Russell Aulston never really thought about medals.
In 1945, he was just thankful to be alive and happy to be heading home. Ready to get on with his life.
Along with his dog tags, he had a little hunk of metal in his hip to remind him of his military duty. That was the day he was nearly blown up. That was the day he was taken prisoner by the German army. That was the time he earned his Purple Heart and Bronze Star.
But it took 66 years for those medals to finally come home to Aulston.
It was World War II, December 1944 in western Europe. G.I. Russell Aulston was a strapping lad of 26 fighting in the U.S. Army at the Battle of the Bulge. He still remembers the day when the hell of war came calling.
“I heard the shell coming so I hit the ground,” the 93-year-old Yellow Jacket man says, recalling that horrifying day. “It felt like my hip was hit with a baseball bat.”
There he was, in the middle of a deadly battle with a painful wound, bloody, unable to scamper away and more scared than anyone can imagine.
His terror increased when the Germans grabbed him. What was going to happen next? What a terrifying question.
“I was crippled up a little bit and I thought I was in a real heap of trouble,” he says. “But everything worked out OK.”
Four months in a German POW camp wasn't too bad, he admits.
“Except for the food,” says Lolita, his wife of 65 years. “They didn't feed him very well. He ate a lot of potato soup. It was a long time before he could eat potato soup again.”
Doctors told him that if that scrap of shrapnel in his hip didn't bother him that he should just leave it alone. That little lump of metal is still with Russell. There's only been one real problem.
“It's a drawback when I want to take an airplane. They really check me over real close.”
But besides an alarm buzzing and a little inconvenience in the airport security line, that sliver of German metal was his souvenir from WWII.
Now, he has some new keepsakes from his military days and the Battle of the Bulge. More metal in the form of medals. Well-earned, well-deserved medals.
Surrounded by family and officials, 66 years after that piece of shrapnel attached itself to him, Russell Aulston was honored for his valor at a ceremony in Colorado Rep. Ed Perlmutter's Lakewood office on July 25.
His great-granddaughter, 5-year-old Jayden Aulston pinned the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and POW medal onto his shirt.
As the ceremony ended, tears were dabbed away, applause resonated, and then Russell Aulston — WWII Army veteran, former POW, winner of the Bronze Star — did what any soldier would do: He saluted.
This month, Aug. 17 to be exact, Lolita and Russell will celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary. They met on a train in 1944 somewhere between Salina, Kansas and Cheyenne Wells, Colorado. Lolita had the only open seat and Russell was stuck without a place to sit. Besides, there was a pretty girl next to that open seat.
“It took quite a while to get up the nerve to ask her if that seat was taken,” Russell says.
He finally asked and Lolita invited him to sit down, and they started talking. She was a farm girl from the wheat fields of Colorado's Front Range and he was a farm boy from the bean country of Montezuma County.
“That kinda got things rolling,” Russell says.
Lolita says Russell never talked much about his time in the Army when they were younger. But later on, he started telling her Army stories.
But he never mentioned medals or never talked about wanting medals.
Medals weren't important to Russell. He was proud of his military service and dedication to his country, and that was good enough for him.
It was his grandson, Darrell Aulston, a Colorado State Patrol trooper from the Denver area, who started the process to bring his grandfather's military medals home.
“I noticed that he didn't have his Bronze Star. So I started looking into it,” he says.
After poking around in military records, Darrell eventually found help after contacting Rep. Perlmutter's office.
“It was very emotional, nothing but excitement,” Darrell says about the ceremony. The big country boy even admitting that he too shed a couple of tears.
Russell admits that he doesn't remember a lot of his time in the military.
He talks about being a mechanic and shuttling his colonel around in a Jeep. Then it was off to the front lines and the Battle of the Bulge. After he was released from the POW camp, he was shipped home, where he started farming in the Yellow Jacket area. His family first moved to the area when he was 12 years old.
Russell says that it was a real nice ceremony and pretty emotional. Lolita says there weren't too many dry eyes watching little Jayden pin those medals onto Russell's shirt.
“I was really proud,” Lolita says.
Everyone was really proud. It's not too often that a genuine World War II hero is honored in a medal ceremony.
“I really enjoyed it,” Russell says. “I really enjoyed having the family there.”
It may have taken 66 years, but for Russell, that was OK. Medals were never high on his priority list. He was just a humble, hard-working farmer from Yellow Jacket.
Darrell's voice is energized when he talks about his grandpa and that special ceremony.
“I can sum it up pretty simple — he's my hero,” Darrell says.
As the years click by, the memories of World War II fade a little more.
But after 66 years, a hero from that war was honored and remembered for his service.
It's a day that Russell Aulston and his family will never forget.
A hero finally has his war medals.
Reach Dale Shrull at dales@cortezjournal or 564-6037.
