Via my friend Doug Coe:
You're a kid, 18 or 19 years old. You're critically wounded and dying in the jungle in the Ia Drang Valley, 14 November 1965. LZ Xray, Vietnam. Your infantry unit is outnumbered eight to one, and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 or 200 yards away, that your own commander 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 and you look up to see a Huey, but it doesn't seem real, because there are no medevac markings are on it.
Ed Freeman is coming for you. He's not medevac, it's not his job, but he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire after the medevacs were ordered not to come.
He's coming anyway.
He drops it in and sits there in the machine gun fire as they load two or three of you on board. Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire, to the doctors and nurses. He kept coming back, thirteen more times, and took about thirty of you and your buddies out, who otherwise would never have gotten out.
Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Ed Freeman died last Wednesday at the age of 80, in Boise, Idaho.
May God rest his soul...