2 Iraq tours, a tailspin — and a tragic end

[unhappycamper]

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 : Sunday Apr 25, 2010 10:03:47 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.



unhappycamper comment: As someone who did two tours of Nam, I can tell you this happened many, many times during our 14 year 'involvement' in that country. Please note that there are the names of 58,264 veterans on The Wall and not one mention of suicides. The people who suicided were killed by Vietnam every bit as much as the 58,264.

Oh BTW - the United States paid (yup, paid) for much of the French occupation of Vietnam.