My Hero

He could just sit back, relax, and enjoy his celebrity status. I might.

But British rock star Sting is tending fields of grapes as he prepares to market red wine made at his Italian country estate in Tuscany. Some 30,000 bottles of wine produced on the property will go on sale in September, mainly in Britain and the United States.

In 1997 the former Police frontman purchased a 16th century villa, called Il Palagio, in Figline Valdarno, a small village some 19 miles south of Florence. Over the years he has turned the surrounding 860 acres into an organic farm that also produces honey, olive oil, fruit, vegetables and Tuscan salami.

Homecoming

Ed Freeman

You're a 19 year old kid. You're critically wounded and dying in the jungle in the La Drang Valley, 14 November 1965, LZ X-ray, Vietnam. Your infantry unit is outnumbered 8-1, and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 to 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 halfway around the world 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 MediVac markings are on it.

Ed Freeman is coming for you. He's not MediVac, so it's not his job, but he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire, after the rescue copters 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 doctors and nurses.

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

Medal of Honor Recipient Ed Freeman died last month and the age of 80 in Boise, ID.

May God rest his soul.

Retirement

I had a day.

I squandered it.


I let it slip away

on this and that,

and nothing-much;

on baubles, trifles, play.


Retirement.

I squandered it.

I let it slip away.

Apologies to Jo Lightfoot