As many of you know, I was a helicopter pilot in VietNam and flew Hueys.  I did fly MediVac missions.  I could not resist featuring Ed Freeman.  What an individual!  Cpt. Otis

Here’s the feature:

You’re a 19 year old kid.  You’re critically wounded, and dying in the jungle in the Ia Drang Valley, 11-14-1965, 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 half-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.

Captain Ed Freeman is coming in 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 3 of you on board.

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

And, he kept coming back!!  13 more times!!  And took about 30 of you and your buddies out, who would never have gotten out.  No one knew until the mission was over that the Captain had been hit 4 times in the legs and left arm.

Medal of Honor Recipient, Ed Freeman, died last Wednesday, [August 20, 2008], at the age of 80, in Boise, ID…. May God rest his soul….

Click here for the article and the Medal of Honor Citation.

Courtesy of Snopes.com.

For more on Captain Freeman…
click here.

Courtesy of Find A Grave.

I cannot resist one of my favorite YouTube videos as a tribute to our military.  What memories this clip evokes as it probably does for all of us ole helicopter pilots!  Cpt. Otis

God’s Own Lunatics
By Joe Galloway

Click here for the sound effects that accompany this memorial tribute to Ed.

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