Audie Murphy

Audie Murphy (1925–1971) was one of the most decorated American combat soldiers of World War II. Born into a poor sharecropping family in Kingston, Texas, he grew up in hardship and lost his father to abandonment and his mother to illness while still a teenager. Determined to enlist despite being underage and undersized, he was initially rejected by several branches of the military before the Army accepted him in 1942.

Murphy fought in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany, earning a battlefield commission and receiving every military combat award for valor available from the U.S. Army, including the Medal of Honor for single-handedly holding off an entire company of German soldiers near Holtzwihr, France, in January 1945.

After the war, Murphy parlayed his fame into a Hollywood career, appearing in more than 40 films, most notably playing himself in the 1955 adaptation of his memoir, To Hell and Back. He also worked as a songwriter and rancher. Privately, he struggled for years with what would today be recognized as combat-related post-traumatic stress, and he became an early, outspoken advocate for veterans’ mental health care. He died in a plane crash in 1971 at age 45 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, where his grave remains one of the most visited.