The family he grew up in did not have resources to spare. His father, Emmett Murphy, eventually deserted the family. His mother, Josie Bell, died in 1941, the same year the country was pulled into the war, when Murphy was a teenager. After her death, the state authorities placed three of his youngest siblings in an orphanage — a consequence of the family’s inability, without its mother, to maintain the household.
Murphy left school in fifth grade. He picked cotton and hunted small game to help feed his siblings. The skills he developed — the marksmanship that came from hunting rabbits and squirrels in the Texas countryside, the discipline that came from understanding that if he missed, the family ate less — were skills the Army would eventually value at a scale nobody on a Texas sharecropper farm in the late 1930s could have anticipated.
When his mother died in 1941, Murphy was fifteen or sixteen depending on which birth-year record one uses. He had been supporting the family as much as he was able, in conditions that left no room for the uncertainties of youth. The death that stayed with him, as he said later in his life, was hers.
## The Rejections and the Enlistment
The image of Audie Murphy as one of the most decorated soldiers in American military history has sometimes obscured how persistently the military initially tried to keep him out.
After Pearl Harbor, Murphy’s ambition to serve was immediate and genuine. He went to the Marine Corps recruiting office. Too small, they said — underweight, underage. He went to the Navy. The same answer. He went to the Army. The same. He was not, by the physical and age standards the services were applying in early 1942, a promising candidate. He weighed somewhere around 110 pounds, stood about 5’5″, and was not yet 18 by his actual birthday.