Sergeant Princess Crystal Samuels was born February 27th, 1985, in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Fitting to her name, Samuels was known as a “girly girl”. She was a cheerleader in high school with an unmatched love for pink. She had a white poodle named Skylar whose ears and tail she had dyed a light fuchsia, and her Mustang was custom embellished pink and purple to match a Barbie car she had as a child.
Samuels graduated from Charles Herbert Flowers High School in Springdale, Maryland, in 2003. Citing that she didn’t feel ready for college, Samuels enlisted in the Army and wanted to travel after high school. She chose the Army because it allowed her to pursue work as an imagery analyst gathering intelligence. She was assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division.
A friend she enlisted with recalled how Samuels had convinced her to let her pull off their sets of braces so they could enlist: “I wasn’t messing with those pliers, but she had no problem with it.”
Samuels became an intelligence analyst with Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division and deployed to Iraq.
On August 15th, 2007, in Taji, Iraq, Samuels was killed by indirect enemy fire. She was 22. Another soldier, Zandra T. Worthy-Walker, 28, was also killed. Sergeant Samuels was survived by her husband, to whom she had only been married to for a year; her mother; her brother; her maternal grandparents and paternal grandfather; her great-grandmother; two aunts; one uncle; and many nieces and nephews.
After her passing, a friend of Sergeant Samuels posted on her MySpace page, reflecting on her beautiful spirit and strong personality and how she “always made me see the good side of things [and] laugh at stuff that I didn’t think I could laugh at.”
Her funeral service reflected that same spirit. Many mourners dressed in hues of rose, programs were printed on fluorescent pink paper, and a few women had even died their hair pink.
Sergeant Princess C. Samuels is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.
Sources:
https://cnsmaryland.org/2007/08/31/girly-girl-soldier-lies-in-arlington/
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/21030790/princess_crystal-samuels
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