Audie Murphy

Murphy was born in Kingston, Texas, the seventh of twelve children of sharecroppers so poor that he left school after the fifth grade to pick cotton for a dollar a day, feeding the family on what he could shoot with a borrowed rifle. His father left before he was in his teens. His mother died in 1941, when he was sixteen, of a heart infection and pneumonia. After Pearl Harbor he tried to enlist and was turned down by the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps for being underweight and underage; his older sister signed an affidavit lying about his birth date, and the Army took him on June 30, 1942.

Murphy fought from the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 through Salerno, Anzio, and the liberation of southern France, collecting wounds, malaria, and medals along the way. The action that defined him came on January 26, 1945, at Holtzwihr, France, when his company was overrun by German infantry and tanks. He sent his men back, stayed alone directing artillery fire by radio, then climbed onto a burning tank destroyer and fired its machine gun at the advancing Germans for roughly an hour, killing or wounding about fifty before leading a counterattack while bleeding from a leg wound. He left the war at twenty with the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, and every other combat award the Army gave for valor, credited with 241 enemy dead and called the most decorated American soldier of the war.

The war did not let him go. Murphy slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow, grew dependent on the sedative Placidyl, and once locked himself in a hotel room a week to break the habit. His temper turned violent enough that his first wife, Wanda Hendrix, said he once held her at gunpoint; a 1970 dispute with a dog trainer ended in an arrest later dropped. He lost 260,000 dollars in one bad oil deal in 1968 and more on horses and gambling, and spent his last years short of money despite star billing. What set him apart was that he talked about it, telling reporters, before the phrase post-traumatic stress disorder existed, that the war had damaged him, and pushing the country to treat Korea and Vietnam veterans better than it had treated his own.

Murphy died on May 28, 1971, when the small plane he was riding in flew into a fogbound mountainside near Roanoke, Virginia; he was forty-five. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery under a plain government headstone, per his own instructions, rather than the gold-lettered marker reserved for other Medal of Honor recipients, and his grave is now the second most visited there, after John F. Kennedy's. Congress named a veterans' hospital in San Antonio for him two years after his death, a fitting monument for a man who had spent his last decade talking about what combat does to the men who survive it, before the country built the vocabulary or the institutions to listen.

Audie Murphy's life against the full span of the corpus.

• To Hell and Back book
  Autobiographical war memoir 1949
• The Red Badge of Courage film
  John Huston's adaptation of the Stephen Crane novel 1951
• To Hell and Back film
  Film version of his memoir; the biggest hit in Universal's history to that point 1955
• No Name on the Bullet film
  Among his best-received film performances 1959
• Whispering Smith television
  His one television series, in the title role 1961

• June 20, 1925 aged 0 Born in Kingston, Texas
• 1941 aged ~16 His mother dies; he leaves school to support the family
• June 30, 1942 aged 17 Enlists in the Army after being rejected three times
• January 26, 1945 aged 19 Earns the Medal of Honor at Holtzwihr, France
• July 16, 1945 aged 20 Appears on the cover of Life magazine as the war's most decorated soldier The cover brought him to the attention of actor James Cagney.
• September 21, 1945 aged 20 Discharged from active duty
• 1955 aged ~30 To Hell and Back is released and becomes Universal's biggest hit to date
• May 28, 1971 aged 45 Dies in a plane crash near Roanoke, Virginia
• 1973 aged ~48 A veterans' hospital in San Antonio is dedicated in his name

• John Wayne 1907–1979
  Western star whose screen persona became a durable symbol of American masculinity. contrasted with the Hollywood myth of
• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. served under
• George H. W. Bush 1924–2018
  41st president who managed the end of the Cold War and assembled the coalition for the Persian Gulf War. attended his funeral
• William Westmoreland 1914–2005
  Commander in Vietnam whose attrition strategy and optimistic troop estimates collided with the Tet Offensive. attended his funeral