HEROES: To Hell and Not Quite Back

When Audie Murphy returned from World War II, not yet 21 and the war’s most decorated hero, he held the promise of an emerald future. Winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor and 23 other citations, credited with killing an estimated 240 Germans, the baby-faced kid from Kingston, Texas, was feted by the press and patriotic organizations, courted by business, industry and Hollywood. To an adoring public, he represented that elusive American ideal: the small-town boy who, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, goes on to perform such deeds as dreams and motion pictures are made of.

Yet the consequence of heroism, all too often, is an ego-rending compulsion to continue in a larger-than-life role, a task at which few succeed. Murphy was no exception. Faced with the need to translate acts of valor into a lifetime of virtue, he had nowhere to go but down. When his body was found last week in the crash of a light plane outside Roanoke, Va., Murphy, 46, left behind a promise that had dissolved unheroically into business failures, run-ins with the law and forgettable parts in forgettable movies.

No Talent. Still, Murphy’s bravery in World War II was memorable indeed. A member of the Seventh Army, 3rd Division, 15th Infantry Regiment, Company B, he rose from private to first lieutenant in nearly 30 months of combat. He was wounded three times. On one occasion, he stormed a German-occupied hill alone, killing 15 and wounding 35; later he captured, singlehanded, an enemy machine-gun nest. In the battle for the Colmar pocket in eastern France, he mounted a burning tank destroyer and with its .50-cal. machine gun held off an attacking Nazi force of some 250 men and six tanks. It was for this action that he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Yet in his autobiography, To Hell and Back — he later starred in the movie version — he recalled his pleasure at being just another soldier. Even in his Hollywood heyday, Murphy was never comfortable in his hero’s role. He preferred chatting with the extras to hob nobbing with actors and directors.

Murphy had no qualms about his lack of acting ability. “I’m working he with a handicap,” he told one director. “I have no talent.” He was also quick to admit that he was in acting simply for the money. He did make money — some $2.5 million from 40 pictures — but part of it he gave away and the rest he lost in poor investments. For the past several years he was hounded by creditors. When he died, he was on a business trip trying to close one last deal to stave off bankruptcy.

Busting Drug Dealers.

One of nine living children of a Texas sharecropper, Murphy was no stranger to adversity. While Audie was still in his teens, his father left home; his mother died soon after, leaving Audie to support what was left of the family. He scraped through, working as a farm hand and doing odd jobs, but only the war saved him from becoming a Dust Bowl drifter.

When he enlisted in the infantry after being turned down by the Marines and the paratroopers because he was too small, Murphy had never been more than 100 miles from home.

Murphy was twice married: the first time for a little more than a year, to Starlet Wanda Hendrix. His second marriage, to Pamela Archer, was more durable. He had two sons and was a devoted father. In his last years he and his family lived in a two-story English-style farmhouse in Los Angeles, attempting to make a new start.

As the world got faster and faster in the ’60s, it left him farther and farther behind. Murphy played a kind of grownup cops-and-robbers game as a special officer of the Port Hueneme, Calif., police department and as a source of Mafia intelligence for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. He developed a powerful aversion to the drug trade and took to riding around with the police, helping them bust drug dealers. Last year he and a bartender friend beat up a man after an argument over the treatment of a pet dog. Though Murphy was acquitted on a charge of attempted murder, the incident marked the depths to which he had fallen. Audie Murphy belonged to an earlier, simpler time, one in which bravery was cardinal and killing was a virtue.