Before he was in movies, Audie Murphy was just a kid who ended up in the infantry because the Marines and the paratroopers said he was too small. This memoir only makes brief mention of his life before the war. Enough to know he grew up poor, that his father (himself a veteran of WWI who got a lungful of something toxic) up and left, and his mother died when Murphy was sixteen.
Beyond that, and a few things he discussed with a nurse while convalescing from malaria - apparently he contracted malaria sometime in North Africa, and was gripped with periodic bouts for the remainder of the war, and presumably beyond - this deals strictly with his experiences fighting in either Italy or southern France.
Murphy is blunt about the fact he went into the war with grand dreams, and swiftly learns the reality. He admits that during the war, he's rarely aware of the larger course of the war, or the logic behind the movements his unit makes. There are rumors, there are things that can be extrapolated by the training they're given when temporarily pulled off the lines, but for Murphy and the men he fights alongside, the war is the next field, the next hill, the next defensive fortification they're expected to take.
He describes the men he fights alongside, and to an extent, they could feel like stock characters from a war movie. A Polish immigrant named Novak sure a girl he knows in Pittsburgh is waiting faithfully, who keeps a little stove with him to make coffee. Horse-Face Johnson, who always has another story about, 'this one girl I knew.' Kerrigan, a hard-drinking Irishman and Snuffy, who turns intoa preacher when drunk, begging Kerrigan to repent. Brandon, who receives letters from his daughter back in Tennessee.
It could feel cliche, but those sorts of cliches had to come from somewhere, and the mixing pot of the infantry would present situations like this. And since this real, things don't follow the path a story might. He makes a connection with a nurse while recovering from malaria, but they never meet again. He hears the hospital was bombarded, but doesn't know if she was among the casualties. Murphy writes with a mixture of fondness and exasperation for the guys he knows and all their tics. How it occasionally irritates him when they won't shut up, but other times he's glad for that. He works hard to describe how he can't enrage himself over Novak's death enough to stave off fear that creeps in at night, but when Brandon dies after a couple of Nazis pretend to surrender and cut him down when he steps in view, Murphy's able to describe how he couldn't really process or accept that in the moment.
What follows is one of the sequences that no doubt earned him some of those decorations, but Murphy doesn't allude to that aspect. Medals or ribbons are never mentioned. He scarcely mentions his promotions, from private to corporal, to sergeant, and eventually to lieutenant. They're just another step on a long road to wherever the Army orders him to go. You do notice that he describes fewer of the men who join his command as time goes on and the ones he landed with are gradually whittled away.
Murphy is open about how lucky he was, how easily he could be dead instead of any of the others. He describes seeing two lieutenants dive into a foxhole together and a mortar lands in it a moment later. A mortar hits the ground right in front of him and he's barely harmed, because he was too close to be hit by the spray pattern of the blast. Several men further away are killed or badly wounded. A ricochet catches him in the hip and knocks him down. The sniper fires at his helmet, but Murphy's not wearing it, and that gives him a chance to get the sniper. Those are just the obvious ones, the book is full of moments where you know he could have died if an enemy simply picked a different target.
The writing mixes a matter-of-fact approach with more descriptive phrases. He compares the fear settling into to a fist reaching in to disembowel a chicken carcass, or talks about the dream of a lovely girl he's never seen but would like to meet one day. The moments where he does something particularly wild, he admits he barely remembers, or had no conscious thought of how risky what he was doing was. I'm not sure he's unaware of the likelihood he'll die, but he's either past caring or can't spare the thought to care. He's in the next moment, determined to fight, because that's seemingly how he's always been. Unwilling to stop fighting.
There are a few pages at the end for after victory in Europe is declared where you see the confusion he's left with. He describes wanting to be with others and wanting to be alone, to talk and be silent. It mirrors an earlier stretch when Rome's been liberated, and the soldiers are all it at ease until Kerrigan picks a fight with some flyboys.
'The gun has thrown the krauts into confusion. Evidently they cannot locate its position. Later I am told that the burning tank destroyer, loaded with gasoline and ammunition, was expected to blow up any minute. That was why the enemy tanks gave it a wide berth and the infantrymen could not conceive of a man's using it for cover.
I do not know about that. For the time being my imagination is gone; and my numbed brain is intent only on destroying. I am conscious only that the smoke and the turret afford a good screen, and that, for the first time in three days, my feet are warm.'
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