Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Dies

You're a 19-year-old kid. You're critically wounded, and dying in the jungle in the La Drang Valley on November 14,1965, in LZ X-ray, 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 halfway 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 unarmed 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 keeps coming back....thirteen more times...taking you and about 30 of your buddies out.

Without Ed, you don't make it out.

Medal of Honor Recipient Ed Freeman died last Wednesday, April 1, 2009, at the age of 80, in Boise, Idaho.

Here's a news story from the Idaho Statesman: http://www.2news.tv/news/27180989.html

And here is his Medal of Honor citation: http://www.mishalov.com/Freeman.html

May God rest his soul.