PEARL - After World War II, Charlie Freeburgh recovered from the months of starvation and abuse he endured in German prison camps. He moved on and dealt with the atrocities he'd seen like most others of his generation, silently.
Even after six decades, the 80-year-old Freeburgh has difficulty talking about the 16½ months he spent as a prisoner of war in camps.
"I was no different from thousands of other people just like me," he said during an interview at his home. "I wasn't outstanding in no way other than the fact that I did eventually make it home."
It's the soldiers who didn't come home that Freeburgh hopes are honored this Veterans' Day.
"Veterans Day is to honor the people who gave their lives, their time and their efforts in order to maintain freedom for the United States," he said. "To me, it honors the living that partook of it, but more than that, it honors the dead that gave their lives to allow us to be here."
Freeburgh was a 20-year-old flight engineer on a B-24 when German fighters brought down his bomber over the mountains of Germany on Feb. 24, 1944.
The crew, part of the 68th Bomb Squadron, 44th Bomb Group of the 2nd Air Command, was shot down shortly after bombing a ball bearing plant in Gotha, Germany.
The plane was crippled en route to the target and could not keep pace with the other bombers on the way out. German fighters swarmed the aircraft. At 25,000 feet, the crew bailed out, but not before taking down five or six German fighters.
"The thing about it is we had watched the German fighters shoot down guys hanging in parachutes," he said. "All the sudden I'm hanging out here in the wide open. So I thought on the way down: 'Well they might get me but I'm going to wait as long as I can to pull (the ripcord). I ain't going to let 'em shoot me in my parachute."'
Freeburgh waited until the ground "came rushing" before deploying his parachute and the rapid deceleration ruptured both of his ear drums before the impact of the landing drove him chest-deep into the snow.
"Out of 10 people that day (who bailed out of the plane), six of us died and four of us lived," Freeburgh said. His gaze fell to the floor as he spoke. "Today there's none living except me. Don't ask me why. I don't know."
Freeburgh was alone and running through the snow for two days before he was captured.
"Absolutely petrified," he remembered. "Imagine, a 20-year-old young 'un - don't know nothin' about nothin'. Here you are shot down in a strange country and don't know where you're at. You're freezing to death but you're sweating to death, too."
The worst days were still ahead for Freeburgh. But he doesn't care to talk about those days - in conditions so rough that his weight plunged from 198 pounds to 85 pounds by the time the 82nd Airborne Division freed him at the end of the war. The Union native would spend more than a year recovering in military hospitals before finishing his care at the now-defunct Foster General Hospital in Jackson.
It's hard, he says, to even think about - being shipped around a strange land packed into the suffocating tanker of a boat or a boxcar so tightly against the other prisoners that it was difficult to breathe. No water. No food. No ventilation.
And then there were the forced runs - exhausted and starving men chained together and forced to run for miles.
"If you couldn't run, they bayonetted you," he recalled. "Or they'd sic the dogs on you and let them eat you up. I could go on and on and on just like every other POW could do."
But he doesn't go on and on about the war. Freeburgh would rather talk about his wife of 59 years, Neva, his grandchildren or great grandchildren.
He remained in the military and spent 21 years active and another 10 years in the National Guard.
It was just living a sense of duty for Freeburgh.
"I am not a hero," he says. "I'm just an ordinary military man who did a job Uncle Sam asked me to do."
Selby Parker, who spent 33 years working for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Jackson, said Freeburgh's attitude about his own service is not unusual.
"I've never heard a veteran say he was a hero," Parker said. "A lot of them look at the ones who died as the heroes."
But Parker said Americans need to be thankful for the sacrifices of soldiers like Freeburgh and remember them this Veteran's Day.
"A lot of people have forgotten that our soldiers paid a price throughout history," Parker said.
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