The film career is remembered, in cultural history, primarily through *To Hell and Back*. The songs are remembered in country music history, particularly “Shutters and Boards.” The quarter horses are not remembered outside the specific community of quarter horse racing history. The business ventures are not remembered at all.
What is remembered, and what the visitors to the Arlington grave are coming to see, is the person who climbed onto the burning tank destroyer north of Holtzwihr on January 26, 1945, and who spent the rest of his life trying to make the country understand what that experience, and all the experiences that surrounded it, had actually cost.
## The Enlistment and the Country It Came From
The America that Audie Murphy enlisted in on June 30, 1942, was at a specific moment in its history: six months after Pearl Harbor, committed to a two-ocean war against two industrial powers, and in the early stages of building the military force that would have to fight that war.
The Army Murphy joined in 1942 was an institution in rapid expansion. The peacetime Army of the late 1930s had been small by any comparison with the armies of Europe or Asia; the specific decisions that had kept American military spending low through the Depression and the first years of the European war meant that the Army was building from a constrained base. Training facilities, equipment, doctrine — all of it was being scaled up simultaneously.
Camp Wolters, where Murphy went for basic infantry training, was one of the facilities that the Army had constructed specifically for the wartime expansion. It was in Mineral Wells, Texas, in the same general part of the state where Murphy had grown up. The specific coincidence of the Texas boy going to basic training in Texas is the kind of detail that his story accumulates — the Army he joined, at the beginning, was not far from the land that had made him.