have more passion for everything, for life

Ed Freeman

You’re an 18 or 19 year old kid. You’re critically wounded, and dying in the jungle in the Ia Drang Valley, 11-14-1965. LZ Xray, Vietnam. Your Infantry Unit is outnumbered 8 – 1, and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 or 200 yards away, that your own Infantry Commander has ordered the MediVac helicopters to stop coming in.

You’re lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns, and you know you’re not getting out. Your family is 1/2 way around the world, 12,000 miles away, and you’ll never see them again. As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day.

Then, over the machine gun noise, you faintly hear that sound of a helicopter, and you look up to see a Huey, but it doesn’t seem real, because no Medi-Vac markings are on it.

Ed Freeman is coming for you. He’s not Medi-Vac, so it’s not his job, but he’s flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire, after the Medi-Vacs were ordered not to come.

He’s coming anyway.

And he drops it in, and sits there in the machine gun fire, as they load 2 or 3 of you on board.

Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire, to the Doctors and Nurses.

And, he kept coming back…... 1 3 more times….. and took about 30 of you and your buddies out, who would never have gotten out.

Medal of Honor Recipient Ed Freeman died last Wednesday at the age of 80, in Boise, ID…...May God rest his soul…..

I have had some crazy things going on in my life the last year or so. I feel like I have lost the sense of knowing who I am, if that is even possible. I feel like one of those lizards that changes colors to adapt to its environment. Do I just try to blend in with my immediate surroundings to keep from being noticed. Being divorced has made me much more self concious…it has made me feel like a failure to some degree. I realize that the divorce is not all my fault, but it still makes me sad. It makes me think that I am not capable of sharing my life with another person…so why bother.