No Name on the Bullet

No Name on the Bullet, A biography of Audie Murphy, Don Graham, ISBN 0-670-81511-X

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


For those of you who may not know who Audie Murphy is, he is the most decorated soldier in American Military History.
Murphy received thirty-three awards, citations, and decorations and won a battlefield promotion to second lieutenant. (He kept refusing the commission, finally they did two things, they allowed him to stay in his own company and fixed it so he did not have to do any paperwork)

He received every medal that the United States gives for valor, two of them twice. On January 26, 1945, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for exceptional valor near Holtzwhir, France, where he was personally credited with killing or wounding about fifty Germans and stopping an attack by 6 enemy tanks and two companies of Germans. After the war's end, Murphy also received several French and Belgian decorations for valor. He fought in eight campaigns in Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany; participated in two amphibious assaults, in Sicily and southern France; and was wounded three times. Considered conservatively to have killed over 250 men in combat.


I read this book a few years back and recently a friend gave it to me. I was overjoyed to read it again. When I got it I flipped it over to read the blurp on the back.....


“Audie Murphy used to be a legend in Texas and still is among those old enough to remember World War II and the postwar decade. A hero equal to any the Alamo has to offer, he has suffered, the way heroes sometimes do, from a shift in the modern consciousness. Since Vietnam, Americans have had trouble believing or honoring the kind of warrior that Murphy represented. We prefer video fantasy-Rambo-a kind of MTV celebration of American machismo in which the nation wins that unpopular war it never should have fought and which, of course, it lost. Audie Murphy could have had Sylvester Stallone for breakfast. Audie Murphy was the real thing, not some pumped-up, aerobicized celluloid palooka. And the real thing is always more interesting, more human, more tragic, more blood-and-death-ridden than the made up, the phony. It was that real hero, the man behind the bronze statuary, that I had come to find"

And find him Graham did. But as Gregory “Pappy” Boyington was famous for saying “Name me a hero, and I'll prove he's a bum.” Which is not to say heroes are bad people as much as it to say that those who excell in war aren't always the best citizens.

Graham starts the book by painting a picture of Murphy’s poverty stricken childhood as one of twelve children in depression era Texas. He, of course, tells of this 5'6" 112 pound recruit’s war time experiences and the almost super human ability as a front line combat soldier. Trust me, Murphy earned those medals. But the majority of this book deals with Murphy’s post war life.

Speaking of life, it was Murphy’s picture on the cover of Life magazine at the end of the war that led him to Hollywood, where he would appear in 44 movies, Starring in 37, including John Huston’s Red Badge of Courage. The book’s title comes from arguably his best western, No Name on the Bullet. And of course, the movie of his autobiography “To Hell and Back” (Considered a must have for readers of war, Hell and Back was pretty much ghost written, Murphy only had a 5th grade education, but it was ghost written by a man who was a very close friend) (I had a chance to buy an autographed copy of Hell and Back but got out bid at the last minute Grrrr)Anyway, where was I? Oh right.... I am not much into the movie star stuff but this was actually really fascinating stuff. Hollywood was, then as it is now, a town of make believe, peopled with pretenders. Murphy in Hollywood was like oil and water. Or gas on a fire.

He also details parts of Murphy's life that I had no idea about. Like working as an undercover cop to catch drug dealers that garnered 20+ convictions and an ugly clandestine Jimmy Hoffa connection.


Throughout it all, Graham shows a man who has few qualities to admire. From the addiction to gambling with which he gambled away about 3 million dollars, to his womanizing to the borderline psychopathic bullying. Graham could have easily written a book strictly to debunk a myth. Yet what he does brilliantly is to show Murphy as a very sympathetic person. One very human. One who suffered terribly from post traumatic stress disorder his entire life. Who wrestled his demons right up til he died in a plane crash in 1971.

I highly recommend this book. Graham teaches English Lit and you can tell. He is a great writer. But he must have dabbled in Psychology somewhere or another, for this is one of the best books I’ve read to illuminate what it is like to be in combat. And to live through it.

It is a well told tale of the man who once signed his name on an autograph with "A fugitive from the law of averages"....I think he showed that indeed Audie Murphy went To Hell....and stayed there.


YMOS
tommy




(Message edited by aphillbilly on July 03, 2003)