On Brush Mountain west of Roanoke, Virginia, people place rocks and leave pieces of their lives in honor of a World War II hero and actor.
The Murphy monument atop Virginia’s Brush Mountain. Inset: Audie Murphy as Tom Smith from the TV program “Whispering Smith.”
It’s a hike my wife and I do at least once a year—the 3.8 miles of Appalachian Trail from either direction—to the Audie Murphy Monument on Brush Mountain, not far west of Roanoke, Virginia.
It’s a walk that provides rewards commensurate with the distance and the climb. The bench at the overlook westward to the view of Sinking Creek Mountain is a wonderful spot for lunch. And even more impressive is the ever-accreting attention to the monument for the World War II hero who received every combat award possible from the U.S. Army before becoming, for the last 20 years of his life, an actor who appeared in some 40 features films and one TV series.
There is no real connection between Audie Murphy and our part of the world beyond his death, in 1971 at age 45, when he was a passenger in a twin-engine Aero Commander 680 being piloted into rain, fog and zero visibility, and that crashed into Brush Mountain. The pilot and four other passengers were also killed.
But it is a connection that elegantly and extravagantly displays reverant remembrance of a man nearly 50 years after his death. The cairns and enclosure made of flat stones, the dog tags and messages, the decals and notes and little flags that surround the monument are organic and ongoing salutes to a man whose accomplishments were the equal of most anyone of his revered generation.
Audie Leon Murphy, born in Texas in 1925 and ultimately buried in Arlington National Cemetery, began his military career soon after Pearl Harbor in 1941, when his older sister helped him falsify his age. The Army, Navy and Marine Corps initially all turned him away for being underweight. The Army finally took the 5’5”, 112-pound Murphy in 1942, and the rest is glorious military history, highlighted, perhaps, by his January, 1945 heroism in the Vosges Mountains of France, when, despite wounds to both legs, he mounted an abandoned tank destroyer and killed or wounded 50 enemy forces and then returned to his men to lead them in repelling the Germans. Murphy was the recipient of many awards, including the Medal of Honor, and was promoted to first lieutenant the next month.
The career that saw him receive every U.S. military award for valor available was not without its costs. Murphy, whose father deserted the family of 12 children when Murphy was a youngster, who dropped out of school in the fifth grade, who lost his mother at age 16, was prone to mood swings even as a child. And as a self-confessed post-war victim of “shell shock” (the term then in use for what is now identified as post traumatic stress disorder), he suffered from nightmares, violent episodes, addictions to sleeping pills and gambling; and slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow.
Nonetheless, under the early tutelage of actor/producer James Cagney, Murphy received the training in acting, voice and dance that would help get him his first bit film roles in 1948, and lead to a seven-year contract with Universal Studios. Most of his roles from that contract and beyond were in Westerns. In his last film, 1969’s “A Time for Dying,” he starred as Jesse James.
The end of the rich and accomplished life of Audie Murphy—he was also a songwriter and breeder of quarter horses among other undertakings—resulted in 1975 in the award of $2.5 million in damages to his widow and the couple’s two children.
The stone monument erected on Brush Mountain in 1974 is tribute to both his life and death. The tiny pieces of stone, fabric, chain, flag and more that surround it are tribute to our region’s ongoing memory of that life and death.
The story above is from our September/October 2019 issue. For more like it, subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription. Thank you for your support!