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• Keeping His Cool • Desert Storm: A Perfect War - Maj. Joe |
It was his first day on the job in Baghdad as a military policeman, and Spc. Sam Beall stood with his back to a wall, avoiding gunfire. The Cypress Hill song, “Born to Get Busy,” ran through his head:
I went to learn acquire knowledge of a scholar went to college all
Comes very handy when it comes to pushin’, shovin’ and stuff
Then ask who is he though, I’m not the sissy
I’m stiff to neutral brother, and I’m born to get busy.
“You gotta keep your cool,” Beall says, “because if you don’t, that’s when people die. I wasn’t going to die.”
In a matter of months, sports management major Beall went from working at Best Buy to being a cop in Baghdad. He broke up a counterfeit ring and patrolled the city and the Tigris River.
The gunfire he dodged on his first day in Baghdad wouldn’t be the last.
“One night, I was watching bullets bounce off the pavement,” he says. “When we started taking fire, I put the pedal down. I was out of there. I told too many people I was coming home.”
A 23-year-old Kent State student, Sam Beall,
left for Iraq on February 24, 2003 and returned
on January 28, 2004. Beall refused to wear his
uniform for a photo because he said it brought
back too many painful memories.
The building where he worked in Baghdad was a skeleton—no glass windows, no doors and no jail cells. The soldiers created a jail cell using a desk, which held up a grate. The paint was peeling off the concrete walls. On one wall, American and Iraqi flags hung side by side.
On top of the station, a soldier kept guard behind a barricade of sandbags.
On the outside, barbed wire kept prisoners in the station and Iraqi children out.
“If you give a kid over there a dollar, they’d do anything,” Beall says. “They’ll just follow you around.”
Not all the Iraqi people were fond of the soldiers. Beall says most of the people were nice. The rest threw rocks.
“It pissed me off because I didn’t want to be there anyway,” he says.
While on patrol, Beall visited the Baghdad Zoo. Twice, on his days off, he swam among fountains in Saddam Hussein’s pool, surrounded by palm trees.
“It was the best feeling in the world,” he says.
For the rest of his time in Iraq, he lived out of a tent in the yard of the former vice president’s palace. He showered in a trailer. He worked an 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift. And during the day, he endured 140-degree heat.
“There’s really never any getting used to it,” Beall says.
Camel spiders, which can grow to have a leg span of 5 inches, were something the soldiers never got used to, either.
Beall remembers a time in Kuwait when someone spotted a camel spider in the tent.
“You gotta keep your cool because if you don't, that's when people die. I wasn't going to die”
“There were grown-ass men jumping on the bed screaming, ‘Kill it! Kill it!’” he says with a laugh. Someone finally threw a boot on it.
Beall’s unit left Iraq on Dec. 22, 2003, but it didn’t leave with everyone it had come with.
On Dec. 10, while some soldiers were patrolling the Tigris River, Staff Sgt. Aaron Todd Reese fell in. Sgt. Todd Bates went in to try and save him, but both drowned. To this day, it is unknown how Reese fell in the river.
“It pretty much crushed us,” Beall says. “The whole Bates and Reese thing showed us a sense of vulnerability.”
Sam Beall walks through Saddam Hussein’s palace after he is
captured.
Reese’s body was found two days later. But Beall and his unit spent 11 days looking for Bates.
“You’re basically sitting there waiting for your friend to float up,” he says. “It sucks, especially because you know it could have been you.”
On Christmas Eve in Kuwait, Beall heard Bates’ body had been found.
“It kind of makes you feel guilty because you made it home, and they didn’t,” Beall says.
At Hopkins International Airport, Beall was reunited with his family.
“I don’t know how you describe the feeling,” he says. “It was great to be home.”
Beall also met the families and friends of the soldiers he served with, but he felt like he already knew them.
“Twelve hours of sitting on top of a roof in Baghdad will do that to you,” he says.
Looking back, he says his time in Iraq was “like a bad dream. It’s like it never happened, but the memories are still there.”
Recently, Beall was watching TV and saw footage of troops playing football in Iraq. Suddenly the smell of Baghdad and the feel of wind on his face came rushing back.
“It almost made me puke,” he says. “I’d break my fucking leg if I have to go back.”
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