Episode 106: Too Tall

 

As a young boy in Mississippi, Ed Freeman wanted three things: 1. escape from his home town, 2. to join the army, and 3. to learn to fly. He enlisted in the navy  during the final year of World War II, which got him out of Mississippi; he enlisted in the army after returning from World War II and finishing high school; he became a pilot after a battlefield commission during the Korean War, but only after the army raised its maximum height limit for a pilot. The first time he tried to fly he was told that at 6' 4" he was simply, too tall.

After flying mapping mission for nearly a decade, Freeman went to Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. On November 14, 1965, he helped dropped a battalion of cavalry troopers in the isolated Ia Drang valley, where they found themselves facing a much larger force that threatened to annihilate them. For the next 14 hours, Freeman and his commander, Bruce Crandall, were the only two pilots willing to fly into a hot LZ dropping off supplies and evacuating critically wounded personnel.

35 years later, in July 2001, the Distinguished Flying Cross that Freeman received for his efforts that day was upgraded to the Medal of Honor. He was the first person President George W. Bush bestowed the medal on.

It wasn't until the movie We Were Solders came out in 2002, that I learned that Freeman had lived around the corner from me for a decade. In 2005, I walked over to his house unannounced, asked him to autograph his photo in a book about living Medal of Honor recipients that I had bought for my dad, and ended up in an impromptu mentoring session between Freeman, a bona fide hero, and me, a lowly army cadet. I walked away with the autograph and a memory I will never forget.

Army Major Ed W. "Too Tall" Freeman, a navy veteran of World War II and an Army Veteran of Korea and Vietnam passed way in Boise, ID on August 20, 2008 at age 80. He was interred in the Idaho State Veterans Cemetery in Boise in Section 12-J-155.

Freeman's commander in Vietnam, then-Major Bruce Crandall, was the other pilot who spent 14 hours in 1965 trying to help the troopers in the Ia Drang valley survive the onslaught by a much larger force. 

He had to wait a little longer than Freeman, but in 2007, 40 years after the battle in Ia Drang, Crandall's Distinguished Flying Cross was also upgraded to the Medal of Honor.

Crandall, who retired a lieutenant colonel, but was promoted to colonel years later in 2010, is still with us as of this post, but his wife Arlene passed away in 2010, which is why we know that when his time does come, Colonel Crandall with join her at Arlington in Section 7A, Grave 1.

The commander of the battalion Crandall and Freeman support, then-Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore (seen above in an image taken during the battle in Ia Drang) advocated for the both pilots to receive the Medal of Honor for years, as did many other survivors of the battle.

Moore, who retired a lieutenant general, lived long enough to see his campaigning come to fruition and was present at both Freeman and Crandall's Medal of Honor ceremony.

When he passed away in 2017, he choose to be interred at the Fort Benning (Georgia) post cemetery, among many of his troopers who were killed in the Ia Drang in 1965.

In May 2023, Fort Benning, the home of the US Army's Infantry and Armor schools, was renamed Fort Moore.