Even now, at 88, the reflexes from his training and military service remain. “People think it’s funny to sneak up behind you and touch you to see you jump,” he said. “When I jump, I jump in your face.” It is not anger so much as conditioning, training learned in close quarters where surprise meant danger. “We practiced that amongst ourselves all the time whe we were just in living quarters. It wasn’t unusual for some guy to try to get you on the floor,” he said, referring to when he lived with his U.S. Navy special forces unit.
Freeman grew up in Arkadelphia, just blocks away from then Henderson State Teachers’ College, and joined the National Guard while still in high school. When his two years were up, he enlisted in the Navy, intending to become an electronics technician. “The military does it their way,” he said, explaining that his skill as a rifleman soon stood out and caused his superior officers to think of ways he could be used.
Out of a company of 40, only he and one other man were selected for specialized duty aboard a “special ship” that was then part of a program that would evolve later into the SEALs. “It was being developed as we went along,” he said. “We were called Special Forces before that name meant what it does now.”
His first mission came in 1956, when his unit helped evacuate American civilians from Haifa, Israel, during the Suez Crisis. “We had 150 civilians on board, including a mother and a six-hour-old baby,” he said. “They wrapped that little sucker in clothes and put him in a box and brought him on board. It was standing room only on that ship.”
Two years later, he took part in a peacekeeping mission in Beirut, Lebanon. “We wore little green crosses on our uniforms,” he said. “We carried our weapons muzzle-down to show we weren’t fighting the war. We ended up fighting the war.”
By 1961, Freeman’s 13-man unit had been drawn into the Bay of Pigs operation. “We were not supposed to be known to be there,” he said. His group specialized in psychological warfare, demolition, and “We were not supposed to be known to be there. In fact, nobody was. Everybody thought it was 90 miles away where the invasion would be. And if they [the Cubans] had any more soldiers, I don't know where they got them from. Everybody in world was waiting,” he said.
The skills he was trained in and which he used in his first deployments carried over into the early years of the Vietnam War. “We went nearly to Hanoi once and got called back,” he said. “We worked in Laos and Cambodia. We operated in territory where there wasn’t supposed to be any operation.”
Freeman said that in the early 1960s, as politicians told Americans that soldiers were only being sent to Vietnam as advisors “a lot of bum information” reached the public. “They didn’t tell the truth about what we were doing or how many people were there,” he said. As the years of service went by, Freeman said he became used to the level of violence. “It was guerrilla war,” he said. “To me, it was just like walking down the street. You get to the point where it’s every day.”
Freeman was seriously wounded in 1971 when a mortar shell exploded nearby. “I was wounded from the ears to the floor,” he said. “They put me in traction for 16 days. I was two inches shorter than I had been the Christmas before.” Months of hospitalization followed. “They had me in a body cast,” he said. “You lay there and think. I went through the pity party, then decided I had two choices, and neither one was good—but one was better than the other. I decided to try to do something for myself besides be pitiful.”
After more than four years in Vietnam and two decades of total service, Freeman left active duty in 1974. “I had planned to do thirty years,” he said. “I didn’t get to, but I did my part.” His official discharge came in 1983.
His civilian life began with work that made use of his Navy training. “My primary rating was electrician’s mate, heavy power,” he said. Within a year, he had a journeyman’s license, and by 1976 he earned a master electrician’s license, an unusual thing for someone with no civilian apprenticeship. “They wanted a master’s license to hang in their workshop,” he said of his employers. “They didn’t have one, and they were hard to get.”
He became chief maintenance engineer for a California company that had just opened a new plant. “It had a lot of electrical stuff the old place didn’t have,” he said. “I spent many nights figuring it out.” Later, he added certifications in welding, heating and air conditioning, and electrical inspection. “They paid my salary while I got the certifications,” he said.
His life in California included a frightening episode that could have ended in tragedy. “An alarm went off one night at the plant,” he said. “I thought somebody was breaking in.” He went outside armed and hid between a line of freight cars. “I cocked the hammer and waited,” he said. But eventually, “there was a light, and I saw the uniform. He was my district supervisor.” Freeman, who had never met him before and was not provided with ID, held the man at gunpoint until police arrived. “That man was a second away from being dead,” he said. “A .357 doesn’t wound—it destroys.” The supervisor had climbed the fence after hours to check something, unaware that an alarm would bring Freeman running. “I told his boss, ‘If he ever comes on this lot again, he’s going to be in trouble,’” Freeman said. “I never saw him again.”
It was in California that Freeman met his wife, Jenny, who worked as a secretary for the company’s finance office. “She was still married at the time, but planning a divorce,” Freeman said. “We just kind of worked together and got to know each other.” When they began thinking seriously about marriage, Freeman knew they needed an understanding. “Before we got married, I told her I had battle fatigue. They call it PTSD now,” he said. “I told her nobody can walk up behind me and touch me without getting hurt. If you need me for something, stand in the door and call my name.” He said Jenny accepted those terms without hesitation. “We just kind of worked out a business deal,” he said. “We decided we’d get married, and it worked out the best ever.”
Jenny brought three sons from her previous marriage into their new life together. The sons stuck to his rules, at least enough to stay among the living, and Freeman helped raise them as his own.
Freeman, laughing, said that his third stepson had “a bad habit” of rushing into a room. “If he ran in from behind me, he could have got hurt,” he said.
Freeman and Jenny moved to Hope in the 1980s to care for his parents. It did not hurt that they were also escaping California’s rising costs. “It was getting almost impossible to live there,” he said. “My wife and I wanted a smaller town, and we liked Hope.” After working as an electrician locally—including a stint at Meyer’s Bakery—he retired but continued to use his skills to help others.
He joined the Hope Lions Club shortly after arriving, transferring his membership from his California chapter. “I joined in 1982 out there,” he said. “When I moved here in 1988, I sent my transfer to International, and I’ve been in it ever since.” Over 36 years, he has served as club secretary, first vice president, and twice as district governor. “Both times, the district governor died or had to resign,” he said. “They came to me and said, ‘Bill, you’re it.’”
Freeman lost Jenny several years ago. Her memory, he said, remains close. “It bothers me when I see somebody out of the corner of my eye coming up,” he said. “But I look, and if I see it’s somebody I know, I’m all right. A lot of that is from Jenny teaching me patience.”
Freeman has lived for more than fifty years with the effects of his wounds, but he does not dwell on them. “I’ve been somewhere between pain level two and nine for fifty-some-odd years,” he said. “You always have a choice. I decided to keep going.”
He continues to attend Lions Club meetings, volunteer with local projects, and stay connected to friends. “I can’t be a cripple and keep a job like I used to,” he said. “But I can still be useful.”
SWARK.Today celebrates Bill Freeman this Veterans Day week.