RENEWED
PURPOSE
Veteran finds community in the VFW
BY MACEE SWAFFORD- STAFF WRITER
For 71-year-old Larry Freimuth, a lifetime of service and resilience has led him to find renewed purpose in Williamsburg, Kentucky. Originally from northern Kentucky, he grew up in the Covington and Cincinnati area, raised primarily by his mother. Though life wasn’ t always easy, he described his childhood as fairly normal.“ I didn’ t have a lot of things a lot of kids had,” he said.“ That was my life. I enjoyed going out playing as a child, and had a fairly normal childhood.” At 17, Freimuth enlisted in the U. S. Army in search of direction and independence. He went in January 1972 and was honorably discharged in December 1977—“ 5 years, 10 months, 22 days, 13 hours and 23 minutes,” he said. Initially trained to be a truck mechanic, his partial blindness in one eye prevented him from driving, leading to reassignment after reassignment. Instead, he served in multiple roles, from generator mechanic to assisting helicopter crew chiefs. Throughout his six years of service, Freimuth was stationed in Germany, Florida, Fort Knox, and South Korea. One of his most unique duties came at the United States Readiness Command in Tampa, Florida, where he handled the destruction of classified documents.
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