Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* Audie Murphy

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

This is a preview. For the entire episode support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/139091417?pr=true&cr=true

Today, we are talking about Audi Murphy, America's premier short king, the Texas Terminator, a man whose later life, everyone who describes himself as a World War II buff really likes to ignore, the most decorated soldier in American history. But the story of how a man who kind of looks like the world's most murderous cabbage patch doll had a very poor, desperate early life. Audi Murphy is a guy that like most Americans, I imagine, have heard of, probably all. but I don't know. I feel good saying most people have heard of him,

but they've only ever heard of one or two particular parts of his life, which of course we'll talk about. But to me, Audie Murphy is more interesting due to what happened to him after he got back for World War II. Oh, 100%. Which we will also get to. Yeah, I love that he rebranded himself after the war with his full name,

Audio Cable Murphy. Which is why Nate knows so much about his music career. No, I just found him being as a fascinating guy because like he was alternately like extremely anti-war and extremely pro war depending on what like phase of uppers or downers he was on yes he was the world's most he was the America's most decorated soldier and also like he was like a hot couch guy in Los Angeles for a very long time annoyed the shit out of his friends he was a fascinating person also if you ever see his Medal of Honor portrait he

looks like a child because he was like I mean he was in his early 20s but like he was stunted by malnutrition and Joe will get into this but like yeah his life tracks a lot of like just how shit it was in a lot of places in America and the, you know, during the Great Depression and onward. And I should point out I'm using his autobiography to hell and back as a source, but Audie Murphy did not write it, despite the fact he is credited, but we'll also get to that. So, Audie Leon Murphy was born June 20th, 1925 to a family of sharecroppers in Kingston, Texas. Kingston is a kind of place that is nothing. It's still nothing. Has a population of at 140. It's literally only known for being.

the birthplace of Adi Murphy If only he was born in the other Kingston we could have got a very different vibes Audi Murphy Yes

Yardy Murphy Waguan Yardy Murphy He's just He's just coming over the hill in Germany screaming Bomber clown I'm taking over

this blood clot tank destroy If you've ever driven through Texas you've passed through a hundred places like Kingston it's a tiny

little town that when you drove through it you didn't even notice as you ripped by it 70 miles an hour like blink and it's gone. There's a lot of places in Hamilton County, Indiana where I'm from

that are just like that but in Texas it's just bleaker somehow it's hotter and drier and more fucked up. Also it's Texas at 1925. Yeah. He was the seventh of 11 children.

That's an Irish family right there. The combination of big sputty and heads and being stuck in Texas in the 1920s. My grandparents parents were from or born around the same time and we're from a town called Indianola

Mississippi and they were both the youngest of like 12. So like this is also, this is a kind of like the, imagine like what if you combined the sort of setting of O'Brother where art that with children of men's aesthetics and more or social outlook and that's it. Yeah,

like share cropper families who use their children as rented labor with the except, with like the understanding like two of these motherfuckers are probably going to die before they're five. Well, that's what I was going to ask is like how many of like Audie Murphy's siblings survived into adulthood? Most of them. Okay.

So that's why he was so short is because he didn't get to do the, you know, large family thing of the child dies and then the family gets to eat it. Yeah, exactly. He doesn't eat the younger siblings. Maybe a slightly less macab version of this is that if all your siblings survived, then there's way more of them to steal off your plate and take your food. Yes. And tell you that mom doesn't love you.

And so like at the end of the day, you know, you then get a very angry five foot one man. Yeah, you get a really elaborate row. for like who's go it is on the PS5. You only get to use it once every two weeks. Yeah, I love like the RCA standup radio vacuum two PS5. Life at this point was pretty awful. Everyone rented themselves out to farm owners in the local onion fields with his father as soon as they were old enough. And that was pretty much by the time you were walking and able to hold things.

Like they were all working the fields before they were 10 years old. You know anything about growing onions? I mean, I know what sucks. I know a little bit about it because I did it as a hobby gardener. With onions, it's kind of a two-year cycle in which means you have to basically both plant things, then dig up muddy bullshit, get them out, and then get them for the next thing, then plant them again. So you're constantly either burying shit in mud or unburying shit in mud,

and it's just nonstop, bending over, burying shit, getting mud, demodifying, so on and so forth. And then you got to get them all out and demudify them and dry them and cure them. And then, you know, keep at it. It sucks. And the whole Murphy family is. slowly becoming onion mud monsters. But like they're doing a proto form of an

ordeal, so maybe that's the origin of the term onion booty. That's right. This is effectively also saying, given Ardy Murphy's later accomplishments, he's the one human we can say did actually become the weird secret class from Final Fantasy tactics known as Onion Night. That's true. That's true. Audie Murphy

is canonically an Onion Knight. Someone Photoshop that. At only a few years old, Audi was in the field with his father, who was described by all accounts as an incredibly violent alcoholic and his mother Josie who I only ever saw described as quote sad-eyed

which I bet she was I also read I read Anni Murphy's autobiography and I read Don Graham's no name on the bullet and yeah there's not a lot of detail about his family other than it's sort of like all the tell tell signs of it sucks it's like whenever I hear Cynthia tells me about one of her friends in Britain are like parenting

group chats talking about some really depraved British shit like you know oh it's having a nice little time with parents at 11 a.m. on my fourth gin and tonic or whatever, I just start singing, God save the queen. And whenever I hear this shit, God save the king. Whenever I hear this shit, all I can think of is, oh, beautiful for spacious guys for Amber Ways. Because God damn, dude, this is like real, we want some real America. Real America is like violet alcoholics, sad-eyed mom, 11 children working in onion fields just basically getting paid in slightly smaller onions. By all accounts, Josie was as a loving mother as anyone

was back in the day. But it is telling like Nate, I read those two books as well and one other one and read a few papers on him. Of all the things that Adi Murphy is quite an open book about, he never really talks about his family life which tells me it was real fucking bad. His family

was desperately poor. They lived at a shack with no floor. They had like a literal dirt floor. They often ate only what the farmers allowed them to bring back with them as like that were surplus or partially rotten or fucked up looking. So they're mostly subsisting at a constant diet of like onion soup. And by soup in

this case, I mean the onions boiled in water. Yeah, like, you know, if they're getting paid and like slightly smaller onions, it makes going to the strip club really hard. Because you can't like a hell like a stripper with onions. Also, I have to say this because I was a moron in college and I was like, I'm going to make onion soup. Now, when you make actual onion soup, you caramelize the onions beforehand. I was like, I'll just boil some damn onions. It tastes okay. Do you know what happens when you do that? Get the worst gas ever. So I'm just saying that Shackby's smelling bad. You know it's

smell crazy. They're just Shrek maxing. They're living in a swamp eating onions. Odie Burfee was the first militarized ogre. It's often pointed out that in Adi's life that he

at during this point he only had two changes of clothing, one for work and one for school. Only the school set was allowed to like be washed and tailored and by Taylor to be like sewn back. back together when he ripped at doing kid stuff. His shitty onion clothes

stayed rank as hell. His tattered cotton school pants got shrunk in the wash one time, so he was forced to wear them anyway. So he was pretty much wearing the Connor McGregor suit pants and his fellow school kids nicknamed him short breaches because of it. No, nay.

Aldi Murphy's dies running around is a Tony Abbott, the Australian PM, who had an onion life on TV. Yeah, like it was an apple. Yes. Yes. That was Tony Abbott. Yeah. Been to an onion like it was an apple. Yeah. I mean, I like onions, but not that much. But yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I'd say too that like, if I were crazy, probably he left school, what, like eighth grade, I think? Like, not even. Not even. But we're about to get there. Yeah. Yeah. Eventually, his dad left for work away from home to make more money and simply never showed back up. At this point, Audie completely dropped out of

school so he could work more at nine years old. And because without his father's extra income of a whopping $1 per day, the family had to move out of their dirt floored home and into a discarded box car off the side of the road in Kingston. See, once again, if Audie Murphy was born in the other Kingston, we would have gotten the song from Toots and the Meadows, ay, aye, aye, aye, aye, I talking about the big onion man.

Jesus Christ. It was around this time that Adi taught himself had a hunt, not as a hobby, mind you, but rather because his family was literally starving. Yeah. And his father had simply, left the child a rifle with ammunition before he abandoned his family because to be

honest America has hardly changed using that hunting rifle he stalked through his horrible depression era Texas small town shooting rabbits and rats for his family to eat yeah I was gonna say I'd forgotten Joe it was 1920 or 1921 he was born 1925 1925 right so by the time he was 9 years old it was it was we were full on in shit mode yeah

and he didn't exactly start from a great place. Like, whereas a lot of America lost everything, the Murphy family's like, oh, so y'all motherfuckers want to share the dirt floor now. Yeah, it's like exactly. You thought you were so much better than us,

and now you two are sending out a nine-year-old to make that thing bark at rats and rabbits. Everybody gangs until their pockets empty, then they come looking at my dirt floor and my onions. Everybody wanted judges for Shrek maxing.