of scouts in front of their company. Suddenly they ‘‘flush[ed] a couple of
Italian officers. They should have surrendered’’ but rashly ‘‘mount[ed] two
magnificent white horses and gallop[ed] madly away.’’ Murphy described
his own ‘‘instinctive’’ response: ‘‘Dropping to one knee, I fire[d] twice. The
men tumble[d] from the horses’’ dead. A green American lieutenant came
up and reproached the young soldier: ‘‘You shouldn’t have fired.’’ Murphy’s
answer was a precociously mature soldier’s: ‘‘That’s our job, isn’t it?’’ Oddly,
the boyish figure who dropped two galloping targets had scored merely
‘‘marksman,’’ the least of three qualifying ranks, on shooting in basic train-
ing. The explanation his old friends and family members offered to Mur-
phy’s biographer was that stationary targets were boring to him and that
even when Murphy was small, he preferred moving ones. One acquaintance
declared that young Leon was deadly even when firing from a moving auto-
mobile.^1
By the time he was nineteen and fighting in Italy, Murphy was a ser-
geant with the first of his Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. Just twenty, he
was fighting Germans in southern France and won a Distinguished Service
Cross and the first of his Silver Stars. His fifth-grade education notwith-
standing, he received also a battlefield commission as second lieutenant.
Then, on a frigid January afternoon in , at the Colmar Pocket near Stras-
bourg, Murphy sent his company into retreat in the face of an overwhelm-
ing German attack. Alone, he climbed atop a burning tank-destroyer with a
functional . machine gun. Firing the gun at wave after wave of enemies,
he simultaneously called in American artillery on his own position. The
few German survivors finally withdrew, and moments after Murphy walked
away, the tank-destroyer exploded. In his Medal of Honor citation, the offi-
cial estimate of enemy Murphy killed, in the space of an hour at most, was
. And in two and a half years of combat, Murphy likely killed, by him-
self, . By the time he returned to the United States during the summer
of , just before his twenty-first birthday, the still slight, wiry, and baby-
faced Murphy had become the most decorated American soldier ever.
Murphy’s World War I counterpart was Alvin York, the other celebrated
poor boy from the rural South and another skilled subsistence hunter. York
(–) was a child of the Cumberlands, from Fentress County, Tennes-
see, hard by the Kentucky border and present-day Daniel Boone National
Forest. His large family owned but fifty acres and struggled, especially after
York’s father died in . York, like Murphy, was the oldest son at home
and assumed greater burdens on the farm, a duty not very agreeable to him.
But his chief responsibility was feeding the household fresh meat from the