Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 12 - May 21, 2023
“All men are born to die... and if one man must go a few turns of the earth sooner than the rest... what has he really lost?” — Audie Murphy
I never moved into combat without having the feeling of a cold hand reaching into my guts and twisting them into knots. — Audie Murphy
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.”[5]
In the war Audie Murphy was wounded three times, killed some two hundred-odd Germans, and won every medal for valor that the United States had to offer (one of them, the “Silver Star,” twice in four days). He became America’s most decorated soldier ever, lauded by two presidents and millions of humbler folks. Yet he was unable to sleep, twenty years after the war ended, without the lights on and a loaded Walther automatic pistol beneath his pillow.
You watch out, Henry, an’ take good care of yerself in this here fighting business.... Don’t go a-thinkin’ you can lick the hull rebel army at the start because yeh can’t. Yer jest one little feller amongst a hull lot of others, and yeh’ve got to keep quiet an’ do what they tell yeh. — Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Still the Germans fought on stubbornly. They were going to make the Amis, as they called the Americans contemptuously, pay for every inch of ground they gained.
Henry James once wrote: “We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”
The Murphy family lived and worked in conditions little different from those that their forefathers in Ireland had wanted to get away from when they left the Oud Sod back in the nineteenth century to start a new life in America.
The Murphys were typical sharecroppers of their time, improvident, breeding too many children for their circumstances, scratching a poor living from the soil in an area of backward people like themselves.
As his longtime friend David McClure, another American-Irishman from a similar poor, rural background, noted after the war: “I have never seen a man with such fast reflexes. With him, to think is to act. Audie fires on instinct and is deadly accurate.... His vision is fabulous. It must be better than twenty-twenty. He often points out tiny objects to me at night; and even with his help I cannot see them except upon close inspection. His sense of smell is very acute.... During the war he was sent out to capture prisoners for intelligence on night patrols and was able to locate the Germans by
...more
As he wrote himself, “I was never so happy as when alone. In solitude my dreams made sense. Nobody was there to dispute or destroy them.”[67] And a loner Murphy was going to remain. In the service, after he had some combat experience, he shunned close relationships. All too often they were suddenly and violently destroyed in battle.
It would be some twenty-eight months later, his skinny chest adorned with twenty-five awards, before First Lieutenant Audie Murphy, the only surviving member of that original Company B, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division, would return to the United States.
The wine meant nothing to Audie; he did not drink.
Of his original 235 man company, which set off for Sicily in July 1943, only one other man besides Murphy was going to survive the whole war — all the others were killed or invalided home. What effect did the killing in combat of an estimated 240 Germans have on the young Texan? The years to come were to show that, whatever his conduct under fire, the war did not leave him unscathed.
“With Thee I am unafraid for on Thee my mind is stayed. Though a thousand foes surround, safe in Thee I shall be found.… In the air, on sea, or land. Thy sure protection is at hand.”[117]
“War robs you, mentally and physically, it drains you. Things don’t thrill you anymore. It’s a struggle every day to find something interesting to do.… It made me grow up too fast. You live so much on nervous excitement that when it is over you fall apart.”[139]
“I had hoped,” Churchill lamented that March, “that we were hurling a wild cat onto the shore, but all we had got was a stranded whale.”[171]
Not all of Company B got through unharmed. That day, the only other member of the company to win the coveted Medal of Honor besides Murphy, Sgt. Sylvester Antolak, singlehandedly silenced several German machine-gun posts so that his platoon could get across the tracks. He was not so lucky as his fellow platoon leader. As he silenced the last of the enemy machine guns, he was riddled with German bullets, and not knowing he would win America’s highest decoration, died and lies forgotten these forty years or more.
Battlefields are empty places. You don’t remember the guys’ names. You remember that one-one-zero-eight-seven-eight-three is the number of your rifle,[217] but names are too personal. That’s really how it is.”[218]
The Texas farm boy, who on the day of Pearl Harbor had been double-dating with another boy at a drive-in movie theater, now three years later had slept with three women in one evening. Italy had taught him a lot and would — indirectly — affect the course of his future life until the day he died.
Now he was on his way to France. Here, in a period of less than five months, Audie Murphy would be wounded three times, be promoted to an officer on the battlefield, and win the United States’s highest decorations for valor, one of them, the Silver Star, twice. In the history of the U.S. Army, no one had ever matched that record, nor in the forty years since then has anyone come close. Murphy was heading straight for the history books.
A man never travels so far as when he does not know whither he is going. — Oliver Cromwell
Afterward, when he was informed that he was to receive the Distinguished Service Cross for his valor that August morning, he stated: “I won the medal, but Lattie, who was the bravest man I ever knew won only death for himself.”[230] Indeed, after the war Murphy gave the precious decoration away to Tipton’s daughter, who, as a nine year old, had seen her father march away to war in 1942 never to return. Now nearly half a century later, a middle-aged woman herself, she still treasures that medal.
What was to follow was called later “the Champagne Campaign.” For at a cost of five hundred men wounded and killed, Gen. Alexander Patch had put ashore two whole corps of some 66,000 men. In contrast the 100,000-odd men that Eisenhower put ashore in Normandy on June 6, 1944, suffered 10,000 casualties, nearly a ten percent rate.
In September 1944, the German output of weapons of war was the highest of the whole war; and in the Vosges, General Patch’s Seventh Army began to run out of shells.
The war with Japan still raged, and Audie Murphy would make excellent copy. Here was this handsome youngster with his ready smile and open face, who had won every medal that the USA had to give and had killed 240 “Krauts” in the bargain, but had emerged from it all unscathed. Wouldn’t he be an inspiration to all those other eager teenage hopefuls, ripe for some desperate glory in the Pacific? This was the real John Wayne!
We do know that he told one of the officers at the separation center that he would appear in a short feature and would “be given special schooling at the expense of MGM.”[300] He also told newspapermen that he was sick of being treated like a hero. “I’m tired of being a hero. The true heroes, the real heroes, are the boys who fought and died, and will never come home.”[301]
Perhaps the best film of the genre to deal with Korea came at the end of the decade. It was Lewis Milestone’s Pork Chop Hill, based on a real battle during the conflict. This half-cynical, half-heroic account of the fight for a useless piece of hillside, carried out while the cease-fire negotiations that would end the war were taking place, contained a vignette, in which a harassed captain (Gregory Peck) says to a bleeding and wounded GI about to set off on some self-imposed heroic mission, “Who the hell do you think you are — Audie Murphy, eh?”
Off to one side the same Fort Lewis GIs, dressed as World War II infantrymen, smoked and joked with other Fort Lewis GIs dressed in German uniform. At Anzio when an American and a German got that close to each other, one of them was going to be abruptly dead.”[417]
It was the dawn of the “swinging sixties.” The decade brought tremendous and unprecedented prosperity to the West; and freedom of choice — unhampered by the restraints of poverty or of conventional morality — unknown to the average man and woman hitherto. There was virtually full employment everywhere. Indeed, labor had to be “imported” from the Third World to keep pace with the demand. There was a new concern for the rights of groups that up to that time had had precious few rights, or none at all. There were rights for blacks, rights for the Indian, rights for gays, rights for single parents
...more
As he told an interviewer five years later, “There was a nightmare, a recurrent nightmare. A feeling of exasperation. I would dream I am on a hill and all these faceless people are charging up at me. I am holding a M-1 Garand rifle, the kind of rifle I used to take apart blindfolded. And in the dream, every time I shoot one of these people a piece of the rifle flies off until all I have left is the trigger guard! The trigger guard!”[446]
Outside, long-stemmed “Audie Murphy” roses (named after the star in the fifties) flourished near the flagpole and a “big scary police dog named Eric” prowled.
Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist who had acted with Murphy in The Red Badge of Courage, was asked to write a tribute to his dead friend. The magazine that commissioned the article was Life, which had launched Murphy’s postwar career back in 1945.
It was all over. Audie L. Murphy had been laid to rest. The Army band struck up the jaunty marching song of the 3rd Infantry Division. Murphy’s old outfit, as it swung up the avenue back to its barracks, “Just a dogface soldier with a rifle on my shoulder... eat a Kraut for breakfast every day... So feed me ammunition.... Keep in the Third Division...”[511]
When Sergeant Joe Hooper, one of Murphy’s pallbearers, died of natural causes in 1979, he had been long forgotten by the general public. Although he had returned from Vietnam as that war’s most decorated soldier, with 115 enemy dead to his credit, the holder of the Medal of Honor, two Silver Stars, the Bronze Star, and a staggering seven Purple Hearts, he discovered he had fought in a discredited war. Few mourned his passing. No one, save his family, remembers him today.
The attempts to make him “sell” his combat fame had never ceased. When he was almost penniless, living off his disability pension, they had latched on to him to sell: “commercial things — a few shirt ads, whiskies, cigarettes. I don’t drink or smoke and at that time I couldn’t afford a shirt. I turned them down.”[512]
Perhaps then he had told the real truth — before they had turned him into a reluctant movie star — when he had said, soon after returning from the war, that he had wanted to become a farmer because, “Farmers are happier.”[513]
Time’s wrong-way telescope will show a minute man ten years hence, and by distance simplify. Through the lens, see if I seem substance or nothing; of the world deserve mention or charitable oblivion. Remember me when I am dead and simplify me when I’m dead. — Captain Keith Douglas, Killed in Action, Normandy, 1944
