“I remember the spot you’ve picked for our picnic when I come home. I have very many memories of that particular location. Just down the slope and above the river there is a cave where some of us kids found a dead hobo. To the north of the powder house is the mule boneyard which used to stink pretty bad after accidents in the mine. In the powder house I’ve worked many a day unloading boxcars of powder when I was on the yard gang. Wyman, Peck, and I used to drop the boxes as they rolled down the chute from the siding and scare each other. Meredith and I used to hunt snakes in the rocks below the dump and between it and the river. Not far from a point below the powder house I killed the copperhead which yielded that big skin I have in the attic. Tib and I used to shoot his bow and arrows on the flat top of the chat-dump there. Not far below there on the river is the point where Tib and I turned over when we took our boat on its first run. Poor old Buford, I can still see how miserable and disgusted he looked trying to get dry and shaking himself and getting his wet tail up against our freezing naked legs. Then almost directly below there is a long deep hole on the river where Carter, Peewee, and I used to try to skate. I fell through the ice there once and stayed out all day till long after dark trying to dry out so Mom wouldn’t know I’d been down there. You see I well remember the spot you speak of and I think I well remember every detail of every yard.”
–Arthur Freeman, in a letter from France to his wife: 25 July 1944
“All things pass, all things return; eternally turns the wheel of Being. All things die, all things blossom again, eternal is the year of Being. All things break, all things are joined anew; eternally the house of Being builds itself the same. All things part, all things welcome each other again; eternally the ring of Being abides by itself. In each Now, Being begins; round each Here turns the sphere of There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Part III)
* Sergeant David F. Freeman received posthumously the Military Merit Medal, the Gallantry Cross with Palm, the Air Medal (With Numeral Device Seven), the Army Commendation Medal (with First Oak Leaf Cluster), a Purple Heart, and the Distinguished Flying Cross (with Second through Eighth Award).