching engine.

“If it came to a hill, it had to stop for a while and build up steam,” Blake says. While the train was thus stalled, soldiers would get off and guard it. Blake recalls being bundled up in his wool winter outerwear but still being cold as he stood guard. A girl, dressed only in crude burlap garb, approached the soldiers.

“She was begging for food, and I realized what war does to a country,” Blake said.

As they moved through the countryside toward their destination, Blake saw villages that reminded him of photos of the devastation following World War I. The country was decades, even centuries, behind the America he had left behind.

At the Army base in Seoul, which was surrounded by barbed and concertina wire, soldiers were instructed not to toss food scraps to the starving children who begged for food around the base. Blake said the soldiers would disregard those orders, however, and the children would dive into the wire to retrieve whatever was tossed toward them, even bones with little meat left on them.

“You realize what abject starvation is,” Blake says.

The soldiers’ Christmas celebration reflected the drab, dour spirit of that place. Blake says their captain gave a couple of the guys the job of finding a tree, and they came back with a pathetic specimen, about 2 1/2 feet tall. Some of the men made paper decorations; others soldered light bulbs to wire, then painted the bulbs with the only colors they had available, olive green and orange.

“That kind of made a strange Christmas tree, olive green and orange, but that’s what we had. That scrubby old tree was home to us. I look at the fancy trees we have today, and they can’t hold a candle to that 2-1/2-foot tree we had over there,” Blake says.

Assigned to regimental supply, Blake’s unit provided blasting materials to engineers at the front.

“We were about as far from the front as we are from (Lake Road),” says the Elk Drive resident. “Every single night, we saw the flashes and heard the artillery and hollering all night long.”

Occasionally, the artillery would stray into their location, but casualties were rare.

“I got hurt worse diving down than getting slapped on the hand with this little piece of metal,” says Blake, describing the superficial shrapnel wound he received.

He says another scary moment was when he traveling toward the front, in North Korean territory, and he suddenly heard, for the first time in his life, a cuckoo bird.

“It scared the living daylights out of me,” Blake says. “I was certain it was the North Koreans and Chinese signaling each other.”

Blake said no men in his unit were lost in the war but a close friend of his, Army Pfc. Donald Clark, was killed. Blake had gone to school with Clark since elementary grades, and Clark received his draft notice at the same time Blake got his. Blake, who had one year of college remaining, got a deferment, but his buddy headed off to the Army and the Korean battlefield.

Clark was killed in action July 27, 1950, but his remains have never been located.