“You Do The Prayin’ And I’ll Do The Shootin’ ”—Audie Murphy

During the war, we soldiers would catch up on sleep at every opportunity. For me, very often, the peacefulness of an Army church service on a sunny Sabbath morning would lull me to quick slumber. Once our chaplain kidded me about it. “I’m not satisfied with the amount of praying you do,” he said to me. My answer was:

That’s what I said then. I feel differently now. I have come a long way since the bitterness of wartime in general and my smart alecky reply of that day in particular. The truth was, as the chaplain well knew, you prayed all the time you were up in the battle area. But for a nineteen-year-old it was hard to reconcile being blessed for killing, in the face of the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”

Those days, in between being hungry and tired and scared, I walked around full.of question marks which I sometimes tried to sort out but never could. Part of what I was doing then, it seems to me now, was trying to get a sense of relationship to life beyond the actual moment of living it—in other words, beyond the moment that a bullet might anytime end it.

I suppose that to counteract a demoralizing fear that I might die and became an indistinguishable part of the past any second, I wanted an imperishable identity with the future. For that you needed spiritual faith. My search for it, as far back as I could remember, had never been an easy one.

I first knew God, in my Texas boyhood as a fire-blasting monster who, I was told, would take great delight in throwing the likes of child sinners like me into a hot place called Hell. The man who thus interpreted Him for us was the preacher of our little backwoods church.

I remember the preacher well. His face would get angry and red, his words would come at us in ranting outbursts, and his gestures were threatening ones, made with re fists. Sometimes he even danced his fury, not unlike the witch doctors sat primitive peoples.

Listening to this preacher, and to others of the district who were like him, I came close to never having any religion at all. I went to church in the first place seeking comfort, and, I think, reassurance about life. I wanted to be told that it could be better than the way we in our family lived it, cursed by poverty. But what I sought in that church I didn’t get.

I never was young

People know me for my record as a soldier. But the truth is I must have done some of my best fighting in a war I was in long before I joined the Army. You might say there never was a “peace time” in my life, a time when things were good. I can’t remember ever being young in my life. I never had just “fun.”I am one Texan boy who never had a pair of cowboy boots. I am one native-born and native-bred American male who actually doesn’t know the rules of our national pastime—baseball. I never had time to play or the paraphernalia you play it with. I never had a bike. It was a full-time job just existing.

My mother never made it. Continued poverty and enforced self-neglect wore her down until she had no resistance to disease. She ailed steadily. In a home where food was hard to come by, medicine and treatment were unattainable luxuries, not necessities. She died when she was in what should still have been her vigorous years. Her story, including her early death, is not unusual in the history of a sharecropper’s family, particularly when the sharecropper himself runs off, leaving his wife to take care of their children—in other’s case, nine of us.

When do you get a nickel for the collection plate at church when you are in a fix like this? Not often. When do you get a change of clothes to wear Sunday, let alone a new or good suit? Never.

I usually owned only one pair of jeans, and for years my nickname among kids who knew me, particularly the girls, was “Short Britches” because mine were usually never as long as they should be. My mother would wash my jeans regularly and they would get clean, but also shorter.

When I was fourteen and felt moony about a girl, I did all my admiring of her from a long distance off. I was too ashamed to come closer. There were my short britches. There were my home-repaired shoes—the soles stitched to the uppers with bailing wire. And there was the time that would be wasted if I talked to her that I might better spend picking up wood for my mother, or chopping for hire.

Yet from time to time I would somehow find myself with a nickel for the church collection and I would go. I would be the last to slip in after the service had started, and the first to leave when it was over, so that I wouldn’t need to meet anyone. I would sit and listen . . . while fire and brimstone thundered from the pulpit. I remember, when I was about ten years. old, sitting on a back bench in church one Sunday, and coming to the conclusion that I didn’t believe Hell could be worse than the particular patch of Texas I lived in—as my mother, my brothers and sisters, and I found it to live in, anyway.

But my mother’s religious ties to the church remained as strong as ever, no matter how wretched her life. I used to sit and watch her in her pain, wondering, childlike, at God’s failure to relieve her suffering. Occasionally I would express my doubts to her about Him. She never chided me. I am sure she thought I was too young to know any better. But her faith never wavered.

The oldest male

By this time my older sisters had married and left the home, leaving me as the oldest. I wasn’t in my teens yet but fully aware that I had a wage-earner’s role as the oldest male in the house. And of course I couldn’t make enough money, picking up odd jobs that a boy can do, to help much.

All in all it was a pretty unhappy boyhood, and back of it all was the shadow of my father, for whom my hate grew stronger and stronger as the burdens he had thrown off piled up on me.

(This hate, incidentally, no longer exists. I have since concluded that it is not my prerogative to pass judgment on him, that he may have had what to him were compelling reasons for what he did. We have met and talked, without digging up the past.)

If I wasn’t forever turned from God those days I think it was because man’s instinct is to believe. There came other times and places in my life when the idea would strike me that He was perhaps making Himself known to me. I would be sitting somewhere quietly—on the bank of a stream, in a deserted chapel or church I happened to enter—when I would experience a feeling that He must be. No more than this—and sometimes it is a little saddening that it is no more than this. But if He will not give any more definite sign of Himself, or define His wishes, there is at least the compensation of being able to invest Him with such qualities as one thinks He must have.

This God, whom I can neither prove nor disprove, is not to me a complicated Being who has to be made understandable via long and involved interpretations of Biblical passages. God, as I see Him, must be truth itself, and the truth is always simple. On this I base my faith.

My everyday practice of this faith takes the form mainly of conducting myself so that I hurt no man wilfully, myself included. A person can destroy himself as effectively as he can the other fellow. If I can say to myself at the close of each day that I have committed no offensive deed to anyone, knowingly, then I can sleep.

My faith tells me too that fear is no part of God’s ways; there is no fear or any threat of fear, of any kind and for whatever reason. I wouldn’t want any man to live in fear and I am sure God, who must outdo us all in goodness, would not.

This is religion quite simplified, I know. But it will have to do for me. I think a preacher should be a teacher, a gentle, understanding teacher, and never a voice of doom continually threatening all within earshot. I think it is shameful to be frightened into anything, even into religion.

A girl I know once told a friend that she feared no one and note except God, and the friend replied, “God is the only One you need never fear.” I like that, because it illustrates how I feel about Him. It seems to me that out of fear come many evils, selfishness, lack of self-respect, cruelty.

A group of soldiers are ordered to advance against heavy fire and they all have fear. If one of these has no self-pride to call on then his fear will cause him to hang back while the others go ahead and take the brunt of the punishment. You are very conscious of this when it takes place in battle area. It is not that cowardice is a sin; no man has a patent on fear, and I never met anyone who hadn’t tasted it. What you hate is the selfishness in a man who won’t try to conquer his fear, and instead uses the lives of his buddies to shield his own. In the front line especially, and I think it is true in all life, the answer to “Am I My Brother’s Keeper?” is an emphatic yes.

I can recall being under massive artillery barrage in France and hearing fellows pray all around me. For some reason I would always be irritated when I would overhear the words, “. . . please God, save me . . .” Then one day, as we were out in pretty open country and being pounded by heavy shelling, I heard a GI mumble these same words again and an answer formed in my mind. “Hey, why save just you?” I wanted to ask. “There’s a whole company of us out here!” It seems to me that if a man can help it he ought not to try and whine himself into Heaven.

An unwilling partner

Nor do I think that we compliment Him any by constantly claiming Him as a partner in our private enterprises. I think He has been made a‘member of a lot of firms and enterprises He would be just as happy to resign from. Nor do I think that God wants credit for our achievements.

I remember someone telling back home about a farmer who bought a terribly rundown place. The house was a splatter of broken boards, and the fields were a tangle of weeds. He worked hard for months and finally had the farm in fine shape; the house neat and paint fresh, long straight lines of cotton in the fields, and hogs and chickens in the yard.

Then the local preacher came by and introduced himself. He welcomed the farmer to the community. He said he hoped to see him in church regularly. “And son,” he ended up, “you and the Lord have done a good job fixing up this farm. I want you to know that. You and the Lord have done right well here.”

“Thank you, Reverend,” said the farmer. “I think so, too. But you ought to have seen the place when the Lord was farmin’ it by Himself!”

My folks attended the Baptist Church, and I am today a member of the Highland Park Methodist Church in Dallas, Texas, I was never baptized in any one church as a child and with the simple faith that is my guide now I do not think there is any need for baptism.

Let me enlarge on this as best I can. That my faith is simple does not mean that I take it lightly, nor that this is why I speak thus about baptism. I have quite an active wonder about religion.

I often carry this wonder into a place where I think I can best commune with it, and that place often is a church. And it seems to me that God would not stay out of any church in which men have gathered to be near Him.

I think that way back in Texas, when I sat all through that hellfire in church waiting to hear about the loving God my mother used to tell me about, I felt I might meet Him anywhere, anytime. I still do.

THE END

—BY AUDIE MURPHY

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE JANUARY 1956