Major Ed Freeman - "We Were Soldiers Once and Young" LZ X Ray Hero 11-14-1965

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[TD]The story of a helicopter pilot, Major Ed Freeman, who flew his unarmed Huey into to the battle zone during the Viet Nam War multiple times to supply troops and evacuate wounded personnel after the MediVac helicopters were ordered to stop evacuations. This act of courage earned Major Freeman the Flying Cross and decades later, the Congressional Medal of Honor. The Air Cav Commander, Lt. Col Hal Moore wrote the above referenced book with a reporter, Joseph Galloway. It was later made into a movie and there are documentaries about LZ X-Ray. After the battle several of the surviving companies attempted to march out only to be hit at LZ Albany, down the trail a few clicks, This engagement was very involved, a highly substantial battle with NVA Regulars who outnumbered the First Cav elements by a wide margin.
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He was a veteran not only of Viet Nam, but of World War II and Korea.
He was the recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on November 14, 1965, at Landing Zone X-Ray, in the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam.
During the Vietnam War Freeman served as a helicopter pilot with the rank of Captain in US Army's Company A, 229th, Assault Helicopter Battalion, First Cavalry Division Air Mobil.
On November 14th, 1965, a US battalion was surrounded by the enemy. In the heat of the battle when all hope was lost, an unarmed helicopter came to their aid, bringing water, much needed supplies and ammunition.
According to survivors of the battle the unarmed Huey returned more than 21 times with supplies, evacuating the wounded each trip. That day, more than 70 soldiers were flown to safety by Captain Freeman.
Freeman was decorated with the distinguished Flying Cross for his act of bravery but for decades those who survived this battle felt that a higher honor should be awarded to the helicopter pilot. On July 16, 2001, Congress awarded the Medal of Honor to Freeman with the persuasion of Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Crandall, other survivors who were rescued by Freeman, and Senator John McCain. That day, Freeman and his wife, Barbara, were invited to the White House where President George W. Bush presented the Congressional Medal of honor before witnesses consisting of Vice President Cheney, the secretary of defense, secretary of veterans affairs, the joint chiefs as well as members of the Joint Chiefs, Senator John McCain, Senator Craig, Congressman Otter, and Congressman Simpson from the delegation of Idaho.

On August 20, 2008, Major Ed Freeman passed away from complications of Parkinson's disease at the age of 80 and was laid to rest at the Veterans Cemetery in Idaho, where he settled.
In March of 2009, the United States Congress bestowed one more honor to Major Freeman. They designated the US Post Office in his place of birth McLain, Mississippi, the "Major Ed W. Freeman Post Office."
Click for CNN Transcript of President Bush's presentation of the Congressional Medal of Honor.


Freeman's official Medal of Honor citation reads:
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CAPTAIN ED W. FREEMAN
UNITED STATES ARMY​

Captain Ed W. Freeman, United States Army, of Boise, Idaho, who distinguished himself by numerous acts of conspicuous gallantry and extraordinary intrepidity on 14 November 1965 while serving with Company A, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). As a flight leader and second in command of a 16-helicopter lift unit, he supported a heavily engaged American infantry battalion at Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley, Republic of Vietnam. The unit was almost out of ammunition after taking some of the heaviest casualties of the war, fighting off a relentless attack from a highly motivated, heavily armed enemy force. When the infantry commander closed the helicopter landing zone because of intense direct enemy fire, Captain Freeman risked his life by flying his unarmed helicopter through a gauntlet of enemy fire time after time, delivering critically needed ammunition, water, and medical supplies to the besieged battalion. His flights, by providing the engaged units with supplies of ammunition critical to their survival, directly affected the battle's outcome. Without them the units would almost surely have gone down, with much greater loss of life. After medical evacuation helicopters refused to fly into the area because of intense enemy fire, Captain Freeman flew 14 separate rescue missions, providing lifesaving evacuation of an estimated 30 seriously wounded soldiers-some of whom would not have survived had he not acted. All flights were made into a small emergency landing zone within 100 to 200 meters of the defensive perimeter, where heavily committed units were perilously holding off the attacking elements. Captain Freeman's selfless acts of great valor and extraordinary perseverance were far above and beyond the call of duty or mission and set a superb example of leadership and courage for all of his peers. Captain Freeman's extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army.
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Rest in eternal peace, Major Freeman.
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Another real hero. In an age of everyone being a hero its still refreshing to see the real ones can still be plucked out.

 

"A hero is a man that does what he can." --Romain Rolland
This I think definitely describes Major Freeman! Well done Sir:S!!

 

Thank you, Major Freeman. Be at peace. :S!

 

My former NCO sent me a great research site for all things Viet Nam. He was a member of the Brown Water Navy as well as the flight deck NCO on the USS Oklahoma City, CG-5 during Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of RVN in 1975. He personally guided in the Hueys loaded with refugees escaping from the NVA and Viet Cong during the collapse of the ARVN. A great leader, he taught a bunch of 19 year old kids how to perform in his corner of the Navy, on the flagship of the Seventh Fleet, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, Commanding. I had the honor of working on the flight deck with him for two years and he taught me a great deal. Thanks, Dave.

I hope anyone running across this will get full use out of it and find it a valuable aid.

Vietnam War Resources

 

And it's got maps!

Very nice resource, Rick.

 

Jack P. Smith looks a great deal like his father, Howard K. Smith. I know most of us remember Howard well. Jack has an interesting and VERY GREAT story to tell about the aftermath of L Z X Ray - "GarryOwen" 1 - 7th Cav. His comments ring very true for me and I hope - for you as well.

Jack P. Smith (22 April 1945 - 7 April 2004) gave this speech on 8 November 2003, at the Ia Drang Survivors Banquet in Crystal City, Virginia


I have pancreatic cancer. If it is Agent Orange, it's not the first time this damned war has tried to kill me.

Let me tell you about the first time. In fact, the whole and true story of my journey home from Vietnam. But before I do, let me set the scene for you.

It is November 1965. The Ia Drang Valley. The nearest town, Pleiku, a remote Vietnamese province capital. And west of town, beyond the stilted long-huts of the Montagnards, flat scrub jungle cover the hills by the Cambodian border. A smugglers' haven, and now the infiltration route for the first North Vietnamese regulars to invade South Vietnam.

American regular infantry, the first sent to Vietnam as the war escalates, have come to this border country to hunt the People's Army of Vietnam. They are the men of the First Air Cav, the first Army infantry division to ride into war in helicopters. The leading unit is Lt. Col. Hal Moore's 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment. Driving their choppers into a landing zone designated X-ray, a few miles from the Cambodian border, on the 14th of November, 1965, they land on top of a North Vietnamese Army base. A ferocious battle ensues that lasts three whole days. Hal Moore's battalion several times comes within inches of being overrun. In the end, reinforced to brigade strength, the U.S. troops destroy the better part of a North Vietnamese division at X-ray. Seventy-nine Americans are killed, 121 wounded, a total of 200 U.S. casualties, the highest toll of the war till then...but there are roughly two thousand North Vietnamese casualties.

I came in on the last day of the battle. I remember the NVA bodies were piled so thick around the foxholes you could walk on them for 100 feet in some places. The American GIs were the same color as the dirt and all had that thousand-yard stare of those newly initiated to combat.

The next day, after a restless night, my battalion, the 2/7, walked away from X-ray toward another clearing called LZ Albany. Around lunchtime, we were jumped by a North Vietnamese formation. Like us, about 500-strong.

The fighting was hand-to-hand. I was lying so close to a North Vietnamese machine-gunner that I simply stuck out my rifle and blew off his head. It was, I think, the only time during the war that a U.S. battalion was ever overrun. The U.S. casualties for this fourth day of battle: 155 killed, 121 wounded. More dead than wounded. The North Vietnamese suffered a couple of hundred casualties.

The fight at LZ Albany was largely overlooked as an aberration- poor leadership, green troops. In this first encounter between their main force regulars, the two sides focused instead on X-ray. Interestingly, both drew the same conclusion: that each could win using the tactics of attrition.

The ferocity of the fighting during those four days was appalling. At one point in the awful afternoon at Albany, as my battalion was being cut to pieces, a small group of enemy came upon me, and thinking I had been killed (I was covered in other people's blood), proceeded to use me as a sandbag for their machine gun. I pretended to be dead. I remember the gunner had bony knees that pressed against my sides. He didn't discover I was alive because he was trembling more than I was. He was, like me, just a teenager.

The gunner began firing into the remnants of my company. My buddies began firing back with rifle grenades, M-79s, to those of you who know about them. I remember thinking, "Oh, my God. If I stand up, the North Vietnamese will kill me; and if I stay lying down, my buddies will get me." Before I went completely mad, a volley of grenades exploded on top of me, killing the enemy boy and injuring me.

It went on like this all day and much of the night. I was wounded twice and thought myself dead. My company suffered about 93 percent casualties--93 percent.

This sort of experience leaves scars. I had nightmares. For years afterwards I was sour on life, by turns angry, cynical, and alienated.

Then one day I woke up and saw the world as I believe it really is, a bright and warm place. I looked afresh at my scars and marveled, not at the frailty of human flesh, but at the indomitable strength of the human spirit. This is the miracle of life. Like other Vietnam veterans, I began to put the personal hurt behind me, and I started to examine the war itself and to make sense of it.

When I went back to Vietnam a few years ago, I met Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the man who engineered the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu and then commanded North Vietnamese forces in the war with South Vietnam and us. He conceded that because of the Ia Drang his plans to cut Vietnam in half and take the capital had been delayed ten years. But then, he chuckled, it didn't make a difference, did it?

We won every battle, but the North Vietnamese in the end took Saigon. What on earth had we been doing there? Was all that pain and suffering worth it, or was it just a terrible waste? This is why Vietnam veterans often have so much trouble letting go, what sets them apart from veterans of other wars.

Nothing is so precious to a nation as its youth. And so, to squander the lives of the young in a war that, depending on one's point of view, either should never have been fought or we were never prepared to win, seems crazy. Yet, that's exactly what happened in Vietnam. However justified the war seemed in 1964 and 1965, and, remember, almost all Americans then thought it was, it no longer seemed that way after Tet in 1968. And no matter what you may remember of the war, we never really fought it to win.

When I was wounded it caused a minor sensation at home. My father was Howard K. Smith, the anchorman and TV news commentator, who was then at the peak of his career. That the son of a famous person should get shot in Vietnam was, in 1965, news. When I returned to the United States after my tour in Vietnam, President Johnson, who was a friend of my dad's, invited me to a dinner party at the White House. I remember a tall, smiling man who thanked me for my service and
sacrifice. I liked him then; I still do today. Yet no one bears as much responsibility for the conduct of the war as he does.

In the Gulf War we took six months to put half a million troops into the war zone. In Vietnam, it took more than six years. We were too timid to carry the fight to the enemy until the end, and we tried, impossibly, to keep the war contained to South Vietnam.

The result was that our enemy, a small country waging total war, that is, using all its resources, saw a super power fighting a limited war and concluded that if it could just sustain the 10-to-1 casualties we were inflicting for a while, then we would tire and leave, and it would win. Of course, Ho Chi Minh was right. The war also changed character. The Sino-Soviet split made it seem less like a war of national liberation and more like a civil war - an internal squabble. After the Tet Offensive in 1968, we quit and began the longest and bloodiest retreat in U.S. history. Dean Rusk, then-Secretary of State, many years later ruefully told me, “They outlasted us.”

The fact is, democracies don't fight inconclusive wars for remote goals in distant places for very long. Pham Van Dong, Ho's successor, said that.

Whether the war was right or whether it was wrong, it was fought in such a way it could never really have been brought to a conclusion. That now seems clear with time. What a waste. It's why so many veterans of Vietnam feel bitter.

Well, we finally did get our parades and we finally did build our memorial on the Mall in Washington. These helped. But so many veterans were still haunted by the war, and I was, too.

Fourteen years ago, I watched the Berlin Wall come down and, as an ABC News correspondent, I witnessed first hand the collapse of communism. I remember thinking, “My God, containment worked. We won the Cold War.” And however meaningless Vietnam seemed at the time, it contributed to the fall of communism. Hardly justification for what we went through in Vietnam, but at least it was something.

Then ten years ago, an event changed me. An opportunity to go back to Vietnam. With ten other Ia Drang veterans, I traveled back to the jungle in the Central Highlands and for several days walked the battlefield. Did I find the answer to my question? No, I don't know if what we did in the war ultimately was worth it. But what I did find surprised me.

North Vietnam may have conquered the South, but it is losing the peace. A country that three decades ago had the fourth strongest army in the world has squandered its wealth on fighting its neighbors and is poor and bankrupt. You look at Vietnam today and you wonder why they fought the war. Many North Vietnamese wonder, too.

What struck me was the overwhelming peacefulness of the place, even in the clearing where I fought, LZ Albany. I broke down several times. I wanted to bring back some shell casings - some physical manifestation of the battle - to lay at the foot of The Wall here in Washington. But, do you know, search as I did, I could not find any. The forces of nature had simply erased it. And where once the grass had been slippery with blood, there were flowers blooming in that place of death. So I pressed some and brought them back. Flowers...that's all that I could find in that jungle clearing that once held terror and now held beauty.

What I discovered with time may seem obvious, but it had really escaped me all those years on my journey home from Vietnam: The war is over. It certainly is for Vietnam and the Vietnamese. As I said on a Nightline broadcast when I came back, “This land is at peace, and so should we be.” For me, Vietnam has become a place again, not a war, and I have begun letting go.

 

That's a heckuva speech. Thanks for posting it, Rick.