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Soldier, 25, dies after re-enlisting to aid ailing wife
Ex-Coon Rapids resident killed in Iraq on same day spouse left Indiana hospital
BY TAD VEZNER
Pioneer Press
Stacy Beardsley, a soldier's wife released this week from the hospital after a grueling surgery, watched two men in pressed military uniforms walk steadily to her front door.
"Tell me he's just hurt," the Indiana woman told the pair, according to family friend Marilyn Piersdorf.
"Well, they couldn't tell her that," Piersdorf said.
Her husband, Army Sgt. William "B.J." Beardsley, who recently lived in Coon Rapids, died Monday in Diwaniyah, Iraq, 80 miles south of Baghdad, after a roadside bomb went off near his vehicle.
The 25-year-old soldier had re-enlisted, in part, for the health insurance to cover his wife's medical bills.
He died the day she left the hospital.
The surgery had been on his mind until the end, said Beardsley's biological father, Jim Beardsley, of Blaine.
"On Friday, we talked and he said, 'If anything happens, call the Red Cross and they'll call me and I'll be there,' " Jim Beardsley said.
His son had another request.
"He said, 'If anything happens to me, I want to make sure my kids know who I am,' " Jim Beardsley said. "He was afraid that if something happened to him, the kids being as small as they are, they wouldn't understand why he was gone. …
"They'd think he was just gone. That was his fear."
Beardsley was born in Muskogee, Okla., and his parents split when he was a boy. He spent his early years hopping between military bases with his mother and stepfather, a military man himself.
Jim Beardsley said his son arrived in Coon Rapids in 2002 or 2003 to operate heavy equipment at his father's excavating business.
"He'd outwork anybody. If somebody else would dig, he'd dig faster," Jim Beardsley said.
B.J. Beardsley left the Twin Cities in December 2005 to join the Army. His batta lion in the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga., left for Iraq last September to provide support for U.S. coalition troops and to help train Iraqi security forces.
After Beardsley enlisted, his wife and their two children — a 3-year-old girl and 4-year-old boy — moved to an Indianapolis suburb to be closer to the wife's family.
It was B.J. Beardsley's second term of service. He joined the Army just after high school, was stationed in South Korea and at Fort Campbell, Ky., and met his wife, a soldier at the time. The two married five years ago.
After leaving the service, the couple arrived in Coon Rapids and spent three years hopping between there and Indiana, Jim Beardsley said, before family financial and medical concerns and the need for insurance prompted B.J. Beardsley's re-enlistment.
Beardsley's mother, Lavonna Harper, who lives in Oklahoma, said at first her son believed the U.S. cause in Iraq was just. But just a few weeks ago, Harper received an e-mail from him that said he could no longer make sense of why he was over there.
"I wrote him back and told him to be careful and keep his head down and his butt covered," Harper said. "I asked him what he needed me to send and when he was coming home."
She never got a reply.
Grandfather Jim Beardsley, of Roseville, noted that his grandson was known as a baseball pro on the military bases where he grew up — even joining a military kids' traveling team while his parents were stationed in Georgia.
Piersdorf, a former North St. Paul schoolteacher and a family friend, described Beardsley as one of the most polite men she had ever met.
"He was rather quiet, respectful — but with a great smile," Piersdorf said. "He had that Southern politeness about him."
"Anybody who would get out of the Army and go back in, with a wife and kids, do what he did, is a hero," the soldier's father said.
B.J. Beardsley was scheduled to return to Indiana in April for his son's fifth birthday, family members said. They were told he was to leave Iraq for stateside duty in August.
Beardsley's wife and biological father say Beardsley will be buried in Indiana, close to his widow and two children. The military will offer a full-honors memorial service in the Twin Cities area, though it has yet to be scheduled.
Beardsley was the 45th military member from Minnesota to die in the Iraq war.
On Thursday, the Pentagon announced the death of the 46th. Marine Sgt. Chad M. Allen, 25, of Maple Lake, was killed Wednesday during combat operations in Iraq's Anbar province.
Matt Peiken and the Associated Press contributed to this report. Tad Vezner can be reached at tvezner@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5461.
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