Audie Murphy - The Most Decorated Combat Soldier of WW2
Audie Leon Murphy (20 June 1925 – 28 May 1971)[1] was an American soldier, actor, and songwriter. He was widely celebrated as the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II,[4] and has been described as the most highly decorated enlisted soldier in U.S. history.[5][6] He received every military combat award for valor available from the United States Army, as well as French and Belgian awards for heroism. Murphy received the Medal of Honor for valor that he demonstrated at age 19 for single-handedly holding off a company of German soldiers for an hour at the Colmar Pocket in France in January 1945, before leading a successful counterattack while wounded.
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Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts because because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.
I'm Eli Bosnick, and I'll be leading the charge tonight, but I'll need some grunts to hop to with me.
First up, the two most decorated members of the podcast by Blowing Locks Alone, Cecil and Noah.
Probably not the only time this episode you'll hear hair comments on.
It is forcing anybody to go after Cecil in a battle of wordplay is cruel, Eli.
You just do it as Noah and Cecil next.
And also joining us tonight are two red badges of courage, Heath and Todd.
That's a book.
I knew that.
I read books.
In combat, not so much a red badge of courage as like a brown stain of fear, but sure.
That's very good.
Before we begin tonight, I'd like to thank our patrons.
Patrons, just a dollar a week, you dive onto the grenade of poverty
to prevent us from the most horrifying war of all, the capitalist war on the workplace.
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And with that out of the way, tell us, Tom, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today?
Today, we will be talking about the most decorated U.S.
combat soldier, Audi Murphy.
And Cecil, why Audi Murphy?
Well, today I want to talk about a guy that killed 240 Nazis, and I have no ulterior motives for it.
Zero.
Audi Murphy was born in a small town in Northeast Texas.
His family had 12 kids, and he was number seven.
His parents were white sharecroppers, so a pretty poor upbringing.
Second only to Cecil.
How many refinery expenses did he survive?
They also say in the Wikipedia entry that he had a pretty bad temper as a kid and also had mood swings.
His father sort of phased in and out of his family for several years and then just finally fell out completely.
So at the age of 10-ish years, he drops out of school and he gets a job.
I feel like it's weird to include his nine-year-old temperament in his bio, right?
It's relevant.
Okay, but mad respect to a nine-year-old with a temper so severe it makes his way.
Yeah, that's true.
100 years later.
He gets a job picking cotton at a whopping $1 a day.
Now, in 2025, money, that's $23 whole dollars a day, or a little over three hours of 2025 federal minimum wage.
God, unless you're a tipped employee, in which case it's way less.
He also, at this age, starts hunting to help feed his family.
They mention it here that he became skilled with a rifle and pin in that for some Nazi killing later.
At the age of 16 in 1941, his mother died of pneumonia.
Hold still, Ma.
What part of your lungs do you feel the worst in?
December of 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II.
Audi tried to get in the service.
He was pretty late.
He was a little slow.
He tried to get in the service.
By the application trifecta, he applied to the Army, the Navy, and the Marines.
And all three rejected him because, one, he was too young.
And two, he was underweight.
His sister provided the Army recruitment with a falsified birth certificate and said he was a year older than he actually was and he was accepted into the army in june of 1942.
He comes back and he's like, actually, I was born earlier now.
Remembering.
You know what?
I remembered.
This is just crossed off.
This is just,
you just wrote an ex you know what?
Welcome in.
Welcome in.
What number did I say?
Somehow he gained weight too.
Yeah.
He must have missed the part where he was like, well, you know, you were too young and you were underweight, but now you're just old enough and underweight.
So you can get it.
Yeah, right, right.
He's got rocks in his pockets.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, he goes through basic training and is given a marksmanship badge and an expert badge for his sweet bayonet skills.
Bayonet skills?
That's just
fucking stabbing, right?
He was really good at stabbing?
He was expert,
man.
He got a fucking bayonet.
Aren't you kind of worried about the guys in the company who didn't earn that merit badge?
Like,
god damn it, Phil.
Yeah.
Bill, it's the pointy end.
You want them to line up in front of you.
Yeah.
Okay, so I know this happens a lot in shit, but it's got to be really depressing to get the rejection letter when the job you're applying for is stand in front of the bullets for you, right?
Yeah, but he was underweight, so he didn't catch a lot of bullets.
He joined the Mediterranean theater in February of 1942, and he started out as a platoon messenger, and he was promoted twice in two months, private first class in May and corporal in July.
He gets upgraded from platoon messenger to division runner, which sounds like a bigger job for the same pay.
In 1943, he participated in Operation Avalanche, which is when the Allies landed in southwestern Italy.
He had been in combat before and he had killed two fleeing Italians in Sicily, but this is where things get a little more intense.
Ah yes, start the story with a celebration of the bravery of shooting men in the back.
Yeah, no, it's going to get more intense than that, though, Tom.
Don't worry,
yeah, but like Italian Nazis, I'm cool with it.
Thank you.
Yes, Italians.
Racist.
You don't do that to German people.
Garlic-scented Nazi.
He was in a scouting party near a river, and he and two other soldiers were ambushed by Nazis.
One of the soldiers he's with goes down right away to machine gun fire.
Murphy and the other soldier fight back, killing five Nazis with grenades and some machine gun fire for good measure.
A month later, Murphy is in another battle.
This time, his fellow soldiers fought off an attack of seven Nazis, killing four of them and taking three prisoners.
At this point, he's promoted again to staff sergeant.
After his promotion, Murphy gets malaria and is put in the hospital.
He stays only eight days and rejoins the fight.
A few days later, he's promoted to platoon sergeant.
Valier, you know the war is going great for your size when surviving malaria earns you a promotion.
Okay, but I feel like not surviving is at least a de facto desertion, right?
In March of that year, he and his platoon were taking shelter during a rainstorm in a farmhouse.
The house stood on a small hill that allowed the occupants to see a vital nearby road.
While there, a column of 20 Nazi tanks just slowly rides by like they own the place, but they didn't realize that Murphy and his platoon had placed mines on the road the night before.
Now, Murphy is like a kid that can't wait till Christmas to unwrap his presence.
So he decides to use what they call a land line.
Now, this is a phone that uses a wire to connect to another phone.
It's wild stuff.
He uses that phone to call in an airstrike on the column of tanks.
Okay, when you said unwrap his presence, I thought it was going to be like
a skin plane.
I like what it is.
The first airstrike was off target, but Murphy was still on the line with the artillery and gave him an adjustment.
Second barrage hit and disabled the first tank on the road, and the rest just slowly five-point turned out of there and went back down the road they came from.
Murphy was tasked with finishing off the disabled tank.
He crawled in the mud.
up until he was about 15 meters away and then decided to throw some Molotov cocktails onto the tank.
But neither two that he threw ignited.
So he crawled up to the tank, opened the hatch, threw a grenade down inside, and of course it exploded.
You'd think that motherfucker would be locked, right?
Why can't I keep it locked?
There was a time we thought that about cocktails, too.
The enemy that was nearby opened fire on Murphy.
who then responded by sprinting away and firing six grenades from the grenade launcher at the Nazis and their tank.
He blew off the treads of the tank and was able to get to safety.
Hey, Audi, you're back.
You done
fist fighting that tank or whatever?
I ate your beans.
I ate your beans.
It seemed like you were doing it alone, so.
He received the bronze star with the V device.
V device means he not only got a bronze star for heroism, but he got a V for valor.
He gets a few more medals, a second bronze star with an oak leaf cluster and an infantryman badge.
He didn't get these for a particular mission, just sort of a way to recognize a bunch of things he did while he was on patrol.
Shortly after, he winds up getting malaria again and is hospitalized again before going off to the south of France.
Doctor's like, for the last time, Audi, we're not willing to throw a grenade down there to flush up.
You would expect that at this point, even the mosquitoes would know better than to fuck with him, but apparently not.
Get this guy a gin and tonic or something.
Come on.
In August of 1944, Murphy and his platoon were making their way through a vineyard in France and they got ambushed by Nazis.
Murphy tells his troops to stay in cover and he takes his M1 carbine and splits from the platoon.
Murphy killed two of the Germans that were coming down toward him from the top of the hill.
He's under heavy fire and he wounds another German and he engages with another group in a foxhole nearby.
He runs out of ammunition at this point, goes back to where his troops are, and takes a machine gun from the soldiers.
Then he heads back up and fires on these foxholes, but then he runs out of ammo again.
Okay, where's everybody else?
Are they doing a wine tasting?
Can you help kill the Nazis?
We're good.
You got this, hey, guys.
Exactly.
Let me know if you mean that would save me some.
Awesome.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
He goes back down.
Sounded ingenuine.
He goes back down the hill to get his carbine, and his best friend, Laddie Timpton, convinces him to let him come along.
Dude, you're hogging all the war.
Come on.
They fight their way back up the hill, throwing some grenades, and Tipton gets part of his ear shot off, but they manage to destroy a machine gun placement.
At this point, two Nazis come out of a nearby house, and they look like they're trying to surrender.
Tipton goes to take them prisoner and they shoot and kill him.
So Murphy, still detached from the group, throws several grenades, opens fire on the house, makes it to the machine gun placement and takes their machine gun.
They return fire, but Audi keeps moving towards the house.
He keeps moving toward the house, killing six Nazis and wounding two with their gun.
Okay, you're just saying Wolfenstein 3D out loud.
That's all you're saying.
The 11 inside the house that are left alive, they decide it's better to actually surrender this time.
So he takes them
shit.
His platoon takes the area.
He's individually awarded the distinguished
service cross.
And his regiment gets the presidential unit citation.
Yay, we did it together.
Ross and Audi.
Better be some fun before go left.
All right.
Well, I don't know about you guys, but I've straight up got a Ram boner.
So while I take a cold shower, we'll take a quick break.
Rambo of Nothing.
Rambo is a movie about a guy who cares.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm telling you, man, it's when she comes from Alabami.
What's Alabami?
That's not even a place, man.
It's an expression, though, Chris.
You guys.
Hey.
Hey, Audi.
How's it going, man?
I'll tell you how it's going.
I'm fresh from the kill.
He's eye-frolling again.
You can just, like, walk, man.
No time.
Heard enemy movement on the ridge, so we'll check it out.
You're in Dias of Plato and Nazi Tanks, Squadron, 33 men.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah, I killed two with Betsy.
Ha, which meant I could get behind their line Betsy.
It's what he calls the knife right right the knife Yeah, encouraged the tank took out two hostiles swung her around open fire on the platoon cleaned up the stragglers by hand, you know 44 of them in all counted.
Oh, you're done.
Yeah, great job man.
Great job Yeah, only a day's work.
Hey Audi settle a bet for us.
Are the lyrics to she'll be coming around the mountain when she comes from Alabama or is it I don't know any any songs.
Just a song of battle.
Song of Battle, got it.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I'm going to go look for some more people to kill.
You do that, Audi.
You do that.
And there's the dive roll.
I'm going to eat your beans, okay?
Hey, podcast listener.
I'm Heath Enright.
And I'm Tom Curry.
You know, we have some fun here on Citation Eight about how busy Tom can be, but more folks are pressed for time than ever before.
Pro tip, I only poop when I sleep now.
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Now, can I talk about slooping?
It's deeply important to me that you don't.
You're missing out.
I don't think I am.
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And we're back.
When we left off, the killing machine was just revving up.
What happened?
So true, too.
This gets worse.
All right.
Murphy got his silver star in October of 1944.
It took the slacker long enough.
He was with his platoon in the eastern part of France, just southwest of Strasbourg.
There was a very steep hill with lots of passageways carved out of the side of it.
There was also a network of tunnels that worked their way up the side of this hill.
The Nazis were dug in with machine guns and could move pretty quickly from point to point up the side of the hill while they were still in cover.
There was a group of machine gunners and snipers stopping the advance of the Allied troops.
A couple of colonels and a captain, along with some other troops, decided to visit the front lines that day.
So the group, rejecting the advice of Murphy, decided to go up the side of the hill to see if they could find the places where the Germans were shooting from.
Oh, for fuck.
So you say that people are getting shot when they stand right here doing exactly this?
Murphy decides to go up as well, just a little bit to the right.
He does this without their knowledge.
He's about 25 yards from them, shadowing their movements as they climb this hill.
Well, when you know it, the Nazis let him pass and then open fire on their position.
The group of officers and soldiers are pinned down in an area where they really can't move.
While they're just barely out of the line of fire, they're basically a great target for an eventual grenade.
Okay, I do have to say, the sheer volume of grenades in this story vastly exceeded my
grenade.
It seems like he has a lot.
it's just all grenades, just backpacks.
Does he look grandolier of that sort?
Murphy, from behind his boulder nearby, calls out to them, telling them to remain calm and that he is on it.
Hey, idiots, you didn't see this very large boulder in this fucking open field.
You just went into the open field.
All right, whatever.
Just relax.
I got this on my own.
It's cool.
So he jumps.
I'm doing slow-mo.
He jumps out from behind the boulder with his M1 carbine in one hand and a grenade in the other.
He's still doing jazz here.
He
surprises the machine gun crew that was firing on the other soldiers and they pivot to shoot at him.
But they catch the barrel on some brush and they miss Murphy, but just barely.
Murphy, taking advantage of the barrel getting stuck in the brush.
Nope, I planned that.
I planned that.
He throws the grenade and he opens fire.
Before the grenade lands, he kills two of the Germans with shots to the stomach.
Before it lands.
The grenade.
That's what the account said.
The graphic.
The classic snowball trick.
Maybe, Tom, maybe he threw it up really high and their eyes went up like a dog.
Look at it.
And then he's like,
yeah.
Oh, it's a pop-up.
It's a pop-up.
The grenade goes off and Murphy throws off two more and he continues firing.
He kills four Nazis that were in the foxhole, wounds three of them, and the one that got up to run away was shot down as he fled.
Okay, so apparently, like everything I made up in slow motion as a kid playing with toy dunks, this guy actually
in real life.
That's awesome.
It is so hard to picture any of this shit without him going pew, pew, as he does all of it, right?
Three days later, he's walking down a creekbed nearby.
Along the side of the creek, in a concealed position, a group of Germans open fire on him and his platoon.
The Nazis immediately kill seven of his 27 men as they run for cover.
Murphy calls to his soldiers behind him to take cover and he tries to assess where the enemy is located.
He starts moving with the six men in tow and a machine gun starts firing on them and kills or wounds four men before they can make it to different cover.
So while they're being fired at by the enemy, he and his men take out their entrenching tools and while lying on their backs, just dig out shallow depressions.
Sorry, make a dirt angel?
Is that what the sentence of make a dirt angel?
Wow, I'm getting shot at right now.
Shallow
impression sentence.
That's an impression.
If he'd said impression, that joke would have really killed, but that's well, depression and maybe depression are similar.
Two different words.
Don't kill Natalie Wood.
No.
Which stole all the cocaine.
When the men are
when the men are quasi-safe in their freshly dug foxholes slash shallow graves, Murphy decided to move forward on his own to see if he could find out where the enemy was shooting from.
So he belly crawls in the mud, hiding in every slight hole he can find to try to stay out of sight of the gunners.
He gets about 50 yards closer and is able to see the foxhole that the German snipers are in.
They're about 200 yards from him and he's able to kill two of the snipers from this position and then get on a walkie-talkie and direct mortar rounds onto the rest of the Germans where they're at from his location.
Some remaining Nazis tried to run for it, but they were killed as they fled.
And this is how he got his second Silver Star.
Motherfucker's going to have a whole constellation by the end of this match.
But at this point, you're slowing down his crawling, and he does a lot of crawling.
I feel like that's true.
Next season, we're going to learn that the A-bomb we dropped in Japan was just Audi Murder.
That's why they call me Lilmo.
And they took his gun away and gave him Wolverine claws.
Yeah.
Now, before I tell you about how he gets his Medal of Honor, I should tell you about how he got his three purple hearts.
The first one was in September of 1944.
He was on his way to battalion headquarters when he met a group of new soldiers.
He stopped to talk to them.
And as he did, a mortar shell landed literally between his feet.
Murphy is thrown through the air, knocked unconscious, but the men he was having a conversation with all died.
I guess being at the epicenter of the explosion is the best place to be when you're hit by a mortar, as the shrapnel isn't going to
cut your legs and blow your heel off your boot instead of penetrating your head and neck area, which are pretty vital.
Oh, wow.
Guys, it's basic karate.
You got to get inside.
You're all dead.
You're all dead.
I was going to say inside the guard.
Yeah, Audi Murphy somehow submitted a mortar shell.
It only taps once and it is very pronounced.
It's just Steven Segal using the back of his hand to move the mortar shell away from him.
Just pushes it away.
Second Purple Heart injury was next month.
He was moving behind a friendly barrage of artillery when a group of German snipers that were camouflaged and in the forest opened fire.
Murphy dove for cover behind a tree, but a shot from the second sniper bounced off a tree trunk and it hit him in his hip.
His radio operator was not so lucky and he got shot above his left eye, killing him.
As Murphy fell, he dove to the ground and his helmet came off and it rolled a few yards away.
The German sees the helmet in the bush and he thinks it's attached to someone's head.
So he tosses off some of the camouflage cover to get a better shot.
As the Nazi is shooting at the unoccupied helmet, Murphy raises up his gun like a pistol and he shoots
right between the eyes.
That's what the accounts say.
That's what the accounts say.
Yeah.
Honestly, based on the story so far, I'm surprised he didn't hit the bullet back at him like a pickleball, right?
With a curve on it.
I'm sorry, why did we send anyone else to this war at all?
Like, there should just be fucking this guy and a cook, and that's the LIB.
That's it.
This guy, a cook, and a guy to hold up his like WWE belt and walk into the ring with him.
Someone's got to carry his balls around too, I guess.
Jesus.
When he's mede-vaced out of there, he isn't able to get to a hospital for a few days, and he develops gangrene and he throws a grenade
kind of he has to spend several weeks at the hospital as they remove the infection and several large pieces of his butt he goes back to action and he gets wounded again on january 25th 1945.
okay you know he's showing off the missing ass chunks all the time
right
Yeah, his version of the Jaws scene is very uncomfortable.
It's really uncomfortable for everyone involved.
He puts him in a jar and it's now the Battle of Murphy's ass, you know, and he carries it out.
His group is hit with a heavy mortar barrage, and several people are killed, but Murphy survives it with superficial wounds.
I guess the mortar that hit near him didn't explode the way it should have.
Instead of producing like a, a big, a few big chunks of shrapnel, it was like a fine cloud of splinters.
So his left leg got sprayed with these, and he used his field kit to clean out what he could.
Sure.
Okay, definitely a hero, but at this point, I don't want him anywhere near my fucking book dude.
He's like a Nazi mortar magnet, just constantly, right?
It's true.
The next day, the Germans counterattack the Allies in the area and try to take back the wooded section with two companies of soldiers and six heavy tanks.
Now, the one thing that this group didn't know is that the commander of the line they're assaulting is none other than Audi Murphy, who took command of this area earlier in the day when the commanding officer was wounded in the fight.
His defending group has two M10 tank destroyers with it, which is just the name of a tank we had.
It had a 50 caliber machine gun on it, and it had an anti-tank weapon on it, but it wasn't really all that special.
Oh, I'm sorry, Cecil, is your concern that we were going to write off this story because the machine gun did all the work?
Like, it's okay.
I mean, it's not so special because the Germans, when they attacked, they immediately took out the tanks in short order.
Germans basically climbed over everything in their way with troops and tanks closing in on the Allied forces.
Murphy orders his units to retreat, but he stays there on the phone with the artillery forces and he directs their fire, which starts taking out Nazis and the troops on the line.
He sees that he has a chance to make it to one of the disabled tanks.
So he takes this chance and he runs for it.
And he punches the tank right in its tank balls.
He makes it to the now flaming M10 and he climbs on top of it.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
He mans the 50 caliber machine gun and he opens up on the German soldiers.
In between bursts of machine guns,
he rides a motorcycle and then jumps off of it and like
lands inside of a tank at the machine gun.
In between bursts of the machine gun fire, he's on the phone with the artillery people directing mortars into the Germans.
At some point, either the telephone stops working or the line is cut, which also makes the telephone stop working.
But that doesn't stop Murphy, who stays on top of the tank, firing round after round and then stopping to reload belts of ammo into the gun.
Artillery, I'm so sorry.
I'm going to have to let you go.
I'm doing that crazy screaming machine gun thing.
Yeah, exactly.
You understand me.
Thank you so much.
Nice.
Okay.
Yeah, I will talk to you guys later.
Can you eat your beat?
Bye-bye.
now the germans aren't sure where he is there's a tank that's on fire and i guess they can't see what's up there because of this line quote fortunately the germans were having a difficult time locating the source of the murderous fire being poured on them end quote I think it's over here.
I'm dead.
No, I didn't tell anybody.
I should have.
While he's unloading with this machine gun, his location is hit not once, but twice with artillery rounds.
Now, the rounds don't kill him or hurt him that much.
Count says that
at most, he was stunned for a few moments before he would open up fire again.
Come on.
Also, at some point, the wound from the day before in his leg opens up, but he keeps firing.
Okay, it's like a guitar player's fingers with this guy, but for bombs and your whole body, he has calluses.
Right, right.
It would have been weird if he's like, oh, fuck, the wound from yesterday opened up.
I have to call this guy.
Time out.
Time out.
Don't worry.
I'm just going to put a capo on my entire fucking body.
I'll be true.
I will say, though, that 50-caliber invisibility cloak came in handier than anybody probably thought.
Now, he's killing scores of Nazis at this point.
One group looks to be making their way to him, crawling in a ditch, getting close, but he notices them, opens fire, and kills them all.
After some time, the Nazi tanks fuck off, start retreating, and they, and so do the rest of the, the, the people with them.
I guess this guy's fucking crazy, man.
We got to get out of here.
Well, the tanks, they really needed ground troops nearby to protect them.
When the most of those people get killed, the troops, all the troops fell back.
So, Murphy, after seeing them leave, stops firing, climbs down from the tank.
The tank is full of fuel and ammunition, and he was just on top, standing there and firing the gun.
But he, it waited until he was off it and walking away for it to explode.
It probably exploded in slow motion for him.
You know he flicked a cigarette over his car
to like a sweet guitar lick, too, for sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Murphy.
Murphy refused medical aid, rounded up the troops, and pressed a counterattack.
Sorry, come with you?
Honestly, man, feels like you got this.
It's on you.
Can you imagine how demoralizing it had to be later when the Nazis found out they lost a whole ass battle to one guy?
Right.
Look, dude.
Murphy was moved from the front lines to regimental headquarters after this, and he received the Medal of Honor.
When he came home, he struggled with sleeping pill addiction and what they called battle fatigue.
He had headaches, vomiting, and nightmares.
He slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow.
His first wife claimed that once he held her at gunpoint while he was suffering from the disorder.
I guess he was in a lot of violent altercations in his adult life.
One time threatening a dog trainer and charged with battery and assault with intent to commit murder.
And he was eventually cleared of all those charges.
Hey, Cecil, can I speak to you over here for a second?
We were all having a lot of fun when the guy was standing on the tank firing the machine gun and you're kind of bringing it down.
I'm sorry.
I didn't want to
post-traumatic stress disorder.
Hey, I'm just going to pop into the little whisper area.
Hey,
yeah, so you got to kill a lot more Nazis if you're going to fuck with a dog trainer because I feel like that's
the thing you get in you and you endanger a dog.
I need you to kill at least an area of Berlin.
He eventually used his fame to speak out about PTSD and called on the government to do more to help soldiers struggling with this disorder and to give benefits to vets that were suffering from it.
In fact, a few months after he died, they named a VA hospital after him.
We figured he'd like a whole building full of the problems in remembering my
well, it does seem appropriate to name something after him that kills a lot of soldiers though
he also had a movie career he started acting in 1948 he worked in films until i feel like a lot of people he just showed up on set and no one would say no right
yeah okay yeah he worked until 1969 in movies and film and then on tv and film and then
he was in a version of the Red Badge of Courage, a bunch of Westerns, and he eventually was convinced to play himself in a film recreating his war exploits.
The film Helenback was, quote, the biggest hit in the history of Universal Studios at the time, end quote.
And that nice guys, we got that PTSD victim to relive his trauma for our entertainment.
Yeah, also, I think he killed at least one production assistant, and he's hogging a whole craft services table, the whole thing.
I feel like if he's in Red Badge of Courage, he's playing Henry Fleming, and he's like, no, not retreating.
And they're like,
okay, that's like a big part of the fucking book.
Yeah, no, it's fine.
You have grenades.
You have grenades.
I have no grenade.
I think you brought those from home.
He died at the age of 45 when a private plane he was a passenger on crashed.
into a mountain in Virginia and he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
All right, Cecil.
And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be?
This story might have convinced me to believe in the lucky Irish if I didn't know Tom.
It's true, Tom.
This is where all your luck went.
God damn it.
Hardy took it.
Son of a bitch.
Are you ready for the quiz?
Take your best shot.
All right.
So it's time to melt out Audi Murphy like demolition man.
Yep.
I didn't have a question.
No, it's not.
And I'm agreeing.
Yes.
Hey, yes.
A great idea.
Great idea.
Hey, Cheers.
All right, Ed.
Let's murder some Nazis.
More of a traditional question for you here, Cecil.
What was the tagline for his movie?
A,
get ready for a Hitler hit and hit of the summer.
B, the German sphere is audible.
C,
get all the gritty PTS details.
Or D, as certain we are that Americans will always remember that Nazis are the unequivocal bad guys and that fascism is bad regardless of how hard you own your purple-haired niece with it.
Here's yet another movie that emphasizes this point.
They all will for the next 90 goddamn years.
Hopefully you guys don't fuck it up.
Oh,
I think you're pushing a little hard for D there.
I think it's D.
It was D.
Audi Murphy was certainly inspiring and heroic, but where else does his legacy live on?
Hey, in every Chuck Norris joke, all of which are just toned-down autobiographical details from Audi Murphy's life.
Let me stop you there, Tom.
All I need is A.
It's A.
That's it.
Yeah.
Hey, Tom, can you join me over here for a second?
I did the one just A thing.
That's all I ever do.
It's kind of Tom's stuff.
I mean, really, you're standing on Tom's stuff.
Heath and Tom couldn't agree who got to do the one-answer joke this week, so Noah wins.
No, wait, Tom wins.
All right, uh, Noah, you should write an essay.
I should.
All right, well, for Noah, Heath, Cecil, and Tom, I'm Eli Bosnick.
Thank you for hanging out with us today.
We'll be back next week, and by then, Noah will be an expert on something else.
Between now and then, you can listen to Cecil's brand new podcast, The Show Rogan, No Sperius, that he did not ask me to be a part of, wherever you bet your podcasts that hurt people's feelings.
And
you'd like to keep this show going, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com/slash citationpod or give us a five-star review everywhere you can.
And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes.
Be sure to check out citationpod.com.
And with this medal, we award you the 21-gun salute.
Enemy fire!
Oh, there he goes.
I'm 17.
Yeah, you are.
Yep.
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