Freeman...Free Men
A few days ago, a friend of mine, a retired Air Force pilot, sent me a news item. I was glad he did, because it was noteworthy, and I never would have heard about it any other way. Like most of us, especially those of us busy with a family, I get my news in bits and pieces. I buy a paper almost everyday. It languishes around the house, I read it in paragraphs, usually running from room to room. In between homework, baths, sports, CCD, and all the other stuff that saturates our schedule, I am lucky, sometime, to get just a vague overview of what is going on in the world.
As if those impediments were not enough, I am also held hostage to digesting whatever news I can glean from the cable news outlets. I'm pretty devoted to Fox News, but, let's face it, a pancake house is a pancake house, and the menu is not all that different. Most stations will focus on the same small handful of stories, covered from barely different angles, and like many I leave the "news buffet" always feeling under-fed.
So it is not of "little surprise", but of "no surprise", that the passing of Ed Freeman didn't make any national news. Conversely, maybe Ed himself would have wanted it that way, because he was yet another of a disappearing breed that would have felt uncomfortable with any fanfare over his accomplishments. He most likely would have deflected any praise onto his brothers-in-arms, or some other pal who had outdone him somehow. Something tells me, though I did not know him at all, that he may have preferred it this way. That he was not mourned in spectacle, but instead, noticed with a quiet nudge amongst friends..."Do you know what that guy did?" I didn't until a few days ago.
Imagine it's November 14th, 1965, and you're a 19 year-old, critically wounded and dying in the jungle in the la Drang Valley in Vietnam. The infantry unit you're with is outnumbered eight to one and the enemy fire is so intense that your Commander has ordered Medi Vac helicopters to retreat. The smell of the jungle, of the firepower, of death, covers you and you think of your family, 12,000 miles away. You know you will not see them again. You know this is it. You begin to fade in and out of consciousness. You will be one of the thousands who gave all, died alone and stoic.
You hear a distant helicopter, but you're not sure at this point if you are still lucid. Is it real? You look up and see an un-armed Huey...no Medical markings. It must be a hallucination. The descending chopper is under heavy machine gun fire. It makes no sense. It didn't need to make sense. It is Ed Freeman, and although he's not MediVac, although it's not his job, and even though he was told not to go in, he's coming anyway.
He drops the bird in, sits there under heavy fire while they load two or three of you on board, and then he's up and out of there, flying you to the nearest Doctors and Nurses. Swept up, as if by an angel, when just moments before you were settling your own score with your maker. And that angel came back and did the same thing 13 more times, and saved about 30 of your buddies, who never would have got out any other way.
As in Frank Capra's masterpiece, "It's a Wonderful Life", an awkward angel teaches Jimmy Stewart's character, Charles Bailey, how different life would have been had ne not been born. How many lives one man's journey can touch. He wouldn't have been around to save his younger brother Harry from drowning as a child. Harry, then, wouldn't have been around to save a ship full of sailors in the war, strafing incoming planes from his own airbourne position. A wonderful lesson about how one man can mean so much. Frank Capra would have loved this guy.
Ed Freeman, Medal of Honor Recipient, died on Wednesday, March 25th in Boise, Idaho, at the age of 80. You didn't hear about it on the national news. Yet, across the country, in living rooms and at kitchen tables, other veterans, or their survivors, said a prayer. It is often this way, that the bravest among us, the true heroes, are born, live, and die, in the shadows. Still, it is incumbent on the rest of us to take notice of their deeds, of their magnificence. I wish I could have told him myself.
It seems fitting that he was in Boise, Idaho. The cradle of the nation...the heartland. One of few places that still holds some place in the memory of an America that is quickly being relegated to the mantle where it will gather dust. It will be left to a handful of us to occasionally pick it up, dust it off, and simply...remember.
Karl From New Hampshire