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'Ed Freeman... A True Hero'

You're an 18 or 19 year old kid. You're critically wounded and probably dying, in the jungle in the Ia Drang Valley, 11-14-1965. LZ Xray, Vietnam. Your infantry unit is outnumbered 8 to 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 an un-armed 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... 13 more times... and took about 30 of you and your buddies out, who would never have gotten out otherwise.

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

(Oh yeah, Paul Newman died that day too. I guess you knew that --- He got a lot more press than Ed Freeman did.)

A few related links...

http://craig.senate.gov/releases/ed082808.cfm

http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/archive/.../11/265756.aspx

Here's what a friend of the family sent this evening:

Hey all,

Go to this Snopes page, skip over the altered etc part and get down to when he was presented the Medal of Honor. Note reference to 1st Cav and 7th Calvary. When I was in Viet Nam, Oct. 68-Oct 69, I was in the 1st Calvary, "Charlie" company, 5th Battallion, 7th Calvary, which also was Custers unit, but that's another story. In 2002 I was contacted by email about joining the 5/7 Cav Association and went to a reunion here in Cincinnati. The 5/7 Cav Assoc. was started by some of the guys that replaced the one's at LZ x-ray. Have you seen "We were young once"....with Mel Gibson? That's how the 7th Cav regrouped and headed for VN, headed by Col. Hal Moore. Col. Moore was at the reunion and spoke. I got to meet him and shake his hand. That was a real honor and a little eerie.

Not exactly sure why I wrote all of this. Whatever

http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/freeman.asp