For some Iraqis without necessities of daily living most people take for granted, “heaven” is when a supply-laden U.S. Army convoy rolls into town. For some of the soldiers tasked with delivering those life-sustaining supplies, “heaven” is having hot running
For some Iraqis without necessities of daily living most people take for granted, “heaven” is when a supply-laden U.S. Army convoy rolls into town.
For some of the soldiers tasked with delivering those life-sustaining supplies, “heaven” is having hot running water for showers and a laundry brigade nearby.
Delivering slices of heaven and receiving bits of heaven is Army 1st Lt. Courtney Blake Sugai, a Kauai native, Kauai High School graduate and daughter of Hartwell Blake of Koloa and Rosemary Blake of Florida.
It still amazes her, according to her father, that soldiers like her in a foreign land eat much better than the inhabitants.
“For the people, every day is survival,” something akin to living on Kauai after a hurricane, with uncertainties about where your day’s drinking water or next meal will come from, Blake told her father in a recent letter home.
“Iraqis love our MREs,” or the meals ready to eat that Army personnel complain about when fantasizing about hot, home-cooked meals, she said.
Assigned to a maintenance company that prepares and delivers supplies like food, water, mail, gasoline, oil, equipment parts and other goods to troops as well as Iraqi residents in humanitarian runs, Sugai remains in the war zone, not knowing if even the year’s end will see her able to come home, or leave Iraq, Blake said.
Of the four convoys a day, the mail run is the most important, because it delivers warm words from home to the thousands of troops still occupying Iraq long after the most-intense fighting has ended, she told her father.
“We’re in heaven” because of the nearby shower and laundry brigade, which affords Sugai hot showers and clean clothes. The T-shirts and socks, though, remain clean and dry only until she places her body armor and other equipment over them.
Then, they immediately become drenched with sweat in the sweltering desert, she said.
When the Army convoys pull into dusty towns, the personnel are treated like royalty, because residents understand that with the soldiers come clean water and food, she said.
Women and children of the villages offer the soldiers what little they have, even boiling-hot tea that doesn’t exactly please the palate on 100-degree days, Sugai told Blake.
Blake, 58, is a former county attorney, Army Vietnam veteran and attorney in private practice. Mostly, though, these days he’s a worried father with a child serving her country, wearing body armor in a war zone.
Her 101st Airborne group had been west of Baghdad early in the war, but is now in northern Iraq, near Mosul.
Another reason for her heavenly feeling is that she has, finally, gotten to occasionally see her husband, 1st Lt. Iven Sugai, a native of Ewa Beach, Oahu, who was completing U.S. Army Ranger training when war broke out.
He also is somewhere in Iraq, as is U.S. Army Spec. Stephen Souza, son of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Souza of Koloa, and several other Kauaians.
Sugai’s unit, upon rolling into one deserted Iraqi town, came across a donkey that had been left behind by the town’s former inhabitants. Using vegetables from MREs, unit personnel nursed the injured, malnourished animal back to health.
He now follows the soldiers around as a pet dog would, Sugai said.
Business Editor Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
