A bittersweet story of a life and death in Iraq

The moment Capt. Brian Freeman walked into the restaurant, Charlotte knew he was the man she would marry. She doesn’t know if he felt the same, but he walked right over to her table and asked the person sitting next to her to move. For the rest of the evening he sat at her side, talking, finally holding hands.

They fell in love and got married, just as Charlotte knew they would, in the spring – May 1, 2004. They had a child together. She saw an unknown drive in him, the kind that could change the world.

“He had this way of seeing a vision and just making it reality,” Charlotte said during an interview at her Temecula home. One day, Brian decided he would take up bobsledding. “All his friends said, ‘Okay, yeah right.’ He grew up in San Diego, but it happened.” When Charlotte met Brian, he was training for the Olympic bobsled team.

This ability to make reality from visions brought him to Iraq. “He was feeling guilty for not being in Iraq,” Charlotte said. “It was about a month after he told me that he was called back up [for active duty.]” This vision would change their lives like none before it.

In Iraq, Brian befriended an Iraqi police officer (who must remain anonymous for safety purposes). The officer’s son, an 11-year-old boy named Ali, was dying of a heart ailment. The wall of his heart was slowly tearing and there was no hope for treatment in his country, so Ali’s father put his own life on the line and came to an American for help. This gave Capt. Brian Freeman a new vision.

Brian e-mailed all his friends and family for information on how to help this boy. One of his friends gave him the phone number of Gift of Life, a kind of Rotary Club whose purpose is to give open-heart surgery to needy children all over the world. Brian contacted them immediately, got the necessary information from Ali’s father and filled out paperwork. Brian was making another vision a reality when something happened that he never could have foreseen.

On January 20, Ali’s father dropped by Brian’s office in the government building in Karbala. Brian told Ali’s father that after six months of working with the bureaucracy he had gotten visas for both Ali and his father. Ali’s father went home to share the good news with his family. That was the last time Brian saw his Iraqi friend.

Later that day, armed men dressed in US fatigues stormed the building, killed one US soldier and handcuffed Brian and three of his colleagues. They put the four soldiers in their SUV and drove for 30 miles. They then stopped the car, dragged the men out, shot them and drove away. Brian died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

In New York two weeks later, Ali received the heart surgery Brian had made possible. Ali is still in New York, recovering perfectly. Brian and Charlotte’s son Gunner played with Ali for two hours a day as he recovered, and daughter Ingrid, now 15 months, took a strong liking to Ali’s father. “He was holding her and she leaned over to me, so I went to take her but she clung to him,” said Charlotte. “She just wanted a kiss [from me].”

Brian is gone but Charlotte will continue to make her husband’s last vision a reality. Two months before he died, Brian began for a little Iraqi girl the same paperwork that saved Ali’s life. Charlotte will not only help this girl but countless after her, just as she believes Brian would have done had he lived.

“I believe violence begets violence,” she said. “If there’s going to be any kind of peace, we need to change our actions.”

Charlotte will soon become a spokesperson for Gift of Life. “We want to help children worldwide,” she said.

Since it was founded in 1974, Gift of Life has helped more than 8,000 children from more than 60 countries. It began when the Manhasset Rotary Club in New York teamed up with the Rotary Club in Kampala, Uganda, to bring 5-year-old Ugandan girl Grace Agwaru to New York for life-saving surgery. More life-saving sojourners followed from every part of the globe.

Brian has left many things behind to remind the ones he loved of him. Gunner has his memory of the last time he saw his father, which, although he is barely 3, he can retell with minimal help from his mom.

After a short Christmas leave, the Freeman family took Brian to the airport to see him off on his flight back to Iraq. After saying goodbye, Brian walked around the corner and took his seat on the plane. “You want to play a trick on your dad?” the attendant asked Gunner, whose face brightened. The attendant let Gunner, Charlotte and infant Ingrid onto the plane.

“Gunner started running through the terminal, saying, ‘Daddy! I love you!’ and Brian gave him a big hug and kiss,” said Charlotte.

“Then we got off the plane,” said Gunner. “And move the ramp back, and moved the airplane away.” He rotated his fist as though turning a crank.

The scar on Ali’s heart will forever remind him of Brian’s kindness. Charlotte sees her husband’s smile every time her son laughs.