The isolation that combat veterans often feel exists between themselves and civilians hit Audie Murphy — World War II’s most decorated hero — full force on V-E Day, when World War II ended in Europe, and a Baylor University historian suggests Murphy displayed post-traumatic stress disorder long before it was understood.
On V-E Day (70 years ago this Friday, May 8), Murphy, from a hotel room in Cannes, heard people in the streets below celebrating, said David A. Smith, who has written a new biography about the hero. Murphy took a hot bath, put on his tie and went out to watch the jubilation. But “in the streets, crowded with merrymakers, I feel only a vague irritation,” he wrote later.
“I want company, and I want to be alone. I want to talk, and I want to be silent. I want to sit, and I want to walk. There is V-E Day without, but no peace within.”
Smith, Ph.D., senior lecturer of history in Baylor University’s College of Arts & Sciences, says that response “reveals that he (Murphy) was already suffering from PTSD, which we understand much more about now.”
Murphy was “an embodiment of Norman Rockwell America,” who “became the poster child for timeless American virtues of innocence, humility, honesty and steely courage,” Smith writes.
But beneath that exterior, he was devastated, suffering from what was known during World War II as “battle fatigue” and in the war before that as “shell shock,” Smith says.
“It was a condition which at the time was little understood, and for the treatment of which there was almost no help available. It plagued him the rest of his life.”
*Smith’s book is “The Price of Valor: The Life of Audie Murphy, America’s Most Decorated Hero of World War II.”
Smith's bio is available at http://www.davidasmith.net/about.html
RSS