To the editors:
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Don Graham’s No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audie Murphy, excellently reviewed by Mike McGrath in the October 20 Reader, certainly seems like a fascinating study in the evolving mores of post-World War II America. However, I feel it necessary to point out a glaring mistake in Graham’s choice of documentation that was noticeable merely by reading the review. Graham, apparently, attributes much of Murphy’s astounding battlefield prowess to his unhesitant willingness to pull the trigger in the heat of battle, whereas he claims most soldiers were not nearly as readily prepared to do so. With this assertion I am in no position to argue. However, he draws his conclusions about just how exceptional Audie Murphy was from the work of a famous military historian, S.L.A. Marshall. Marshall claimed to have statistically corroborated the post-battle interviews he conducted with infantrymen to reach the empirical conclusion that on the average, only 25% of all front-line soldiers ever fired their weapons even once. This is a fascinating statistic, pregnant with implications on the myth of heroism and man’s propensity towards warfare in general. Unfortunately, as reported in the magazine American Heritage (Winter, 1988), Marshall’s research techniques were defective and perhaps even intentionally deceptive. Were his 25% “ratio-of-fire” statistic true, one must conclude that it is so merely by chance. Most likely we can never know how often American soldiers fired on the enemy. Marshall, consequently, has little if any credibility among historians.
Rick Perlstein
