Sgt. Coleman Bean, 2 Iraq tours, a tailspin and a tragic end

AP COURTESY OF GREGORY BEAN In this 2007 photo provided by Gregory Bean, Coleman Bean, left, his younger brother Padraic Bean, center, and his older brother Nick Strickland pose at Fort Dix, weeks before Coleman's second deployment for Iraq. Coleman shot himself dead at his New Jersey home on Sept. 6, 2008 at age 25.

2 Iraq tours, a tailspin and a tragic end

By Sharon Cohen - The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Apr 26, 2010 7:09:22 EDT

Coleman Bean went to Iraq twice, but his father remembers a stark difference in his son’s two parting messages.

Before his first tour, his father recalls, his son said if anything happened to him, he wanted to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Before his second, four years later, he said he didn’t want that any longer.

“He still was very patriotic, he believed in duty,” Greg Bean says. “But he had sort of lost his commitment to what we were doing over there. His first tour ... had changed him.”

Bean enlisted in the Army six days before the 9/11 attacks. He parachuted into Iraq in the first chaotic weeks of the war. When he returned a year later, he offered PG-rated, sanitized versions of his experiences.

“We got glimpses,” the elder Bean says. “He didn’t give us a lot of details.”

Only later on, the elder Bean says, did he learn from Coleman’s friends and Army buddies that his son was among those who’d witnessed a horrifying bus explosion across the street from a safe house in Iraq where he and other soldiers had holed up. Several Iraqis, including children, burned to death before their eyes.
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2 Iraq tours, a tailspin and a tragic end