Remembering a hero
Family and friends mourn the loss of Coleman Bean, 25
BY BRIAN DONAHUE Staff Writer
Coleman Bean was a lot of things to a lot of people. He was a son, a brother, a soldier, and to seemingly everyone who knew him, a good friend. He was someone they could count on to be there, in times of need and in happy times.

FILE PHOTO Coleman Bean plays with the family's dog at home in East Brunswick in March 2004, shortly after returning from his first tour of duty with the U.S. Army in Iraq.

When he took his life on Sept. 6, he left those who knew him in shock. But he also left them with 25 years of cherished memories, the kind that could only come from a fun and thoughtful kid who became a loving, caring young man. It's Coleman's indelible character, and not the way he left, that his East Brunswick family — his parents Greg and Linda, younger brother Paddy and older brother Nick — will always hold on to.

Greg Bean, who is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers, knows how he'll recall his middle son. Most prominent in his mind is the memory of Coleman stopping by unannounced the night before he died.

JEFF GRANIT staff Hundreds wait in line to get into the United Methodist Church in Milltown for the Sept. 10 memorial service for Coleman Bean.

"I was sitting here watching TV, and he poked his face in the dining room window and made a funny face at me," Greg recalled, adding that Coleman, living in South River after returning from his second tour in Iraq, had been dropping over for dinner often, knowing Greg was on leave from work and was cooking a lot.

"He came in and said, 'What'd you make for dinner?' I said, 'I didn't know you were coming, so I didn't make enough for you.' So he made a triple-decker peanut butter sandwich and chips, and sat here and talked baby talk to my new dog, who he had just fallen in love with. … But I'm going to remember that night, because he was just happy and joking, and we made plans to go to the movies the next day and to the gym together on Monday. … I've got a million memories; we went through pictures the other day, and all of them bring back lots and lots of memories, but the one I'm gonna keep with me is just the way he was the day before he died."

JEFF GRANIT staff Nick Strickland, the older brother of Coleman Bean, gets a hug while holding an American flag presented to the family at the service.

In the early hours of the next morning, the family would learn, Coleman got into a one-car accident in West Long Branch, was hospitalized briefly, returned home to his apartment in South River and shot himself. His family and friends would react with shock and sadness, and also with anger that he would leave them this way.G

reg Bean's anger is also directed at the U.S. Army. After Coleman returned from nearly a year in Iraq in 2004, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for issues including extreme anxiety attacks and depression. Despite the diagnosis, the Army sent him back to the war in 2007.

"He had gone to the V.A. and seen a bunch of people [at] the Lyons campus. … He was diagnosed with PTSD and some other troubling issues, just lingering issues from Iraq," his father said. "The problem is that the V.A. doesn't really have anything to do directly with the Army. When he got called back, the Army said, 'Well, we don't care what the V.A. says about you. If you want a deferment from that, you have to get it from an Army psychiatrist.' "

JEFF GRANIT staff Members of the military came from all over the country to pay their respects to U.S. Army Sgt. Coleman Bean at the memorial service Sept. 10.

Coleman feared that if he went to an Army psychiatrist, he'd spend the next deployment cleaning latrines or some other unwanted duty.

"The fact that he was diagnosed with [PTSD] didn't have any impact on him being deployed a second time. I think that's wrong. I think that's horrible that a soldier could be seeing a Veterans Administration doctor and that carries no weight with our Army," Greg said.

Coleman's own feelings toward the war and the Army changed over time. He enlisted in 2001, six days before the Sept. 11 attacks. After graduating from East Brunswick High School, Coleman saw the Army as an opportunity to learn some skills, test himself and serve his country. He decided to become a paratrooper.

FILE PHOTO U.S. Army Spc. Coleman Bean at home in East Brunswick with grandfather Cloyd Harris and father Greg Bean in happier times.

After his training, Coleman served a two-month rotation in Kosovo in early 2003, and with the war under way, he parachuted into Iraq in March with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. His unit spent the first two weeks securing the Bashur airstrip. The group of about 40 men then moved to Kirkuk in Northern Iraq, securing the air base there and ultimately becoming a patrol force, and searching for insurgents.

In a March 2004 interview with Greater Media Newspapers, Coleman was happy to discuss the day-to-day operations in Iraq, but chose not to talk about the darker realities he and his unit experienced, things that he also would not share with his family and friends in the years since.

"He didn't want to keep dragging it out," Greg Bean said. "It came out in bits and pieces, you know. … The only people that knew the whole story were the people that he was there with."

Coleman's younger brother, Paddy, who was in high school when he returned home, recalls him coming to speak to some of the classes, sharing his experiences but leaving out the grim details. Paddy and Nick both describe Coleman as their best friend, but even they were not let in on too much of what he experienced.

"Normal day-to-day, he never really talked about it, and me and Nick didn't really ask about it," Paddy said.

Jonathan Nelson, who served with Coleman on his first deployment, recalls how things changed while they were there, as the tour was continually extended beyond the initial three months. The soldiers went in eager to defend their country, he said, and they were excited to be part of the force that ended Saddam Hussein's regime. They assumed the war had been won and they could soon go home.

"It wasn't until six months later, seven months later, eight months later, as the time dragged on, it just seemed more and more futile," Nelson said. "Like, 'Why? Now what are we doing here?' The regime supposedly has fallen, you know."

As the tour was prolonged, and with no idea of when it would be complete, enthusiasm faded, Nelson said.

"And the longer we were there, the angrier we got," he said. "And I remember just all of us having just contempt, real contempt [for] the people there. … We saw a lot of horrifying things over there, but as the time went on, the horrifying things we saw we just laughed about. There was nothing else we could do, you know, you couldn't break down and cry. You couldn't get on a phone and call home. And hell if a letter is gonna get to anybody in time to really convey what you're feeling at that moment. So a lot of these stories just became comical to us, and we just laughed it off. And we just always talked about what we were gonna do when we got home."

Peter Nicolai, who was also with the 173rd Airborne infantry, said serving in Northern Iraq exposed the soldiers to unique ethnic tensions, because of the presence of Kurds and Turks in addition to the Sunnis and Shiites. In the absence of an authoritarian government, he said, "they enacted just horrific vendettas against each other."

He recalled one occasion where a man was stabbed by his brother, and was bleeding and screaming in the street, and the soldiers had no choice but to watch him die because they were not permitted to provide medical assistance. At other times, they would see things like an insurgent using his 5-year-old daughter as a shield from bullets.

"The absolute dregs of society," Nicolai said. "And it loosens your belief in human morality. Before that point, there were certain things that I could've told you the average human wouldn't do, that it's not in the general nature of a human. To be completely proven wrong is something that, there's no way to cope with it. And coming back into a secular society that still has that kind of faith and honor and just the general disposition of people, you have a problem relating to and trusting anybody."

Being called for a second deployment, this time as part of the Maryland National Guard, and being told his V.A. diagnosis did not count, Coleman chose to serve his country again as best he could. He worked out, changed his diet, and "seemed to be in a good mental place," his father said.

After serving again in Northern Iraq through much of 2007 and early 2008, he returned home in May. He began working with his brother Nick at a Web publishing business, and was learning to do IT work. Coleman may have pursued that as a career, and he was also considering taking college courses, his father said.

But as Coleman was deciding what to do, there also remained the possibility of a third deployment. Greg said the Army had the ability to again call his son back until November, and the looming possibility clouded his future direction.

When Coleman took his life, he became the latest in an overwhelming number of veteran suicides. The suicide rate among those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan was 141 between 2002 and 2005, but was 113 in 2006 alone, the last year for which records are available, according to news reports.

The suddenness and sadness of Coleman's departure was evident on the faces of the more than 300 people who attended a memorial service Sept. 10 at the United Methodist Church in Milltown. The Rev. George Campbell, an Episcopalian minister, conducted the service, himself a father who lost a son in his 20s. Greg Bean noted that the family found comfort in Campbell's sermon, and through his words and support during private services.

The family was also touched by the fact that so many people — relatives, friends, business associates, military brass and soldiers, who flew from as far away as Oregon and Kentucky — who came to pay their respects, many of whom Greg said he had no opportunity to thank in person.

"I know that there were a lot of people there, not all of them got to sign the guest book, and I may never know that they were there," Greg said. "But I want to say thanks to the people. People came out of the woodwork to do things, and I can't even begin to enumerate them. It was humbling and touching."

During the service, Paddy Bean spoke of one fond memory of himself and Coleman, around 4 and 7 years old, going to a garage sale with some loose change, and picking out a large stuffed snake. Paddy laughed about how the two of them walked home "like kings" that day.

"That's a good representation of how our relationship was," Paddy said later. "I remember walking arm in arm down the road with him with that stupid stuffed snake around our shoulders, but that's how it was, you know, it was me and him."

Coleman's older brother, Nick Strickland, told the gathering how the three brothers would have drinks together and toast "to the way things should be." He said they'd joke about the three of them one day being 80 years old and selling used tires somewhere in the Arizona desert.

"We're all best friends with each other," Nick said. "He was an amazing man, an amazing soldier, an amazing friend. He cared so deeply for everybody."

Paddy said Coleman was his hero.

"He was smart and he was funny, and he knew that when something needed to get done, he laced his boots up and got it done. That's what his viewpoint of a man was — when something needs to get done, it gets done, and that's what he did," Paddy said.

Military friends echoed the feelings of Coleman's family.

"Coleman was one of the better people I ever had the pleasure of running into in my life," Nicolai, of the 173rd Airborne, said. "He would do anything for you, anything at all, shirt off his back, lend 10 bucks, any of those types of things."

Among the best memories of Coleman, Greg Bean said, are the camping trips the family would take to Massachusetts. That is where Coleman's ashes will be spread, a request he made before his second tour in Iraq, in case he was killed. Before his first deployment, he had said he wanted to be buried in Arlington, Va., but his experiences prompted him to change his mind.

Another special time the Beans will remember occurred around Christmas, and last year, when Coleman was in the midst of his second tour in Iraq, he managed to bring the family perhaps its most prized holiday memory. He showed up and surprised them on Christmas Eve.

"He just showed up. He had gotten that leave and none of us knew he was coming until the day before Christmas, and he just walked in the kitchen and said, 'What's for dinner?' And we had shipped all of his Christmas presents to Iraq, and so we had to run out and buy him [more presents], you know," Greg said with a laugh.

Coleman will be missed, but the memories will endure. And as Greg wrote in his eulogy, his spirit will live on.