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Parents worried following injuries

Oct- 8-2007 » Filed Under: 4/2 SBCT

The parents of a soldier are profiled in the following article.

By JOHN GOODALL Tribune Chronicle

Discomfort and danger make time grind slowly for a Valley soldier stationed in Iraq.

But if there’s anyone to whom the remaining year of Army 1st Lt. Jim Freeze’s deployment seems longer, it’s his parents. Geri Freeze, his mother, is an 8th-grade teacher at Niles Middle School and his father, Ed, is a WCI Steel employee.

“I worry about his emotional and mental stress that goes along with being in a war,” Geri Freeze said recently of her son. “Above all else, I worry about his physical safety.”

The Boardman couple support his service and try not to think much beyond his obligation to be there.

In Freeze’s most recent communication at the end of September, he said his platoon had been staying at a combat outpost. He said they were away from the base, e-mails, showers, toilets and mess hall food for eight to 15 days at a time.

“It was slightly miserable, but you learn to cope and make the best of it, to improve your situation as much as you can and to not complain because everyone is going through the same suck,” the 1st Lt. said.

He survived a roadside blast June 2 that killed a member of his unit. The eruption, he said, was more like a bad dream than reality.

‘‘It all happened so fast and it seemed so surreal,’’ Freeze wrote his parents, in the aftermath. He was decorated with the Purple Heart for minor injuries suffered in the action.

A surveillance platoon leader in northern Iraq, Freeze and his men were patrolling in Khan Bani Sa’ad, a city in the Diyala Province. They were there in support of another unit.

A thunderous eruption from a roadside bomb engulfed one of their Stryker reconnaissance vehicles. Fire was everywhere.

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