Texans Who Gave Everything: Honoring the Fallen This Memorial Day
Memorial Day is not about barbecues or the unofficial start of summer. It is a day of reckoning — a moment to name the names of those who did not come home. Texas has always punched above its weight in military service, and its sons and daughters have fallen on battlefields from France to the Pacific, from the jungles of Vietnam to the mountains of Afghanistan. Here are five who deserve to be remembered.
Audie Murphy — Kingston, Texas
Few soldiers in American history have a story like Audie Murphy‘s.
Born in 1925 into desperate poverty in Hunt County, he was rejected by both the Marines and the Navy before the Army finally took him in 1942. He would go on to become the most decorated American soldier of World War II.
On January 26, 1945, near the French village of Holtzwihr, Murphy’s company was assaulted by six German tanks and waves of infantry. He ordered his men to fall back to the woods and covered their retreat alone. When a nearby tank destroyer was hit and set ablaze, Murphy climbed atop the burning vehicle — in danger of exploding at any moment — and manned its .50-caliber machine gun. For nearly an hour, wounded in the leg, he single-handedly pinned down the German advance, killing or wounding roughly 50 enemy soldiers before the Germans finally pulled back. He then organized a counterattack.
That action earned him the Medal of Honor. Murphy survived the war but carried its weight the rest of his life, becoming one of the earliest public voices on what we now call PTSD. He died in a plane crash in 1971 at age 46, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery — his grave among the most visited in the cemetery, second after President John F. Kennedy‘s.
From 1948 to 1969, Murphy made more than 40 feature films and one television series.
Dorie Miller — Waco, Texas
Doris “Dorie” Miller was not supposed to be in the fight.
Born in 1919 in Waco, he enlisted in the Navy in 1939, but the segregated service confined Black sailors almost exclusively to mess duties. On December 7, 1941, Miller was doing laundry aboard the USS West Virginia when Japanese planes swept over Pearl Harbor.
What he did next defined his legacy. He carried his wounded captain to safety, then took up an unmanned anti-aircraft gun — a weapon he had never been trained to fire — and opened up on the attacking aircraft, reportedly shooting down two Japanese planes. It was an act of composure and courage under conditions of pure chaos.
Miller became the first African American to receive the Navy Cross, presented to him personally by Admiral Chester Nimitz. But he never stopped serving. Two years after Pearl Harbor, on November 24, 1943, a Japanese torpedo struck the USS Liscome Bay during the Battle of Makin. The explosion sank the ship in minutes, killing over 640 of the 918 sailors aboard. Miller was among them. He was 24 years old. The Navy has since named a future aircraft carrier — the USS Doris Miller — in his honor.
George Keathley — Texas A&M / Olney, Texas
Staff Sergeant George Keathley studied agriculture at Texas A&M before financial hardship pulled him away. He joined the Army in 1942 and was sent to Italy in 1944. On September 14 of that year, during fierce fighting near Mount Altuzzo, his unit was shredded — all commissioned and noncommissioned officers had been killed or wounded.
Keathley stepped into the void. Although already wounded himself, he crawled from position to position under mortar and small arms fire, administering first aid and redistributing ammunition to the survivors. Then, mortally wounded, he stood up — fully exposed — and continued to shout orders and inspire his men for fifteen more minutes until he died.
He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
Roy Benavidez — Cuero, Texas
Roy Benavidez‘s story almost didn’t happen at all.
Born in 1935 near Cuero to a family of sharecroppers who died when he was a child, Benavidez dropped out of school in eighth grade to pick cotton and sugar beets. He joined the Army at 19. During his first Vietnam tour, a land mine left him paralyzed from the waist down. Doctors said he might never walk again. He taught himself to walk in secret, slipping out of his hospital bed at night, and willed his way back into service as a Green Beret.
On May 2, 1968, he heard a desperate radio call from a 12-man Special Forces team pinned by hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers across the border in Cambodia. Without orders, he jumped onto a rescue helicopter. Shot upon landing, he ran toward his teammates anyway — and over the next six hours, despite being wounded 37 times from bullets, shrapnel, and a bayonet, he dragged survivors to safety, distributed ammunition, and killed enemy soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, saving the lives of at least eight men. He was placed in a body bag and presumed dead before he spit in a medic’s face to prove otherwise.
It took 13 years and a living eyewitness to get Benavidez the recognition he deserved. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan placed the Medal of Honor around his neck.
Benavidez died in 1998 and is buried at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio. He once said: “The real heroes are the ones who gave their lives for their country.”
Sgt. Maj. James “Ryan” Sartor — Teague, Texas
Some soldiers serve one tour.
Ryan Sartor served seven.
A native of Teague, Texas, Sartor enlisted in the Army in 2001 — just months before September 11 — and went on to become a Special Forces Green Beret, deploying to Iraq five times and Afghanistan twice. By any measure, he was precisely the kind of quiet, lethal professional the Army builds its most demanding missions around.
On July 13, 2019, during his seventh combat deployment — this time in Faryab Province, Afghanistan — Sartor was killed by enemy small arms fire while on combat operations. He was 40 years old. His commander called him “a beloved warrior who epitomized the quiet professional.” He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. He left behind a legacy not just of valor, but of the steady, unflashy devotion to duty that defines so many of those who never come home.
Spc. Bishop Evans — Arlington, Texas
The most recent name on this list belongs to a 22-year-old from Arlington who never made it to a foreign battlefield. In April 2022, Bishop Evans was deployed along the Rio Grande as part of Texas’s Operation Lone Star when he spotted two migrants struggling in the swift current near Eagle Pass. Without hesitation — and without a flotation device — he jumped in to save them.
They survived. He did not.
Evans had previously served in Kuwait and Iraq and had been a member of his high school JROTC program. His grandmother, who raised him, told reporters she was not surprised by what he did: “He wouldn’t ask you who you were before he tried to help you.”
Evans was posthumously honored in the Texas legislature’s Fallen Heroes Memorial Service. His death also prompted a legislative push to ensure Texas National Guard families receive the same survivor benefits as other state law enforcement.
From World War II to a river on the Texas border, these five lives span nearly a century of American sacrifice. The names change, the wars change, but the willingness to give everything does not.
This Memorial Day, say their names.
