In the impressive combat record of the men of Audie Murphy’s unit is written the harsh fact of how long it was on the front lines, engaged with the enemy for months on end—from North Africa, to Sicily, to Italy, to the South of France, up to the Rhine river frontier, and finally into Germany.  In his Company B, 1^st battalion, 15^th infantry regiment, 3^rd Infantry Division, almost all the men who started out with him were gone by the end of the war, many dying in front of him one by one.  In his weary eyes, his own survival came to seem less a matter of heroic effort than simply a matter of chance.  He thought of himself as a “fugitive from the law of averages,” as he put it.  In what way could that be worthy of celebration?  As he himself said many times, the real heroes were dead—and they all had been “men who wanted to live, just as much as you and I.”  All his medals, he believed, were more justly theirs.  They had given far more than he had.  Having them, in his eyes, was not only misguided, it was in a sense phony.  He spent his life trying to downplay them until he finally claimed to have given them all away.

Nevertheless, in the summer of 1945 he came home to parades, to reluctantly giving speeches to crowds that cheered, prompted by civic boosters determined to put their towns on the map.  The mayor of Farmersville said that “When a boy from Farmersville wins medals all over Italy and then goes up to France and stands off a German army singlehanded and gets the Congressional Medal of Honor—he’ll just have to count on making a few sacrifices when he gets back home.”