AN AMERICAN HERO
Adapted from an email I recently recieved.
It’s November 11th, 1967. You’re a 19 year old kid. critically wounded and dying in the jungle somewhere in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam. Your unit is vastly outnumbered and the enemy fire, coming from a mere 100 yards away, is so intense that your commanding officer has ordered the MedEvac helicopters to stop coming in.
As you lie there, listening to enemy machine gun fire strike all around you, the realization starts to sink in that this is where you are going to die. Your family is half way around the world and you’ll never see them again. The world starts to fade in and out and you accept that this is the day.
Then….over the machine gun fire, you hear the faint sound of a helicopter in the distance. You look up to see a Huey coming in. You’re a little confused because there are no MedEvac markings are on it.
Captain Ed Freeman doesn’t fly MedEvac. He heard the call to cancel all incoming flights because of the enemy fire, but decided he would come for you anyway. Even after the MedEvacs were ordered not to come. He came anyway.
He drops into the LZ and sits there as enemy machine gun fire slams into his bird. You and 2 others get loaded and Captain Freeman lifts off to deliver you to the doctors and nurses waiting to save you and your buddies at the MASH unit.
Then he goes back. Thirteen times in all. Each time picking up wounded, as many as he could get, and delivering them to the MASH unit, saving their lives. It wasn’t until all the wounded were delivered to safety that the doctors turned their healing hands to Captain Freeman. He had been shot in the legs by enemy fire four times and once in the left arm.
Captain Freeman took 29 of you and your buddies out that day. Some would never have made it without him. They would never have gone home, seen their loved ones, got married, had kids and grandkids and lived productive lives. had it not been for Captain Ed Freeman.
Medal of Honor Recipient, Captain Ed Freeman,United States Air Force died last Wednesday at the age of 70, in Boise, Idaho .
May God Bless and Rest His Soul.
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