Dr. Don Graham is the J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of English and American Literature at The University of Texas at Austin.

The Audie Murphy Story On August 15, 1944, two months after D-Day, in an invasion of southern France uncelebrated in the lore of the Second World War, a remarkable soldier named Audie Murphy, from Hunt County, Texas, landed at St. Tropez and embarked upon the completion of an astounding combat career unmatched in American history. In truth it was a routine landing, Murphy's fourth by then. At age twenty he was already a seasoned veteran. Looked at one way, Murphy's experiences as a soldier were pretty typical. He slept in mud trenches at Anzio, he lived the dirty, grimy life of a Bill Mauldin Willie & Joe cartoon, he was wounded three times, he met some friendly professional women in Rome, and once in a hospital he fell in love with a pretty Army nurse. What wasn't routine, though, is the combat record Murphy established. By the time he landed in France he had already won seventeen military citations, including the Distinguished Service Cross. In the next five months he would add twelve more, among them the Silver Star, the French Legion of Merit, and the Congressional Medal of Honor. The crown of these, the Medal of Honor, was awarded for his remarkable heroism on a bitterly cold winter day, January 26, 1945, in the snows of northeastern France, near the town of Colmar. That day Murphy climbed on top of a burning tank destroyer and directed artillery fire against two companies of advancing German troops while he personally mowed down fifty German soldiers with a machine gun mounted on the tank destroyer. Murphy's state of mind at that time is worth reflecting upon. He thought he was going to die. He thought he was living on borrowed time; he thought that the next bullet might have his name on it. He expressed such fears in letters home, written in the childish scrawl and grammatical uncertainty of someone who'd only gone through the fifth-grade. In one letter, he remarked, "Say, those Krauts are getting to be better shots then they used to be or else my lucks playing out on me and, I guess, someday they will tag me for keeps. Nice thought anyway." And this: "I've seen so much blood I don't think I ever want to shoot anything else except (Krauts and Japs) ha, ha., fooled you didn't I." He concluded another letter with: "But thares work to do yet (dirty work). . . ." Dirty work there was indeed, and that meant killing the enemy. In the end Audie Murphy was credited with killing 240 German soldiers. The documentation for the body count is impressive and convincing, and the personal testimony of men and officers in Murphy's regiment is equally impressive. Everybody who fought alongside Audie Murphy said he was absolutely deadly. Yet he seemed such an unlikely hero. When he enlisted in the Army at eighteen, in 1942, he stood all of 5'6" and weighed 112 pounds. He seemed hardly big enough to carry an MI-rifle. And he looked like a choir boy. In fact, he never looked much older, right up until his death at age forty-six in a plane crash. The one thing he was not, though, was a choir boy. The defining moment in Audie Murphy's post-war life came just after the war in Europe was over, in the summer of 1945, when his photograph appeared on the cover of Life magazine. The nation needed a comforting, consoling image of the returning American soldier-hero, and Life provided it. Life certified The Good War. The famous photograph of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima appeared in Life; the unforgettable images of heaped skeletal remains of people gassed to death in German concentration camps were first seen in Life. The Life photographs of Audie Murphy are worth our attention if we wish to understand how the idea of The Good War could be personalized and domesticated for home-front consumption. They tell us a great deal about the public persona of Audie Murphy and almost nothing about the real Kid from Texas. The cover photograph is the one everybody remembers. Here Audie appears ad-man perfect, the American soldier as the Boy-Next-Door: handsome, shy, a wide grin, perfect teeth, the very soul of drugstore innocence. He even has freckles. Put a straw hat on him and you've got James Whitcomb Riley's Barefoot Boy With Cheeks of Tan. Or Huckleberry Finn. The picture conveys precisely what a reporter covering Murphy's public appearances in Texas said: "He was the nicest boy you ever saw." The American soldier, we are to understand, could go half-way around the world, kill hundreds of human beings, and return as innocent and unscarred as the day he left that white-picket fence home in Anyplace, U.S.A. The Audie Murphy on that Life cover was a son, a brother. The trained executioner, which is how Murphy once characterized himself, was sanitized into an innocent American youth. Two other photos in the Life layout illustrate this process of domesticating the soldier, the warrior, the killer. In one, Murphy is shown exhibiting to his younger sister a rifle he captured from a German sniper whom he "dropped with one bullet between the eyes." Trophies of war. He looks incredibly youthful in this picture. The next picture is a minor classic. Norman Rockwell could have painted it: The Boy Next Door Gets a Haircut. He looks about twelve. The woman barber is interesting too-part of the entry of women into formerly male enclaves, a result of the war. Outside, looking in with something like amazement at the youthfulness of the kid in the barber's chair, is a crowd of men dressed in khaki work clothes. Local farmers, they might be mistaken for a chorus from some thirties agitprop play. The other Audie Murphy, the one the Life photographs didn't capture, was a rather different sort of boy-soldier. He had trouble sleeping; he had a bad stomach; he had a tendency to wake up in nightmarish sweats, crying out for lost comrades; he liked to drive around his native Hunt County shooting up the countryside; and on more than one occasion he experienced flashbacks-a sudden noise could send him into a combat-alert pose. The real Audie Murphy was still fighting the war in his psyche. He fought it the rest of his life. Twenty-five years after the war was over, he still suffered from insomnia, he still kept a gun under his pillow. He went on to a career in the movies, appearing in forty-one films, starring in thirty-seven, and some of them weren't bad at all: The Red Badge of Courage, To Hell and Back, No Name on the Bullet, The Quiet American. Too often he found release in activities that cost him dearly: women and horses. He pursued the first and bet on the second. He made a lot of money, but he lost it all. Above everything else, he was never quite able to put the war behind him. When asked, late in his life, if people ever get over a war, he said, "I don't think they ever do."