A Gorham soldier received an early present four days before Christmas 20 years ago Saturday – his life.

A quick-acting soldier and Army medics saved the life of the critically wounded Staff Sgt. Harold “Butch” Freeman when a suicide bomber blew up a mess tent packed with soldiers at noon on Dec. 21, 2004, at the Forward Operating Base Marez in Mosul, Iraq.

“I can’t forget it,” Freeman, now 62, said last week in his Gorham home.

He was picking up eating utensils and said he never heard a boom. “Everything was slow motion,” is how Freeman described the fatal scene surrounding him.

He wasn’t wearing a flak vest or helmet, but an ever-present M-16 was slung over his shoulder. A hole, spurting blood, was blown in an upper thigh.

Freeman was a member of Company B based at the Stroudwater Street Armory in Westbrook. The outfit was a unit in the Maine Army National Guard’s 133rd Engineer Battalion. It rolled out of Westbrook in January 2004 for advance training and landed in Iraq in March that year.

The Portland Press Herald had its own boots on the ground when the Christmastime bomber attacked. Columnist Bill Nemitz and Photographer Gregory Rec had arrived late Dec. 20 aboard a C-130 hop from Kuwait after a lengthy trip that began in Boston.

They were hunkered down near the mess tent in a barracks that Rec recalled as a Conex trailer, a transformed shipping container. Rec, exhausted from early morning interviews and jet lag, was grabbing a quick nap, delaying their lunch in the mess tent.

Nemitz was lacing his boots, he said last week. The blast lifted him out of a chair and Rec heard a loud boom in his subconscious and “awoke in mid-air above my bed.”

Rec said Nemitz looked at him and said, “What the hell was that? They must have hit the DFAC (mess tent).”

They were about 200 yards away from the blast. “It shook everything,” Nemitz said.

They rushed out to see a “plume of smoke,” Rec said, and as they ran to the mess tent, a soldier passed them shouting “mass casualty, mass casualty.”

Nemitz said inside the tent was “gruesome.” The casualties were 22 dead and nearly 80 wounded.

Freeman wondered last week “why was I spared.”

Nemitz said the tent was noisy, dusty and crowded – bedlam. “It was controlled chaos,” he said.

Soldiers were taking the wounded out on stretchers when Nemitz and Rec arrived in the tent. “The (soldiers’) mission was to save their buddies,” Nemitz said.

Freeman, downed by the blast and bleeding, remembered a female soldier yelled at him, spurring him to fight to live.

“He was knocking on death’s door,” Freeman’s wife, Ora, said last week.

One of his own soldiers, Freeman said, stuffed paper towels in the blood-gushing cavity blown in his leg. He was evacuated in an Army Stryker vehicle across the road to an airfield he recalled as Diamondback where Army medics worked on him. “They were pros,” Freeman said.

Rec was shooting photos within minutes of the blast and Nemitz dictated an initial story on a satellite telephone call home to then Press Herald Managing Editor Eric Conrad.

Nemitz said a “chopper” quickly arrived to evacuate the wounded and Diamondback medics transferred Freeman to a helicopter for a life flight to an Army hospital elsewhere in Iraq. The chopper came under fire three times during the flight, Freeman said.

From Iraq, he was flown to Germany and then Walter Reed Medical Center in Virginia and, when discharged in 2005, spent 30 days in bed at home in Gorham.

He underwent multiple surgeries. “Shrapnel is still coming out of his body,” Ora said last week.

Nemitz easily recalled the names of two Maine soldiers who died: Spc. Thomas Dostie of Somerville and Sgt. Lynn Poulin Sr. of Freedom. The deaths “hit communities in the state really hard,” Nemitz said.

Rec said, “Their memorial service, held on the base on Christmas Eve Day, is the most difficult event I have ever documented in my 27-year career at the Portland Press Herald.”

Nemitz frequently thinks of the horrific scene he witnessed in that tent two decades ago. “People need to remember,” he said.

The attack left Freeman with PTSD, traumatic brain injury and migraines, his wife said.

For therapy, the couple dedicates their days to others. He participates in the Wounded Warrior Project, helping other veterans. In addition, he builds decks and wheelchair ramps for disabled veterans along with creating wooden U.S. flags in his shop.

Ora, a member of Co-Op Survival, makes dog leashes for veterans needing service dogs.