*PREVIEW* Audie Murphy

Today, we are talking about Audi Murphy, America's premier short king, the Texas Terminator, a man whose later life everyone who describes himself as a World War II buff really likes to ignore.

The most decorated soldier in American history.

But the story of how a man who kind of looks like the world's most murderous cabbage patch doll

had a very poor, desperate early life.

Audi Murphy is a guy that like most Americans, I imagine, have heard of.

Probably all, but I don't know.

I feel good saying most people have heard of him, but they've only ever heard of one or two particular parts of his life, which of course we'll talk about.

But to me, Audi Murphy is more interesting due to what happened to him after he got back from World War II.

Oh, 100%.

Which we will also get to.

Yeah, I love that he rebranded himself after the war with his full name, Audio Cable Murphy,

which is why Nate knows so much about his music career.

No, I've found him being a fascinating guy because because he was alternately extremely anti-war and extremely pro-war, depending on what phase of uppers or downers he was on.

He was the world's most, he was America's most decorated soldier.

And also he was like a hot couch guy in Los Angeles for a very long time and annoyed the shit out of his friends.

He was a fascinating person.

Also, if you ever see his Medal of Honor portrait, he looks like a child because he was like, I mean, he was in his early 20s, but he was stunted by malnutrition.

And Joe will get into this, but like, yeah, his life tracks a lot of just how shit it was in a lot of places America, in America, in the, you know, during the Great Depression and onward.

And I should point out, I'm using his autobiography to Helenbeck as a source, but Audi Murphy did not write it, despite the fact he is credited, but we'll also get to that.

So Audi Leon Murphy was born June 20th, 1925 to a family of sharecroppers in Kingston, Texas.

Kingston is a kind of place that is nothing.

It's still nothing.

It has a population of about 140.

It's literally only known for being the birthplace of Audi Murphy.

If only he was born in the other Kingston, we could have got a very different vibes, Audi Murphy.

Yes.

Yardie Murphy.

Wagwan Yardy Murphy.

He's just coming over the hill in Germany screaming, Bob McClan.

I'm taking over this blood clot tank destroyer.

If you've ever driven through Texas, you've passed through a hundred places like Kingston.

It's a tiny little town that when you drove through it, you didn't didn't even notice as you ripped by it 70 miles an hour.

Like blinking at the same time.

There's a lot of places in Hamilton County, Indiana, where I'm from that are just like that, but in Texas, it's just bleaker somehow.

It's hotter and drier and more fucked up.

Also, it's Texas at 1925.

Yeah.

He was the seventh of 11 children.

That's an Irish family right there.

The combination of big spud-eating heads and being stuck in Texas in the 1920s.

My grandparents are born around the same time and were from a town called Indianola, Mississippi, and they were both the youngest of like 12.

So like this is also this is a kind of like the imagine like what if you combined the sort of setting of oh brother where art thou with children of men's aesthetics and more or less social outlook and that's that's it.

Yeah, like shared cropper families who use their children as rented labor with the except with like the understanding that two of these motherfuckers are probably going to die before they're five.

Well, that's what I was going to ask is like, how many of like Audi Murphy's siblings survived into adulthood?

Most of them.

Okay, so that's why he was so short.

Is it because he didn't get to do the large family thing of the child dies and then the family gets to eat it?

Yeah, exactly.

He doesn't eat the younger siblings.

Maybe

a slightly less macabre version of this is it.

If all of your siblings survive, then there's way more of them to steal off your plate and take your food and tell you that mom doesn't love you.

And so, like, at the end of the day, you know, you then get a very angry five-foot-one man.

Yeah, you get a really elaborate rota for like whose go it is on the PS5.

You only get to use it once every two weeks.

Yeah, I love like the RCA stand-up radio vacuum tube PS5.

Life at this point was pretty awful.

Everyone rented themselves out to farm owners in the local onion fields with his father as soon as they were old enough.

And that was pretty much by the time you were walking and able to hold things.

Like they were all working the fields before they were 10 years old.

Do you know anything about growing onions?

I mean, I know it sucks.

I know a little bit about it because I did it as a hobby gardener.

With onions, it's kind of a two-year cycle, which means you have to basically both plant things, then dig up muddy bullshit, get them out, and then get them for the next thing, then plant them again.

So you're constantly either burying shit in mud or unburying shit in mud.

And it's just nonstop.

Bending over, burying shit, getting mud, demodifying, so on and so forth.

And then you got to get them all out and demodify them and dry them and cure them.

And then, you know, keep at it.

It sucks.

Onions.

And the whole Murphy family is slowly becoming onion mud monsters.

But like they're doing a proto form form of an RDL, so maybe that's the origin of the term onion booty.

That's right.

This is this is effectively also saying, given Audi Murphy's later accomplishments, he's the one human we can say did actually become the weird secret class from Final Fantasy Tactics known as Onion Knight.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

Audi Murphy is canonically an Onion Knight.

Someone photoshopped that.

At only a few years old, Audi was in the fields with his father, who was described by all accounts as an incredibly violent alcoholic.

And his mother, Josie, who I only ever saw described as, quote, sad-eyed.

But I bet she was.

I also read, I read Audi Murphy's autobiography and I read Don Graham's No Name on the Bullet.

And yeah, there's not a lot of detail about his family other than it's sort of like all the telltale signs of it sucks.

It's like whenever I hear Cynthia tells me about one of her friends in Britain or like parenting group chats talking about some really depraved British shit, like, you know, oh, it's having a nice little time with parents at 11 a.m.

on my fourth gin and tonic or whatever, I just start singing God Save the Queen.

And whenever I hear this shit, God Save the King, whenever I hear this shit, all I can think of is, oh, beautiful, four spacious guys, four amber waves.

Because, God damn, dude, this is like real.

What's real America?

Real America is like a violet alcoholic, sad-eyed mom, 11 children working in onion fields, just basically getting paid in slightly smaller onions.

By all accounts, Josie was as a loving mother as anyone was back in the day.

But it is telling.

Like Nate, I read those two books as well and one other one and read a few papers on him.

Of all the things that Audio Murphy is quite an open book about, he never really talks about his family life, which tells me it was real fucking bad.

His family was desperately poor.

They lived at a shack with no floor.

They had like a literal dirt floor.

They often ate only what the farmers allowed them to bring back with them as like that were surplus or partially rotten or fucked up looking.

So they were mostly subsisting on a constant diet of like onion soup.

And by soup, in this case, I mean just onions boiled in water.

Yeah, like, you know, know, if they're getting paid in like slightly smaller onions, it makes going to the strip club really hard.

Because you just care like hailing a stripper with onions.

Also, I have to say this because I was a moron in college and I was like, I'm going to make onion soup.

Now, when you make actual onion soup, you caramelize the onions beforehand.

I was like, I'll just boil some damn onions.

It tastes okay.

Do you know what happens when you do that?

You get the worst gas ever.

So I'm just saying, that shack be smelling bad.

You know it smells crazy.

And just like, they're just Shrek maxing.

They're living in a swamp eating onions.

Audi Murphy was the first militarized ogre.

It's often pointed out that in Audi's life,

during this point, he only had two changes of clothing, one for work and one for school.

Only the school set was allowed to be washed and tailored.

And by Taylor, to be sewn back together when he ripped at doing kids stuff.

His shitty onion clothes stayed rank as hell.

His tattered cotton school pants got shrunk in the wash one time, so he was forced to to wear them anyway.

So he was pretty much wearing the Conor McGregor suit pants, and his fellow school kids nicknamed him short breeches because of it.

No, Nate, Audi Murphy's dad is running around.

Is it Tony Abbott, the Australian PM who ate an onion live on TV?

Yeah, like it was an apple.

Yes.

Yes, that was Tony Abbott.

Yes.

Vinted onion like it was an apple.

Yeah.

I mean, I like onions, but not that much.

But yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, I'd say too that, like, if I remember Christie, Audi Murphy probably, he left school, what, like, eighth grade, I think.

Like, not even.

not even.

We're about to get there, yeah.

Yeah.

Eventually, his dad left for work away from home to make more money and simply never showed back up.

At this point, Audi completely dropped out of school so he could work more at nine years old.

Because without his father's extra income of a whopping $1 per day, the family had to move out of their dirt-floored home and into a discarded boxcar off the side of the road in Kingston.

See, once again, if Audi Murphy was born in the other Kingston, we would have gotten the song from Toots in the Mate House.

Aye, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye.

Talking about the big onion man.

Jesus Christ.

It was around this time that Audi taught himself how to hunt, not as a hobby, mind you, but rather because his family was literally starving.

Yeah.

And his father had simply left the child a rifle with ammunition before he abandoned his family because, to be honest, America has hardly changed.

Using that hunting rifle, he stalked through his horrible depression-era Texas small town, shooting rabbits and rats for his family to eat.

Yeah, I was going to say, I'd forgotten, Joe.

It was 1920 or 1921 he was born.

1925.

1925.

Right.

So by the time he was nine years old, it was, it was, we were full-on in shit mode.

Yeah.

And he didn't exactly start from a great place.

Like, whereas a lot of America lost everything, the Murphy family is like, oh, so y'all motherfuckers want to share the dirt floor now.

Yes.

Like, exactly.

You thought you were so much better than us.

And now you two are sending out a nine-year-old to make that thing bark at rats, rabbits.

Everybody ganks until their pockets empty, then they come looking at my dirt floor and my onions.

Everybody want to judge us for Shrek Maxing.