Captain Ed Freeman

Honor an American Hero

What is the most inspiring story you’ve ever heard and why was it so powerful and meaningful for you?

Its November 14, 1965, LZ (landing zone) X-ray. You are a 19 year old kid, critically wounded and dying, in the jungle somewhere in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

Your Unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense from 100 yards away, that your Commanding Officer has ordered the MedEvac 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 know 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 the sound of a helicopter. You look up to see a Huey coming in, but it doesn't seem real because there are no MedEvac markings on it.

Captain Ed Freeman is coming in for you.

He's not MedEvac, so it's not his job, but he heard the radio call and decided he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire anyway. Even after the MedEvacs 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 three of you at a time on board. Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire to the doctors and nurses —-and to safety.

And he kept coming back! He flew his Huey in to rescue the wounded thirteen more times, until all the wounded were out. No one knew until the mission was over that the Captain had been hit four times in the legs and left arm.

He took twenty-nine of you and your buddies out that day. Some would never have made it without the Captain and his Huey.

Medal of Honor Recipient, Captain Ed Freeman, United States Army, died at the age of 70, in Boise, Idaho. 

Honor this real life American hero.

As a Vietnam War widow, I salute Captain Ed Freeman, a real life American hero.

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