By the 1960s, the Korean War veterans had been largely dismissed — the Korean War was itself called the “forgotten war,” and its veterans had received substantially less attention than Second World War veterans. The Vietnam War was escalating, beginning to produce a new generation of veterans who would eventually force the American public and the psychiatric profession to reckon with combat trauma in ways that produced the 1980 formal recognition of PTSD.
Murphy was pushing against this current in the mid-1960s, using the credibility of his record to say what the culture did not want to hear: that the experience of combat had lasting costs, that those costs were real and not signs of weakness, and that the country had an obligation to its veterans that extended beyond the discharge physical.
He framed it, at least in some accounts, in pragmatic rather than purely emotional terms: the country had spent money training these men to be soldiers; it ought to spend money helping them become civilians. The economic argument made the case in terms that the political culture of the period could process more easily than a purely humanitarian argument.
Whether his advocacy changed policy directly in his lifetime is uncertain. The institutions moved slowly, as they do. But he was part of a broader conversation that eventually produced the formal recognition of PTSD and the development of treatment programs specifically designed for combat trauma. He did not live to see the DSM-III include PTSD as a formal diagnosis in 1980. He died in 1971, nine years before that recognition arrived.