He was forced to leave school before reaching junior high to search for whatever work he could find to help support the family when his father abandoned them. As a teenager, his skill with a hunting rifle kept his 10 siblings fed when their mother died.

Filled with a surge of patriotism after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, a then 16-year-old Audie Murphy had his sister falsify documentation about his date of birth to meet the military’s minimum age requirement for enlistment.

Just over three years later, on this day in 1945, Murphy was wounded in eastern France while defending against an attack of 250 Germans accompanied by six tanks. Ordering his men to fall back to better their defenses, Murphy used a machine gun attached to a burning tank destroyer to hold off the enemy. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery en route to becoming the most decorated soldier of the Second World War.

Later in life Murphy said, “The true meaning of America, you ask? It’s in a Texas rodeo, in a policeman’s badge, in the sound of laughing children, in a political rally, in a newspaper… In all these things, and many more, you’ll find America. In all these things, you’ll find freedom. And freedom is what America means to the world.”

Ask anyone in the world who is desperate just to touch American soil and they would likely say the same.