The Life of Audie Murphy
On June 20, 1924 (or perhaps 1925), at 7:00 p.m. in a tiny sharecropper’s house on the Foster Boles farm near Kingston, Texas, Audie Leon Murphy entered the world. His parents, Emmett and Josie Bell Murphy decided to call him “Audie,” after a neighbor whom the Murphys particularly liked. Audie’s oldest sister Corinne gave him the middle name of “Leon” because she liked the sound of it. Audie was the third son and seventh child of the Murphy family. There would be a total of twelve children, but only nine grew to adulthood.
Audie did not like his first name and insisted that he be called Leon. It was not until he was in the Army that the name “Audie” stuck. In fact, his last employer before the war did not recognize for some time that the war hero, Audie Murphy, whom everyone was talking about in the spring of 1945, was his former employee, Leon Murphy.
The Murphy’s moved several times during Audie’s boyhood, and although their homes were on different farms, living conditions did not vary – crudely built three or four room houses made of clapboard or plank, sparsely furnished, with no plumbing or electricity. Cooking was done on wood stoves, and a fireplace provided the heating. Their daily diet was a monotonous fare of biscuits, cornbread and molasses with milk and gravy. Occasionally, hog meat, fish and game, often shot by Audie, provided some variety.
In March 1933, the Murphys moved to Celeste so that the children could attend school. For the first few months, they lived in a converted railroad box car on the southern edge of town, not far from the Katy Railroad tracks. Before school started, they rented a house next door to the John Cawthons, and the families became close friends. In the fall of 1937, the Murphys again moved to the box car where they stayed for a few weeks until they took up residence on a farm near Floyd just west of Greenville.
Audie adored his mother, who had a great deal of influence on his early life. She instilled pride in him and encouraged him “to be somebody” in life. He admired her quiet courage, her deep compassion, and her steadfastness in adversity. His mother was the glue that held the family together, but a life of drudgery, overwork, neglect, constant childbearing, and sickness took its toll, and she died on May 23, 1941. Audie borrowed $100 from the Bowens to pay for his mother’s funeral, which he paid back with his services over the next year. Audie never quite recovered from the loss of his mother.
Audie was a born hunter; his ability to sight, stalk and shoot game was uncanny, and his adeptness often meant meat for the family. Most of his hunting as a boy was with a single shot .22 caliber rifle using short cartridges with which he displayed unusual accuracy. He had “eyes like a hawk and could spot squirrels in the tallest, bushiest tree when no one else could. A quick shot by Audie would invariably follow the sighting, and the little gray would come tumbling down.” These characteristics, plus his natural aggressiveness, catlike reflexes, steady nerves, level head and good judgment would serve him well during WWII when he was on the front line.
In the spring of 1942, Audie unsuccessfully tried to enlist in the Marines, but was rejected. He turned to the army infantry; however, being unable to convince the Greenville recruiting office that he was eighteen, his sister Corinne had to procure a notarized affidavit attesting to his age.
On June 30, he hitchhiked to the Greenville Post Office where he took the oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies,” was assigned a serial number, and boarded an army bus for the ride to Camp Wolters, ninety miles west of Dallas. There he was issued his uniform and weapon and assigned his basic training organization–Fourth Platoon, Company D, 59th Training Battalion.
On October 18, 1942, Audie arrived at Fort Meade in Maryland for advanced training until late January 1943. Audie received orders for overseas shipment and reported to Camp Kilmer in New Jersey on January 23rd for two weeks while being processed and waiting for his convoy to form. On February 8, 1943, Audie boarded the USAT Hawaiian Shipper for North Africa, a voyage which took eleven days.
Twenty-eight months later, First Lieutenant Audie Leon Murphy would leave the European-African-Middle Eastern Theater as America’s most highly decorated soldier.
Because of Audie’s size and appearance, his company commanders at both Camps Wolters and Meade tried to spare him the rigors of the combat infantryman by trying to send him to Cook and Baker’s School, but Audie protested so long and loudly that the idea was dropped. Later, at Fort Meade, his company commander tried to talk him into permanently working at the Post Exchange, but Audie would have none of it – he had joined the army to fight, not to sell shoes and socks.
While at Fort Meade, one of the many soldier traps just outside the fort was a shooting gallery. The most difficult target was a playing card with five red, quarter-inch dots on it, one in each corner and one in the center. The object was to shoot out the dots with five shots from a .22 rifle at thirty feet and win $25 in cash, which was almost a month’s pay for a private. Audie accomplished the feat, but the proprietor refused to pay the baby-faced private. Audie was angry and reported the incident to the company commander who visited the gallery that evening and demanded that the proprietor pay Audie, or the gallery would be placed “off limits.” Audie was paid, but the owner never let him shoot there again.
“They talk about bravery; well, I’ll tell you what bravery really is. Bravery is just determination to do a job that you know has to be done. If you throw in discomforts and lack of sleep and anger, it is easier to be brave. Just wanting to be back in a country like this can make a man brave. I have seen many a doughfoot do many-a-brave-thing, because he wanted to get the war over-with in a hurry and go home. Many-a-guy who wanted to come home worse than anything else in the world will stay over there forever. They are the fellows I want the honors to go to, not to me.” – Audie Murphy to AP correspondent William C. Barnard
From the time that Audie returned to the States on June 13, 1945, he was almost constantly in the public eye for everyone wanted to honor the returning hero. But the war had taken its toll on the teenager; Audie had a serious case of “combat fatigue from which he never completely recovered. He received no professional post war medical treatment, and was not sent to one of the army’s rest and rehabilitation centers for readjustment to civilian life. According to Audie, “After the war, they took army dogs and rehabilitated them for civilian life. But they turned soldiers into civilians immediately and let ‘em sink or swim.” Audie never completely recovered from the “toll of the combat years.”
Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after his return from the war, Audie was plagued by insomnia, bouts of depression, and nightmares related to his numerous battles. For a time during the mid-1960s, he became dependent on prescribed sleeping pills called Placidyl. When he realized that he had become addicted to the drug, he locked himself in a motel room where he took himself off the pills, going through withdrawal for a week.
Always an advocate of the needs of America’s military veterans, Murphy broke the taboo about publicly discussing war-related mental conditions. In an effort to draw attention to the problems of returning Korean War veterans, Murphy spoke out candidly about his own problems with PTSD, known then and during WWII as “battle fatigue” or “shell shock.” He called on the U.S. government to extend healthcare benefits to address PTSD and other mental-health problems suffered by returning war veterans.
After seeing Audie’s picture in Life, actor James Cagney invited him out to Hollywood and put him under contract. Audie stayed in a guest house on the Cagney’s estate for over a year while he regained his health and took acting lessons, as he had “a Texas accent thick enough to whittle with a paring knife and no formal training in drama.”
Audie raised Quarter Horses and Thoroughbreds at both of his big Arizona and California ranches. At Los Alamitos, where he raced his Quarter Horses, Audie’s colors were blue and white–in honor of his WWII division, the 3rd ID. The two most successful race horses he ever owned were Joe Queen and Mackay Boy, both of which won a substantial number of races and were put out for stud at high fees. Audie not only rode in his western films, but he rode as a jockey once a year at the Del Mar Race Track in California. He won the race in 1963 and 1964.
The fatal flight of a twin-engine Aero-Commander piloted by Herman Butler departed from Atlanta, Georgia, at 9:10 a.m. on May 28, 1971, bound for Martinsville, Virginia, on a business trip with Audie and four other passengers. Running into a storm, the plane became lost while flying in the rain, fog, and clouds. At 12:08 p.m., the plane plunged into the side of Brushy Mountain–killing all on board. Because of the lack of a filed flight plan and the adverse weather conditions, the crash site was not found until 2:30 p.m. on May 31st. The crash site was in Craig County, Virginia, about fifteen miles southwest of New Castle and twenty miles west of Roanoke.
Audie was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on June 7, 1971. Although he had requested a “simple, plain and ordinary burial” in his will, Audie was buried with full military honors in the country’s most prestigious military cemetery. Following a short service in the Fort Myer Chapel on the cemetery grounds, the flag-draped cas-ket was carried to a waiting caisson for the slow ride to the burial site. The U.S. Army Band, marching with muffled drums and playing soft hymns, preceded the horse-drawn caisson down the tree-lined avenues of the national cemetery.
Audie’s gravesite is under a large black oak tree just west of the Amphitheatre of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, near Memorial Drive. It is the second most visited gravesite at Arlington, after that of John F. Kennedy. Every June 20th a group of non-commissioned officers lays a wreath on his grave to mark his birthday. To appropriately mark the place of Audie’s death on Brushy Mountain, VFW Post 5311 of nearby Christiansburg, Virginia, erected a monument at the site of his fatal crash. The small VFW Post bore the burden of the cost, the labor and the frustration for the project. It took three years alone to obtain permission from the Forestry Service to place the monument on the site and several months to obtain back-ground information on Audie in order to have the correct information for the inscription. The 2 ½ ton slab of granite was donated, as were the services of the stone cutter. Members of VFW Post 5311 cut a rough road up the 2500-foot slope for a vehicle to transport the materials and stone to the site. Post members cleared and graded the area for the monument and poured the concrete slab. This small group of dedicated veterans did this because they believed “The site where this famous American hero died should be preserved with some identifying marker.” The project was completed with the monument dedication on November 10, 1974, marked by a simple ceremony.
