Generations and Other True Stories Read Online Free Page A

soldier of World War II. He was from here.”
    â€œOh. Well, I wasn’t born then.”
    She hasn’t read the historical marker that stands forlornly beside U.S. 69 on the southern edge of town: “Most decorated soldier in World War II. Born 4.5 miles south, June 20, 1924, sixth of nine children of tenant farmers Emmett and Josie Killian Murphy. Living on various farms, Audie Murphy went to school through the eighth grade in Celeste—considered the family’s hometown.”
    The marker’s flat prose goes on to sketch Audie’s childhood of bleak poverty, his war record of extraordinary courage and bravery, his career as a movie actor. He was one of the most popular Western stars of the 1950s, but his most famous role was as himself in To Hell and Back , his memoir of his war experiences.
    The marker’s last lines tell of his death in the crash of a private plane in 1971. He was forty-six years old, survived by a widow and two sons.
    To those born after V-E Day, it’s just history, as remote from their own lives as the War of the Roses. But a few in the town and the surrounding countryside still remember the baby-faced buck private who marched away to fight the Nazis and the somehow different first lieutenant who returned three years later as the most honored soldier in American history.
    Audie was credited with killing or capturing more than 240 German soldiers. He had received a battlefield commission and thirty-three military citations and awards, including the Medal of Honor and every other medal for valor that the United States can bestow, plus three awarded by France and one by Belgium. He was wounded three times. When he was discharged, his face was on the cover of Life . And when he came home, he wasn’t yet twenty-one years old.
    Audie’s life was never easy, his old friends say. Even after the war, even while basking in the nation’s adoration and winning wealth and fame in Hollywood, he always seemed under an invisible burden that he couldn’t lay down.
    â€œHe come back here after the war in a brand new Buick convertible and decided we needed to go rabbit hunting in that car that very night,” says Monroe Hackney, Audie’s closest boyhood buddy. “We went flying over them back roads. We had a ball. But Audie never was really happy after the war. He never could get settled down. The war had a whole lot of effect on him.”
    â€œHe was a very private person,” says Mr. Hackney’s wife, Martha. “He was shy. He didn’t like the praise he got when he come home. He said the real heroes of the war was those that was killed. He sat down and visited with me for two hours one morning after Monroe had gone to work. He told me things. He wasn’t happy with Hollywood. He said, ‘Martha, I think I should buy a section of land in West Texas, and you and Monroe can live on it. It would be a place for me to hide out. I am so tired of crowds.’ ”
    He never bought the land in West Texas. He never lived again in Celeste after the war, nor in the community of Kingston, where another historical marker stands near the site of his birth, nor in Farmersville, which erected a stone monument to him in its square, nor in Greenville, whose public library has an Audie Murphy Room full of photographs and paintings of him, nor in Addison, where he owned a ranch for six months, then sold it. (His house is now Dovie’s restaurant.)
    â€œEvery town in this area from Bonham to Greenville claims to be where Audie Murphy lived,” says Danny Lipsey, proprietor of Lipsey’s Grocery in Kingston.
    But Audie remained in Hollywood, a place whose culture he hated, according to his biographers. There he married a starlet and divorced her and married again. He gambled heavily and suffered recurring nightmares about the war, and would wake up screaming, gun in hand, and shoot at mirrors, lamps, and light switches.
    But he returned often to