a good cop

A grateful and saddened community of Seattle will show their respect today  by honoring  the life and service of Timothy Brenton, a police officer slain on Halloween night while serving in the line of duty. I make an effort to teach my son to value and appreciate the men and women who voluntarily put their lives on the line for us. Among these are

Firefighters

Police

Soldiers

Emergency Medical Technicians

I’m not being funny when I say that I’m having a “Good Cop” this morning…a cuppa coffee and donut…with a heavy heart and sadness I can’t explain.  I don’t know how to say thank you for the price paid by this man, his family and his comrades.  It is not enough Officer Brenton.  ~blm

Ed Freeman, Medal of Honor Winner

You’re a 19-year-old kid. You’re critically wounded and dying in the jungle in the Ia Drang Valley , 11-14-1965, LZ X-ray, Vietnam . Your infantry unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 or 200 yards away, that your own Infantry Commander has ordered the MediVac 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 an unarmed Huey, but it doesn’t seem real because no Medi-Vac markings are on it.

Ed Freeman is coming for you. He’s not Medi-Vac, so it’s not his job, but he’s flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire, after the Medi-Vacs 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 2 or 3 of you on board.

Then he flies you up and out, through the gunfire to the doc tors and nurses.

And he kept coming back, 13 more times, and took about 30 of you and your buddies out, who would never have gotten out.

Medal of Honor Recipient Ed Freeman died on Wednesday, June 25th, 2009, at the age of 80, in Boise , ID.   May God rest his soul.

_________________

Thanks and a tip o’the hat to Terry  ‘Way Down in Alabama’ for sending this in. ~blm

Robert, Ted and John Kennedy

I was in 4th grade class of Mrs. Freeman at Broadview Elementary School on the corner of 125th and Greenwood in North Seattle when the P.A. system came on. Mrs. Amy Loughlin, the principal, spoke carefully and I could recognize an emotional sound in her urgent words. She told us that President Kennedy had been shot and was dead. Mrs. Freeman turned off the lights and sat at her desk. She was quiet and I believe she was crying. I, like the rest of the class – dressed in our Beaver Cleaver style clothes – sat quietly. We knew something big had happened, but I don’t think any of us really understood.

5 years later, early one morning, my mother came into my room at the Flamingo Motel where we lived and gently shook me awake. She said that Bobby Kennedy had been shot and killed and she wanted to tell me about it because, and I hope I never forget her words: “I know he was important to you.” I was now in 9th grade and paying a great deal more attention to these issues. My brother was serving in Viet Nam and my sister was an avowed anti-war protesting hippie. I don’t think I fully comprehended what it all meant.

The other evening I was lounging on my couch watching some innocuous TV show. It was interrupted by a special report banner and the talking head, I don’t know her name, came on screen to report that Teddy Kennedy had passed away, dead from the brain cancer he’d endured the past year or so. I had a gut level reaction to it. I said out loud, no one was with me, “Thanks Teddy.”

I think I understand some of it. ~blm