He talked about it anyway. He used the specific credibility that the Medal of Honor gave him — the credibility of a person whose courage was beyond institutional question — to make it possible for other veterans to acknowledge what they were experiencing. If the most decorated soldier in the Army’s characterization said that combat had cost him something that was still being paid, it was harder to dismiss the same acknowledgment from men whose service had been less celebrated.
The specific policy outcome he sought — government study and benefit extension for the psychological consequences of combat — did not arrive in his lifetime in the form he had advocated for. The formal recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder as a diagnostic category came nine years after his death. The specific protections and treatments he had argued for came even later, through decades of subsequent advocacy by veterans and mental health professionals building on the foundation that Murphy and others had helped establish.
## The Sergeant Audie Murphy Club
The United States Army’s Sergeant Audie Murphy Club, established to honor outstanding non-commissioned officers in a program that invokes Murphy’s name, is a specific institutional form of the legacy he left.
The NCO corps — the sergeants and staff sergeants who are the Army’s backbone at the squad and platoon level — is the institutional home of the kind of leadership Murphy exemplified at Holtzwihr. He was a staff sergeant who had been field-commissioned to second lieutenant when Company B’s officers were killed; he was doing NCO work and officer work simultaneously. The Award named for him is given to NCOs who demonstrate exceptional leadership, professional development, and contribution to the Army mission.