You're a 19 year old kid.
You are critically wounded and dying in the jungle somewhere in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam .

Its November 14, 1965 . LZ (landing zone) X-ray.
Your unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense from 100 yards away, that your CO (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 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.

You look up to see a Huey coming in. But.. It doesn't seem real because no MedEvac markings are 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 3 of you at a time 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!!

Until all the wounded were out. No one knew until the mission was over that the Captain had been hit 4 times in the legs and left arm.
He took 29 of you and your buddies out that day. Some would not have made it without the Captain and his Huey.

Medal of Honor Recipient, Captain Ed Freeman, United States Army, died at the age of 81, in Boise, Idaho.

God bless our vets!

#military #soldier #militarylife #specialforces #greenberets #army #vietnamwar #USMarines

That’s awesome. My dad got there a few years later (1968 I believe). I think part of him never really left Vietnam. I didn’t know him prior to his service, but anytime I asked him about it his eyes glossed over and it’s like he was talking to me from a million miles away.

X2. God bless our vets

Amen

AK, I've heard you mention that you're native American. I had a guy working for me on the farm for a summer that was Athabascan from 200 miles or so out of Fairbanks. George regaled me with a ton of stories about his service in Vietnam. Plus village life in Alaska. What a great storyteller! He had a large facial scar from a booby trap. He said first thing they did was assign him as a scout/tracker which meant he was at the front of the column. "What in hades did I know about scouting or tracking he said, we were all eating canned food and smokin' pot back at the village". He made it out that his peers tended to get put in harms way more than the average grunt..

Battle of Ia Dang, the first major action of US military troops fighting NVR troops about 40 miles south of Pleiku. The battle lasted 4 days with heavy losses on both sides. The NVR troops wanted to fight close to the US troops so that artillary and bombing could not be used. A lot of fighting was close range and hand to hand. It was this battle that had our war department feel that the US could win the war via attrition as many NVR troops were killed and the capital of pleiku was not captured at that time. There were many medals awarded to troops during this battle. Some US units lost or had wounded almost every soldier in their platoons.

Bryce