Price of Valor: The Life of Audie Murphy

Indeed, one of the complexities of Audie Murphy’s story is that he did seem on the surface so thoroughly simple and ordinary. It was a central ingredient, even, of his cultural image. What made him so appealing, however, was not his being average but rather his being emblematic—the ideal of “everyday American” virtue, an embodiment of Norman Rockwell America. He was how the country wanted to think of itself.

Yet, lurking below the Norman Rockwell–like image of Audie Murphy was what we now call “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” from which he so clearly and devastatingly suffered. During World War II it was called “battle fatigue” and in the war before that “shell shock.” Whatever the label, it plagued him for the rest of his life after the war. It was a condition which at the time was little understood, and for the treatment of which there was almost no help available. He was aware of how it affected him and sometimes gave way to bitterness about it.

Killing, psychologists say, is “the single most pervasive, traumatic experience of war.” Second to this is the emotional distress experienced by observing violence and the death of friends and comrades. Murphy had done more than his fair share of killing and seeing others killed. Despite an appealingly fresh-faced and youthful appearance that stayed with him well into his adult years, his wartime trauma left him scarred. There was always a profound melancholy just under his surface along with a fatalism that was completely at odds with his image. The tension made him an interesting actor, but it came at a high cost.

“Before the war, I’d get excited and enthused about a lot of things,” he once admitted to film director John Huston, “but not any more.” Murphy often appeared withdrawn and depressed, unable to focus too long on any one task. Overwhelmed by pessimism, he was subject to hair-raising bouts of temper. He was tormented by nightmares. Within a week of flying home he was reliving the war in his dreams. He would wake up yelling for his buddies who had died in his arms. He slept with the light on, and then resorted to sleeping pills. Military historian Max Hastings described Audie Murphy as “a psychological mess of epic proportions.”

Some of Murphy’s torments also had their roots in his childhood, which was marked by profound insecurities. Murphy came of age during the Great Depression and the uncertainty of those years left their mark on him. In his acclaimed book The Greatest Generation, journalist Tom Brokaw noted that children like Audie Murphy “watched their parents lose their businesses, their farms, their jobs, their hopes. They had learned to accept a future that played out one day at a time.” Murphy never looked far into the future; the present was always enough of a challenge. His father’s periodic absences and the strain they put on his mother also affected him deeply. He was both fiercely proud and remarkably withdrawn. Even when he was a young boy, adults who knew him sensed his pride, his sensitivity, and his anger.

But it was Murphy’s war trauma that shaped his adult life more than anything else, and his responses to the distinctive stresses of war are not unique. A friend of mine who teaches at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College once told me that there were certain clips from movies he refused to show to any of his classes in which there were veterans. The images and, even more, the sounds of combat, he said, could trigger terrible and unpredictable reactions. Given this, the more one knows about Audie Murphy’s story the more difficult it is to watch To Hell and Back, the 1955 film version of his life based on his memoir in which he starred as himself. Not only was a fragile and lonely soul made to relive the pain of his mother’s death, but amid Hollywood-choreographed explosions and gunfire he was made to relive the deaths of his closest companions as well.

In the 1959 movie No Name on the Bullet, a psychological drama in the form of a western, Murphy plays a hired killer named John Gant who has grown numb from his line of work, and speaks of death with cold detachment. In this movie, as in so many others he made, Murphy’s character is low-key, a man of few words, a distant look in his eyes; a man who has been drained by his experiences.

“I can’t make my mind accept that Gant is the vicious killer I know him to be,” says the town doctor at one point. “I’ve played chess with him. I’ve talked with him. I found myself liking him.” Similarly, it might be hard to recognize not only the war hero but the tormented veteran in the small, quiet young man who stepped off the Army transport plane returning home to instant fame. “A man can’t escape his past,” another character remarks of John Gant. That certainly became true for Audie Murphy.

The tree that shades Murphy’s tombstone in Arlington Cemetery, and on hot summer days provides a welcome relief to those who come to find his final resting place and pay their respects, also hints at the shadow the war cast over his life. His story is one of triumph, trauma, and ultimately tragedy. He was a man who, without ever intending to be, had to live out his life as the most decorated soldier of World War II and one of the most celebrated heroes in American history.