He was orphaned by 15, raised without running water on the South Dakota plains, and would go on to serve his country across three continents. Sergeant Major Moritz Friebel‘s story isn’t just remarkable — it’s the kind of American biography that has a way of making everything else feel small.
The Texas General Land Office recently spotlighted Friebel’s account as part of its ongoing Voices of Veterans oral history program, which has now archived more than 500 veteran testimonies for the public and for researchers. His story — spanning service in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam — stands as one of the program’s most affecting entries to date.
A Childhood Defined by Loss
Before there was any uniform, there was a kitchen table in South Dakota. Friebel lost his mother when he was 13. His older brother came home on emergency Army leave for the funeral. When the family returned from the burial, their father gathered the children together and told them something that would stay with Friebel for the rest of his life.
“I lost my mother when I was 13 and I lost my father when I was 15,” Friebel recalled. “My older brother came home from the Army on an emergency leave for mom’s funeral and when we came home from her funeral, my dad got us together in the kitchen and the last thing he said was, ‘if anything happens to any of you kids, I want it to happen to me’ — and on the 8th of April of 1945, he tipped over a tractor in the field and killed himself.”
Two years. Two parents. The boy who survived that grew up in a home with, as he put it, “no electricity, no running water and no toilet paper,” attending a one-teacher schoolhouse that handled all eight grades under one roof. It’s the kind of upbringing that doesn’t produce softness.
From the Prairie to Fort Lewis
Friebel eventually found his way into the United States Army, completing basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington. The weapons training there was thorough by design. Instructors ran soldiers through the full catalog of infantry arms — rifles, machine guns, the works — operating on a practical philosophy: in combat, you don’t always get to choose what’s lying on the ground in front of you.
“Fired every weapon the infantry had,” Friebel explained, “and the theory was, in combat you’re going to find all kinds of weapons on the battlefield, and you should know how to use it.” Sensible enough advice. Though Friebel, it turns out, was about to discover a different kind of battlefield entirely.
A Desk, Not a Foxhole
When the option came — go to Korea as an infantry replacement, or stay in Kansas as a clerk — Friebel didn’t agonize over it. He said it took him about “three seconds” to ask where his desk would be. That quick decision set the trajectory for the rest of his military career.
He was handpicked by 1st Sergeant Juan Roybal to serve as company clerk for A Company, 91st Armored Recon at Fort Riley, Kansas. Roybal, by Friebel’s account, was something else entirely. “That man taught me more about how to be a soldier than anyone I ever met,” he said. High praise from a man who’d eventually rise to Sergeant Major himself.
Roybal’s mentorship was hands-on and direct. He once quizzed Friebel on the fundamentals of leadership — who eats first on a march, who picks their tent spot last — the kind of questions that seem simple until you realize most people get them wrong. Friebel figured it out fast: the troops come first. Roybal promoted him to Corporal shortly after.
The Weight of Paperwork
There’s a detail in Friebel’s early administrative work that deserves a moment. One of his first assignments was typing DD93 Emergency Data Forms — the cards that list a soldier’s next of kin, insurance information, and permanent home of record. Five-by-eight cards. Name after name after name. For a young man who’d already buried both parents before his sixteenth birthday, the weight of that task must have been something no training manual could prepare you for.
Preserving the Record
The Voices of Veterans program, chaired by Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, M.D., who also leads the Veterans Land Board, exists precisely so that stories like Friebel’s don’t get lost to time. The archive now holds more than 500 oral histories — freely accessible to the public and to historians — each one a thread in a larger tapestry of American military service.
Still, no archive can fully capture what it means to be 15 years old, standing in a farmhouse kitchen in South Dakota, hearing your father say goodbye without quite saying it. Some things only the man himself can tell you — and Friebel, to his credit, did exactly that.
