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https://twitter.com/EchoesofWarYT/status/2068470146633793587
Born this day in 1925 in a Texas sharecropper's shack, one of twelve kids. His dad walked out, his mom died young, and Audie Murphy quit school in fifth grade to pick cotton and hunt rabbits to feed his brothers and sisters. He got deadly accurate with a rifle for one reason: the family couldn't afford a wasted bullet.After Pearl Harbor he tried to enlist and got laughed off. The Marines rejected him. The Navy rejected him. The paratroopers rejected him. He was 5'5" and barely 110 pounds, and they all said he was too small to fight. His sister had to fudge his paperwork just to get the Army to take a 17 year old.Then he went to war and became something out of a legend.January 26, 1945, near Holtzwihr, France. His company was down to a handful of men facing six tanks and 250 German infantry. Murphy sent his men back, then climbed onto a burning American tank destroyer that could have exploded under him at any second, grabbed the .50 caliber machine gun, and held off the entire assault alone for nearly an hour. He was wounded in the leg and kept firing. When a buddy asked over the field phone how close the Germans were, he reportedly said hold on and let me ask them.He came home the most decorated American soldier of the entire war. Every valor award the Army could give, some of them more than once, plus French and Belgian honors on top.Life magazine put his baby face on the cover, James Cagney saw it and invited him to Hollywood, and the cotton picker who couldn't pass a physical became a movie star. He made over 40 films. In 1955 he played himself in To Hell and Back, the movie of his own memoir, and it was Universal's biggest hit until Jaws came along twenty years later.But the war never let go. He had what we now call PTSD, slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow, and got hooked on sleeping pills trying to outrun the nightmares. He kicked the addiction by locking himself alone in a motel room for a week. Then he did something almost no famous man did back then: he went public, told the country that combat had wrecked his nerves, and pushed the government to study and treat what war does to a soldier's mind.He died in a plane crash in 1971 at just 45 years old. They buried him at Arlington, where his simple headstone is the most visited grave in the cemetery after John F. Kennedy's.Every branch told him he was too small to fight. He outfought all of them, then spent the rest of his life trying to help the men who came home broken like he did.
