Why would a highly successful graduate from a prestigious university, having been accepted into law school, forgo a lucrative law career? What causes a twenty-two-year-old college graduate to work as a lifeguard and plumber’s assistant while waiting on an opportunity that may never materialize? How does one decide to ignore the advice of loving parents and set a course so demanding that less than 1 percent succeed? Who volunteers to put oneself through months of physical and mental pain and abuse for a position that only a few achieve? What is the source of the internal strength and moral courage that says, “I would rather die than quit”? Why would one deliberately step into a hail of gunfire?
Although I never had the opportunity to meet Michael Patrick Murphy, it has been the privilege of a lifetime during the past months to get to know him through his parents, family, relatives, friends, teammates, and acquaintances, whose lives were made better for having known the young man known as “Murph” or “Mikey.”
When this project started in March 2008, I believed then, and even more so today, that it is a compelling story of an all-American boy from a small town on New York’s Long Island who rose from obscurity to become one of this nation’s most revered heroes, whose actions are now memorialized for all time in our nation’s Hall of Heroes. The world came to know twenty-nine-year-old Navy SEAL lieutenant Michael P. Murphy for his legendary actions in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan on June 28, 2005, which resulted in his receiving posthumously the Medal of Honor from President George W. Bush on October 22, 2007.
However, there is much more to his story. On those two dates, the world became aware of what family and friends had known for twenty-nine years: that Michael Patrick Murphy was an ordinary man with an extraordinary sense of duty, responsibility, and moral clarity. Such moral clarity and sense of duty had its roots in a God-fearing set of parents who sowed within him the seeds of greatness that granted him the wisdom and strength to answer a call that few will ever receive.
It was this call to service that drove him to study and work and prepare himself for that moment in time when character met circumstance in the eternal struggle of good versus evil in the world’s most forbidding terrain. While some may say that Michael chose to walk a path that he could have avoided, I suggest that he could no more have avoided his chosen path than deny the source of his moral clarity and courage. History is replete with those rare individuals who when called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice do so willingly.
Inscribed in a Wheaton College classroom are the words “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Despite our modern culture’s obsession with winning and the rhetoric of subversion, was Michael Murphy’s young life wasted, or did he know and understand something that we haven’t yet figured out? Herein lies the real story. It is my sincere hope that my efforts have done justice to a calling faithfully answered, a duty justly upheld, and a life, while all too short, very well lived. Michael Patrick Murphy clearly had it figured out. He voluntarily gave up an earthly life he could not keep in exchange for an eternal life he cannot lose—demonstrating the wisdom many never achieve.