He made the revision anyway. He said, in various contexts in the late 1950s and 1960s, that combat had damaged him and that the government had an obligation to help veterans who had been similarly damaged. He said it using the specific language available to him, which was not the clinical language that would eventually describe what he was talking about — the clinical language did not yet exist — but the common language of pain and sleep and fear and memory.
The specific contribution was not primarily the information itself. Everyone who had been in combat knew what Murphy was describing. The contribution was making the acknowledgment publicly possible. By putting his name on the acknowledgment — by saying, as the most decorated soldier, that this was his experience — he gave permission for the acknowledgment to circulate more widely.
## The Colmar Pocket: Final Reduction
After Holtzwihr was retaken on January 27 and the areas east of the Ill River were cleared by January 28, the reduction of the Colmar Pocket proceeded through the first week of February 1945.
The French First Army, pushing north from the Belfort Gap and from positions along the Rhine to the south of Colmar, had been making steady progress against the German XIX Corps holding the southern and eastern faces of the pocket. The American XV Corps, to which the 3rd Infantry Division was attached, was pushing south from positions north of Colmar. The two forces were working to close a pocket that had been substantially reduced from its October 1944 dimensions but that still held Colmar itself and the crucial Rhine crossing points.