2 Iraq tours, a tailspin _ and a tragic end

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j5e8RibFzA4Jci8hv2p26WjWSCiAD9F9HIA86

By SHARON COHEN (AP) – 3 hours ago

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.

There also was the shooting death of an Iraqi child riding in a car that inexplicably ran a roadblock. "Several shots were fired," the elder Bean says. "There was no way to know who killed the child."

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Heartbreaking for the parents, and for all the soldiers whose story it tells.

:cry: