World War II veteran keeps grip, tells it straight

Aubrey Moring has told some war stories to his two daughters, but the 84-year-old Coeur d’Alene retiree wasn’t sure he wanted to tell them to a camera lens.

“It’s nothing beyond average,” Moring said of his experiences in World War II, as the camera was being set up Friday afternoon in his small apartment.

The Alabama-born, silver-haired man landed on the beach at Normandy on D-Day, survived the Battle of the Bulge and helped thwart Hitler’s efforts to take over the world. Nothing beyond average, he insisted. “I never felt like I had a story to tell.”

His daughter, Carol Muzik of Coeur d’Alene, felt otherwise. “He has so many stories I wish I would have taped or put down somehow,” she said.

But she never did and time passed. Her dad’s eyesight is failing, and a few too many artillery shells have left his hearing damaged. Not long ago, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

With time running short, Muzik contacted a newly formed organization, the Inland Northwest Veterans History Project, to record her father’s tale.

“I’m very proud of him,” she explained.

Brad Schmitz, one of the project organizers, said his group’s goal is to collect oral histories from 100 area war veterans. People who worked at home in direct support of the war effort are also being sought for interviews.

One copy of the interview will go to the veteran and one to the Library of Congress, which launched the Veterans History Project in 2000 to collect as many stories as possible. The ongoing effort relies on volunteers, including Schmitz, to conduct the interviews.

“I felt like I owed those men something,” said Schmitz, who was trained as a social worker and a teacher. “They changed all of our fates. What was done back then changed our world.”

Moring was the second Inland Northwest veteran to be interviewed. As the project develops, Schmitz hopes the interviews will be conducted by youth from Anchor House, a home for troubled and abused teens in Coeur d’Alene. The interviews might inspire some of the young people, he said, and train them in using interview technology.

Moring, who spent 30 years in the Army, likes the idea of the young giving more thought to the sacrifices of earlier generations. “I’m ashamed young people don’t have that feeling for our country, that patriotism to the core, with an absolute sense of duty,” he said.

The country was united, he said, because that was the only way to win the war. There was no other choice.

Despite Moring’s belief in patriotism and a united front, he’s disgusted by the war in Iraq. When the subject was mentioned, he frowned. It’s not a war that can be won by military might or technology, Moring said. It must be fixed by politics. Until politicians solve the problem, the military will continue to be stuck in an impossible and deadly situation, he said.

“I don’t have any favorable comments about the war at all,” he said. “If I had a son or daughter who wanted to go, I’d blow up the road in front of them.”

Moring entered the Army in December 1942 after spending two years as a firefighter and sawmill worker in the Northwest. He trained as a combat engineer and crossed the Atlantic in a convoy so long it spanned the horizon. When the seas were calm, he could count 99 ships. Occasionally, the ships parted and a small cruiser passed through, dropping depth charges.

Moring didn’t get a sense of the war until he ended up in England, stationed at a camp awaiting orders for the invasion of France. Bombers returning from night missions over Germany passed above the camp.

“There were holes through them,” Moring said, looking away from the camera and folding his arms. “You could see right through the planes. Big holes. Half the rudder was knocked off some of ‘em.”

Moring paused. His eyes reddened. He swallowed. “But they were still flying.”

Schmitz asked: “When you left England, what was your next step?”

“Getting off the boat,” Moring said.

The landing craft had gotten hung up on a sandbar off Normandy. The men were ordered off. “Another few inches deeper and we would’ve drowned.”

The beach had just been secured. It was littered with dead soldiers. Moring didn’t want to talk about it. All he would say is his buddy from Oklahoma had asked him to notify his parents should something bad happen. And something bad did happen to that young man.

“It goads me in the gizzard I never notified his relatives,” Moring said, choking up again. “Of course, the Army did. But I couldn’t do it. I could not do it. Don’t ask me why. I just couldn’t.”

Moring served in Gen. Omar Bradley’s 1st Army, in Company A of the 300th Combat Engineers. It was a “bastard battalion,” he said, which was attached variously to some of the most decorated divisions of World War II, such as the 101st and the 82nd Airborne divisions.

As a combat engineer, “we either blew it up or blew it down or we fixed it,” Moring said.

The paratroopers were another story. They were fearless fighters, he said. One morning he warned a soldier from the 101st Airborne against heating his coffee with a burning wad of cardboard. “‘I told the guy to put the darn thing out. ‘They’ll kill you.’ ” The paratrooper glared at Moring and replied, “They wouldn’t dare.”

Moring laughed. He wondered why Schmitz and the videographer remained silent. “You’re supposed to laugh, guys! You’re not here to bury me, are you?”

Moring made it through the Battle of the Bulge, the war’s bloodiest fight for U.S. troops.

Through the entire war “I never got a scratch. Not one,” he said.

Schmitz asked, “What about when the war ended?”

Moring smiled and slapped his sofa. “That’s when we had fun!” He and a buddy, Charlie Adkins, stayed in Germany for almost a year, working in the motor pool. Moring drove a truck. Charlie was a dispatcher. The vehicles gave them freedom to travel. They hunted for deer and traded the venison for schnapps.

In 1946, Moring returned to Alabama and worked briefly for Sears Roebuck. Adkins went back to Illinois and found his sweetheart with another man. “He went back to the Army,” Moring said. That was the last time he saw Charlie.

“If I knew how to operate a computer, that’d be one person I’d track down,” Moring said. “He’s probably dead, though.”

Three years later, Moring also returned to the Army, where he worked on radar and missile systems. Eventually, he went through officer candidate school and earned a lieutenant’s bar. He retired in 1977.

“I enjoyed it to no end,” he said.