The young boy from Hunt County, Texas, was eager to serve his country. He tried enlisting in the Army, the Navy, and the Marines. They all rejected him as underage and underweight. Undeterred, he had his sister forge an affidavit with a false year of birth — and soon enough the boy was a U.S. Army infantryman, transported worlds away from sharecropping in east Texas. He went to north Africa. He landed in Sicily. He fought at Anzio. He landed in southern France and battled northward with the Allied armies until, in a hellish landscape on the German border called the Colmar Pocket, fate selected him for greatness. When his company, unsupported and exposed, was attacked by a superior German force, they retreated into a sheltering wood. He did not. Instead, he raced to a disabled American tank destroyer, manned the still-working .50-caliber machine gun, and singlehandedly fought off the Nazi assault. Wave after wave of Wehrmacht infantry crashed against his position — and still the Texas boy held. Exposed against the snow and sky, alone and determined, he held off the Nazis for a full hour. Then, wounded and out of ammunition, he at last abandoned his position and retreated to find his companions in the forest. Hurt and exhausted, he did the only thing he could think of: he rallied them, led a final counterattack, and won the field. For his brave stand in the face of death and desperation, the boy from Hunt County, Texas, received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Audie Murphy was nineteen years old. On this Veterans Day, the Texas Public Policy Foundation remembers with gratitude the men and women who fought for our country — from Redoubt Ten at Yorktown, to the walls of the Alamo, to the banks at Shiloh, to the gray mud of the Meuse-Argonne, to the ice fields of Korea, to the red clay of Vietnam, to the sands of Iraq, to the vast and lonely mountains of Afghanistan — and beyond. There are giants who walk among us. They are our neighbors, our family, our friends. They have endured high adventure and unsurpassed suffering. They have seen the lowest deeds and the greatest hearts of men. Today, we honor them.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 15:27:53 +0000
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