Audie Murphy

Murphy was born into a sharecropper family in Hunt County, Texas; his father left, his mother died when he was a teenager, and he quit school in fifth grade to pick cotton and hunt to keep his siblings fed. After Pearl Harbor his sister helped him lie about his age to enlist - the Army, Navy, and Marines all turned him down for being underweight before the Army finally took him. He saw action in Sicily in 1943, fought at Anzio and in southern France in 1944, led an assault at L'Omet quarry near Cleurie, and in January 1945 at the Colmar Pocket earned the Medal of Honor for the act that would define him. He's credited with killing 241 enemy soldiers and received every U.S. combat valor award available, plus French and Belgian honors. After the war he turned to acting, playing himself in the 1955 film To Hell and Back based on his own memoirs, then spent years in Westerns and on television while breeding quarter horses and writing songs. What the war left him with - then called battle fatigue - kept a loaded handgun under his pillow and drove him to sleeping pills; in his final years money problems closed in, but he refused alcohol and cigarette endorsements to av