The connection between Murphy’s story and the NCO corps is specific: he was the kind of soldier who leads from the front, who does not send men to places he will not go himself, who stays when others withdraw. These are the specific qualities the NCO corps values and that the Sergeant Audie Murphy Club is designed to recognize.
## The Arlington Grave
Audie Murphy is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Section 46, Site 366-11. His grave is among the most visited at Arlington — by one common account, the second most visited after the Kennedy grave.
The headstone shows his name, birth year as 1924 (the enlistment papers year), death year of 1971, rank, and decorations. The Medal of Honor is noted. He is buried, as the Army buries its distinguished dead, in ground that is shared with hundreds of thousands of other American veterans — generals and privates, famous and unknown, decorated and undecorated.
The visit his grave draws reflects what his story means to the people who come. For some it is specifically the wartime record — the Medal of Honor, the specific actions. For some it is the post-war advocacy, the veteran who used his credibility to push for the recognition of combat’s psychological cost. For some it is the arc from sharecropper’s son in Hunt County to the cover of *Life* to the grave at Arlington — a specifically American story about what war does to its participants and what the country does, and doesn’t do, with what it asks of them.