The Army’s training in 1942 was realistic about the fact that men were being prepared to fight, but it was also necessarily abbreviated: the demand for soldiers was greater than the available training time could fully address. Infantry basic training was thorough by the standards of the period, covering weapons handling, field craft, tactics, and physical conditioning. But the specific experience of actual combat — the noise, the speed, the specific way that fear and training interact in a firefight — cannot be simulated, and the men who went through training in 1942 discovered this in North Africa, in Sicily, in Italy.
Murphy’s specific advantage going into this training was his background. He had hunted since childhood and was an unusually good shot. He had grown up in conditions of genuine scarcity that had developed the qualities of patience, persistence, and physical toughness that hunting in difficult circumstances requires. He had not had the advantages of education or economic security, but he had skills that the Army could use.
The progression from basic at Camp Wolters to Fort Meade, Maryland, to Casablanca, Morocco, took approximately eight months. By the time Murphy arrived in Africa, he had been in the Army for six months and had not yet fired a shot in anger. He had also developed the specific confidence that comes from being genuinely good at the basic skills of infantry work — weapons handling, fieldcraft, marksmanship — in ways that his training evaluations apparently reflected. He was promoted to corporal five days after the Sicily landings, a promotion that suggests his performance in training had already marked him as a soldier who would be given more responsibility.