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Notes
1 This understanding of Murphy and his career can be traced back to Vietnam veteran turned anti-war activist Ron Kovic’s memoir Born on the Fourth of July, in which he cites Murphy and Wayne back-to-back as childhood inspirations for eventually joining the Marine Corps. See Kovic (Citation1977, 55).
2 It also fails to take into account major differences between these two stars and their constructed personas—not the least of which is that Wayne, despite his roles in many war films, never fought in one nor served in the military, while Murphy, despite his war record and association with the genre, only starred in tiny handful of war films.
3 Binneveld (Citation1997, 85). The most prevalent view among military doctors physicalized the problem of shell shock, assuming “that the senses and the brain could be injured by the explosion of artillery shells. These injuries might be so miniscule that they could not be observed” (86). See also Talbott (Citation1997).
4 Hastings (Citation1945, 31). Emphasis added.
5 For more on cooperation between the military and pop-psychiatry journalism, see Swanberg (Citation2020).
6 To put this in contemporary psychological terms, the concept of combat fatigue conflates the symptoms of what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder with so-called “combat stress reaction.” Whereas the former diagnosis concerns the long-term effects of trauma and is not necessarily associated with an acute mental breakdown, the latter is a more direct successor to the diagnosis of combat fatigue.
7 MacNair (Citation2002, 9). MacNair also notes that even those few studies which have investigated the relation between the act of killing and PTSD tend to focus on atrocities rather than situations of “justified” intent to harm others (21–22).
8 Barnard (Citation1945b), Barnard (Citation1945c), Sager (Citation1945), and Associated Press (Citation1945a). In No Name on the Bullet, biographer Don Graham even claims that the newspapers loved the line so much, “they probably made it up” (109).
9 Gerber (Citation1994, 549). Emphasis added.
10 See U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Citation2014, 82–83). Writing from 1989, however, Graham vaguely attributes Murphy’s struggles to “post-combat stress syndrome” (123).
11 Graham (Citation1989, 190). Graham extensively recounts Murphy’s obsession with guns, which certainly seemed to surpass the learned interest in hunting and shooting one might expect from someone who grew up in rural Texas.
12 As mentioned above, for a brief period following the war, demobilization began to slightly shift the conversation away from the combat fatigue narrative of trauma and, in ways both anxious and sympathetic, toward recognizing the trauma in every combat veteran. Certain Hollywood films such as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and The Pride of the Marines (1945), although they often physicalized mental trauma by also attributing a corporeal disability to their combat veteran protagonists, explored the possibility of trauma outside those diagnosed as N.P. cases and instead in otherwise ‘normal’ soldiers, sailors, and airmen. As much as these portrayals might have nominally challenged masculinist identity they also ultimately reified the curability of trauma in consonance with the combat fatigue narrative in terms of traditional gender roles. “In these tales of redemption,” Pols writes, “veterans reestablished their place in society by embodying true masculine values” (262). For more on this brief cycle of films, see Silverman (Citation1992).
13 Pols (Citation1999, 262). See also Blaskiewicz (Citation2019, 13) and Gerber (Citation1994, 551).
14 Child and Van de Water (1945), 192; quoted in Blaskiewicz (Citation2019, 10–11). Note that Van de Water, as mentioned earlier, had written in Science News-Letter that “the cure for such cases is relatively simple. The principal needs are for rest, sleep and to be away from the strains of combat” (263).
15 Child and Van de Water (1945, 193); quoted in Blaskiewicz (Citation2019, 11).
16 Holliday (Citation1949, 64). Another Hollywood star and an Army Air Corps veteran, James Stewart, was also interpreted as modest when declining to discuss his war experiences. For more on how Stewart’s stardom negotiated his war trauma, see Glenn (2017).
17 Graham (Citation1989, 250). Roughly $107,277,611.94 in 2022.
18 Murphy was one of the first individuals to play themself in a Hollywood biopic, and potentially the first professional actor to do so. Before him, Jackie Robinson had starred as himself in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950).
19 For this reason, publications which interviewed Murphy about the film, such as fan magazines, confronted their greatest challenge yet in interpreting his trauma, as the nature of making To Hell and Back made it too apparent to ignore or displace in the usual manner. They thus borrowed from the combat fatigue paradigm the notion that the key to treating trauma was, as Pols puts it, “re-experiencing these actual conditions [of the traumatic event] in a therapeutic setting” (272). Thus re-enacting his trauma becomes the basis of one of the first of many ‘Audie Murphy finally finds himself’ stories in Maxine Arnold, “The Personal War of Audie Murphy,” Photoplay, October Citation1955. A similar article by Jane Wilkie (Citation1955) states, “Making the movie To Hell and Back was rough on him. Many of the scenes brought back his nightmares. But it also seemed to serve as a sort of therapy, for by now he can bring himself to talk about it” (86). In cases like these, a trauma previously ignored has now suddenly emerged, already cured, thus calling into question whether the broad “wounds of war,” so interpreted, should be properly considered trauma at all, and not simply generic grief.
20 Murphy (Citation2002), First published 1949, 1.
21 Relatedly, in her book on the WWII Combat Film genre, Jeanine Basinger claims that Murphy’s presence instantiates the features of the WWII genre with reality and truth by virtue of his participation. See Basinger (Citation2003, 156–159).
22 Named Lattie Tipton in real life.
23 In Arnold, “The Personal War of Audie Murphy,” Murphy describes putting off doing the scene, which was the hardest he had to do, adding “I had to think throughout the picture, ‘This isn’t me. I’m somebody else,’ so I wouldn’t worry about underplaying it.” (108).
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Garrett Strpko
Garrett Strpko is a graduate student in film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His primary research interests are in film/media theory and philosophy,especially approaches based in phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics,video game studies, and postwar American cinema.