Oregon marine vet killed fighting for Ukraine

Joel David Beal was a U.S. Marine veteran who served from 2006 until 2010 including deployment to Iraq in 2008. As reported by the military media outlet, Task and Purpose, Beal received multiple military awards for his service and left the service with the rank of Lance Corporal. After he left the Marines, he worked as a mechanic and a technician, repairing wind turbines.

A year ago Beal went to Ukraine to fight alongside the country’s military forces against the Russian invasion. He helped form what became known as Chosen Company, made up of foreign fighters attached to Ukraine’s 59th Motorized Brigade. He was killed in combat in October, six months after he began his service. We hear about Beal and his experience in Ukraine from his partner Alex, whose real name we are not using for security reasons.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller:  This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with a story of a Portlander named Joel Beal. He served in the US Marines from 2006 to 2010, including a deployment to Iraq. After he left the Marines, he worked as a mechanic and a technician repairing wind turbines. Then came Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine. Beal felt called to join that fight, and a year ago, that’s exactly what he did. He helped form what became known as “Chosen Company” made up of foreign fighters attached to Ukraine’s 59th Motorized Brigade. As reported by the military media outlet Task and Purpose, Beal was killed in combat in October, six months after he began his service. We’re going to hear more about Joel Beal’s life right now from his former partner who we’ve agreed to not use their name for security reasons.

I just want to say, first of all, to acknowledge that this month marks what I understand would have been your third anniversary with Joel. I just want to say, first of all, I’m so sorry for your loss and I’m very grateful you agreed to come in to talk about your story and his. So thank you.

Joel Beal’s Partner:  Yeah, thank you for having me.

Miller:  How did the two of you meet?

Partner:  We met through a friend and he agreed to help me fix my car and change my spark plugs.

Miller:  In that first meeting?

Partner:  It wasn’t our first meeting. We’d met before, but that started to be how we got together.

Miller:  You said yes, I’d love a free fix of my car?

Partner:  I said I had some car problems and he said, “Oh, I can help you with that.” And he came over and I paid him with a six pack of Guinness and some Marlboro Reds [laughter].

Miller:  Did it feel sort of like a date from the beginning?

Partner:  No, I just… you know, I liked what I saw.

Miller:  Why do you like him?

Partner:  He was so funny and he was always willing to help people and very thoughtful and, yeah, he was a really deep thinker.

Miller:  How did you realize that? How did you come to see him as a deep thinker?

Partner:  He would just think for a long time about something and then come back around to it. And he was always thinking, with his furrowed brow and very serious person, but also funny at the same time.

Miller:  I mentioned that he served a tour in Iraq with the Marines. How much did he talk to you about his military service?

Partner:  Not too much. I asked questions sometimes but that’s not something that a lot of people like to talk about.

Miller:  And it was the same for him?

Partner:  What do you mean?

Miller:  That it wasn’t something that he liked to talk about?

Partner:  I don’t know. It’s a sensitive topic for a lot of people and I don’t know how to answer it. There’s so many unanswered questions that I have, more things I’d wished I’d asked about with him, that we didn’t get a chance to talk about. I thought, you know, we’d have more time.

Miller:  When the two of you got together, did it ever occur to you that he would go off to fight in another war?

Partner:  Mm, we talked about it when the war started...

Miller:  But not before the full scale war in Ukraine.

Partner:  Well, he was dissatisfied with a lot of the things that he saw, the injustice that he saw in the world. And that was kind of a core part of his life. So when the war kicked off in Ukraine, he wanted to go immediately. And I asked him not to.

Miller:  You said he said he wanted to go immediately. So what did he say to you?

Partner:  Just that it was so wrong and he wanted to do it. And it eventually became that he would regret it for the rest of his life if he didn’t go.

Miller:  What do you think he meant by that?

Partner:  He was a fighter. He really wanted to fight. He was dissatisfied with his military service. He no longer believed in the ideals that America had purported to be fighting for. And he wanted to fight for something. He truly wanted to fight an oppressor and be a force of good in the world.

Miller:  In a way that he didn’t come to see his role, as a part of the US military in Iraq, in that same way?

Partner:  Correct.

Miller:  So on some level that is maybe tied to, but also maybe separate from, seeing yourself as a fighter. In this case, he seems like he was both a fighter and he saw a fight that he saw as more noble than what he had taken part in?

Partner:  I can’t speak to how he saw it in comparison to his prior military service. But you know, I can say, he burned his Marine Corps uniform afterward.

Miller:  When he was done with his service, he burned his uniform. It says a lot. So the war in Ukraine starts, a full scale war. We should point it out, because I think sometimes people forget that Russia had invaded Ukraine many years earlier. But this was a full scale invasion and he came to you and said, “I want to fight,” and you said “I asked him not to go.” Can you give us a sense for what those conversations were like?

Partner:  It was pretty bad, you know. Begging, crying. But about a year went by… and I had his friends. We all tried, we all tried to keep him home. But eventually, if you love somebody, you have to let them take their own risks and live their life, even if you don’t want them to do something.

Miller:  You’d been together for two years, am I right, before he left? What kinds of plans did the two of you make for your future at that point? What was already sort of on the table for the two of you, as a couple?

Partner:  We definitely wanted to move in together. We were thinking about years into the future. I’m in school, so we were waiting for my school to be done. And we wanted to leave Portland and… we didn’t know. Travel the world. We talked about having kids and… so the whole thing, we imagined.

Miller:  It seems like you and also your friends, the sense I get is these were very serious conversations you had with Joel where, I imagine, the ultimate question was, “What if you die?” I imagine that it can’t have not come up, the fear of or possibility of death?

Partner:  I talked about it. He really didn’t. He just said that he thought he could do it and that he wanted to do it, regardless. And he was fearless, and I don’t mean naive. He really, he was just like, “I’m going to go for it” and it’s what he wanted to do. It’s what made him feel alive, to fight for something and to fight for a better world.

Miller:  What do you remember about his departure?

Partner:  Uh… everything? Which part?

Miller:  Where were you?

Partner:  At the Portland Airport. It was raining. Oh, and he was excited to go. He walked off happy.

Miller:  How does a non-Ukrainian actually join the fight against Russia? I mean, how do you even begin to be, for example, accepted by a foreign military? Among other things, they have to make sure that you’re going to not shoot them. How does it even work, logistically?

Partner:  There’s the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine. And you can, literally, just go on Reddit and talk to a recruiter. The rules have changed off and on over the last few years of the war. They want people with military experience but they will also accept people who don’t have any.

I feel a little bad, I don’t want to give people a step-by-step. If people want to do it, they’ll figure out how to do it. But yeah, you talk to a recruiter and you fly into Poland usually and take a bus or a train to the border and someone, your recruiter, will meet you at the border and take you to the next location.

Miller:  But that’s not, in the end, what Joel did?

Partner:  No, no, he left the Legion, the International Legion, with a group of guys. It wasn’t what he was looking for. It’s my understanding that a lot of the international fighters are not well regarded by the Ukrainian soldiers. They can leave whenever they want. They often turn tail as soon as the first bomb falls on them because Ukraine doesn’t have air superiority. And a lot of American vets are not used to that, even if they saw combat in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Miller:  They’ve never served in a place where they weren’t in control of the skies?

Partner:  Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of people flee. For that reason, because international fighters have been a bit unreliable, obviously not everybody, they don’t get put to the very front often, is what I was told.

Miller:  And that’s what he wanted?

Partner: He wanted to be on the front. Yeah, he wanted to be fighting. He was ready for trench warfare. And so he and some guys left the Legion. Somebody had some contacts in the Ukrainian Army. And this company was formed to become the “Chosen Company.” And they were doing what they wanted to do, assaulting Russian trenches and kicking ass.

Miller:  What did you learn about his fellow soldiers?

Partner:  I’ve learned they’re all crazy guys. You don’t do that. You don’t put yourself in that position as just a regular normal person. It is normal to not want to go to war. And as one of them said to me, “You’re not crazy for not wanting to fight a war.”

Miller:  You’re not defending your homeland either. You’re not fighting for your country either. Where did they come from? Not just the U.S.?

Partner:  Literally all over the world. Germany, Sweden, Australia, Ireland, Britain, countries in South America, all over, Taiwan. There’s Belarusian fighters who are pro-Ukrainian. There’s Russians who leave Russia to go fight for Ukraine. They’re not all in that company necessarily, but there’s people coming from all over the world.

Miller:  How much are you able to talk to Joel about what his life was like on a day-to-day basis?

Partner:  Oh, we talked morning and night. Yeah. He was very, very secure. So I didn’t know where he was. I had an idea but I would see little things like “Here are the cats who are in our camp.”

Miller:  He would send you pictures of the cats?

Partner:  Yeah, there were lots of kittens and dogs. and he’d tell me little things like, “Oh, we went and did an exploratory mission looking for supplies in these abandoned buildings,” or, you know, “A truck blew up in front of me while we were on a mission today.” So it did vary from, I met a cat to some stuff that blew up.

Miller:  And that was about all he could tell you in terms of what he was actually doing was “some stuff blew up?”

Partner:  He might have been able to tell me more but he was always very, secretive isn’t the right word. But in order to keep everybody secure, there’s so many details that need to be kept under wraps until, I don’t know, a certain amount of time has passed. They change positions or whatever. You don’t want to give away too many identifying details, even on a secure messaging app, because you don’t know.

Miller:  Where did all of his gear, uniforms, weapons, communications, technology come from?

Partner:  He brought his plates for his vest from here. But like the weapons, they get them there, They’re issued. It’s like a real military. They’re issued weapons…

Miller:  From the Ukrainian military?

Partner:  Yeah, it’s not good. A lot of what they were getting is stuff that’s seen heavy fighting for many years. They don’t have brand new gear at all. He had a grenade launcher, a GP-25, that would barely load. [He was] hammering in grenades with the hilt of his knife to get a round off, in combat. Like that’s bad.

He also had a little workshop in Ukraine where he would help people fix their guns or sew up their clothes or sew up their gear. He cleared out a room they called “the goblin workshop.” It also became a hangout room for everybody. People would come and go and wait for their stuff to be fixed.

Miller: You mentioned that a lot of the American soldiers or former American service members were not used to being in a place where they didn’t have air superiority. In a lot of the coverage I’ve seen and in reports from people there including many Ukrainian soldiers, they talk so much about drones. Often Russian drones, but some of their own as well. Was that true for Joel as well? I’m just curious how much he talked about drones?

Partner:  He didn’t talk about drones, but they were an ever present reality in the fighting. It’s my understanding that barely a mission is done in Ukraine without a drone. You send them up ahead, you have them flying up ahead of everybody to go do, basically, scouting. And then on the mission, you have drones. After the mission, you have drones just to see everything.

Miller:  So they’re ever present?

Partner:  Yes. And then you have the FPV drones, the first person view drone that you can fly. People fly them into tanks, people blow them up in soldiers faces, drop grenades on them, whatever. Yes, it’s everywhere.

Miller:  What did you hear from Joel about how foreign soldiers were seen by Ukrainian soldiers or by Ukrainian civilians?

Partner:  People were very glad that they were there fighting. It kind of depended. With the International Legion, in the town nearby where they were, they weren’t too happy with the foreigners being there, because they weren’t helping. A lot of those people were, I don’t know, starting fights, getting drunk, doing stupid stuff that wasn’t about fighting the war. So of course, these people are unhappy.

Miller:  They were seen as sort of mercenaries or thrill seekers?

Partner:  Not mercenaries, but there are people who go to conflicts and they want to live out some version of themselves and also just take. They’re not who they say they are. They are running away from something. They’re not there with Ukraine’s best interest, which is another reason why Joel wanted to leave the Legion. But after he left, when he would meet Ukrainians, they were glad and honored that foreigners were fighting for them, for their country.

Miller:  How did you hear that he had been killed?

Partner:  His mom called me. Or she sent me a text message and then I called her. They had called her. The Ukrainian military had called her the night before.

Miller:  When an American service member is killed in combat, on behalf of their country, there’s this whole ritual that’s established notification next of kin, which sounds like it did happen in this case – bringing the body back, the option for a military funeral among other things. What happened with Joel?

Partner:  He did have a military funeral in Ukraine. Yeah, it was a double funeral. He and another guy who’d been killed some days before, I believe. And it was in a beautiful church in Kyiv. I forget which one but they sent me pictures and videos. And then they cremated him and he’s interred in a military cemetery there.

Miller:  Did you want to find out any details about how he was killed?

Partner:  Yeah, of course I did, I mean, it’s horrible. It’s horrible to not know because you were just imagining every horrible situation that your mind can think of when you don’t know.

Miller:  Were you able to find out enough to, at least, put your worst fears to rest?

Partner:  Yeah. Yeah, it took about six months but I was able to finally talk to somebody. You have to wait for a security clearance basically. And, you know, they’re all so busy. All those guys, they stayed in combat. They were around Horlivka, which was some of the most intense fighting any of them had seen in Ukraine. From what I gathered, they were able to have a little funeral but then they had to keep fighting. So they’re at war. They’re not the easiest people to talk to. So I had to wait.

Miller:  How much support have you had since Joel was killed?

Partner:  Oh, my friends and my family, they’ve really rallied for me and, yeah, really good.

Miller:  It’s a reality of this country that even when US troops were at war in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, the effects on families back here was very uneven. It’s a very small percentage of military families in this country. And so life went on for so many Americans, from 2002, for more than a decade. But the fact remains that we did know that we were a country at war and that there were families of service members who were serving overseas. It’s really different, what you’ve experienced.

I’m just curious what it was like, both for the six months when he was fighting and the six months since then, to be a Portlander going around with a loved one fighting in a war, actively fighting in an act of war. But nobody else around here basically was experiencing that. What was that like?

Partner:  Oh, it was bad. It was pretty bad. As Joel would say, “I was straight up not having a good time.” It’s really like a brain breaking a little bit and I didn’t want to tell a lot of people because I didn’t want to hear anyone’s bad opinions or ignorant opinions about the war.

Miller:  So out of self preservation, you were even more isolated?

Partner:  Yeah, a little bit because people would think I was joking and then they’d need all kinds of details and then want me to explain. If I ever said it I had to explain so many things about the war, about why he went, and how I feel about it. And it’s like this is way too invasive for me. This is too much.

Miller:  It does make me wonder. I mean, we heard about your story and reached out to you and said, “Hey, how would you feel about talking.” And you thought about it and then said yes. Why?

Partner:  Because he really was such an amazing person and I just wanted more people to know that he existed. Yeah. A lot of people, after he died… if I said, “Oh, yeah, my boyfriend was fighting in Ukraine and he got blown up.” They think I’m joking.

Miller:  I mentioned at the beginning that you asked if we could not use your name for security reasons. And we agreed. Can you give us a sense for what you’re worried about [and] why you feel it’s important to maintain anonymity?

Partner:  Because there are Russian trolls online who go after foreign fighters’ families. They issue death threats, they might try to hack them, they harass them online. I don’t want any part of that. I don’t want anyone to have to experience that.

Miller:  For so much of the time when Joel was fighting and after he was killed, there was a raging debate in the US about whether or not we would provide more support for Ukraine, more military support. And just recently that happened. The House had a kind of political breakthrough and the President signed it. What went through your mind when you heard that Ukraine was going to get more US aid?

Partner:  I was glad but it’s still not enough. It’s been six months, it was about six months, I think, since they’d last received aid. And it really hurt the fighters. It really hurts the war and Russia has been able to make advances. So I think that if Ukraine is not supported by other countries, by the United States, by other countries in Europe, that Russia could win. And Russia is not going to stop advancing and it’ll be another country next and it’ll be an even bigger war. We’ve got to spend more money now so we don’t spend even more money later and, you know, the loss of more life and the spread of fascism across the globe.

Miller:  Thank you very much for coming and I really appreciate it.

Partner:  Thank you for having me.

Miller:  We’ve been talking to the former partner of Joel Beal, a U.S. Marine veteran from Portland who died fighting in Ukraine about six months ago.

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