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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Saturday, March 29, 2003

Kaua'i veteran proud, worried for daughter

By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer

Hartwell Blake of Lihu'e is a Vietnam veteran, the son of a World War II infantryman and the father of Courtney Blake Sugai, a young Army first lieutenant who recently went to serve in Iraq.

Rachel Marshall, Daryl Dobashi, and Hartwell Blake, right, were among about 60 people who demonstrated in Lihu'e yesterday in support of American troops.

Jan TenBruggencate • The Honolulu Advertiser

Service is an important word in Blake's family, a part of life he sees as essential, a message his children took to heart.

His daughter lives it.

She decided to join ROTC at the University of Hawai'i after her brother told her it would be an easy "A." Then she stuck with it. She got her airborne certification. She married a fellow cadet. She was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and spent six months in Afghanistan.

Blake felt confident Afghanistan would be the end of his 26-year-old daughter's difficult deployments — until she told him the 101st was bound for Iraq. Blake found himself revisiting the message of service he had impressed upon his children.

"Since she and her brother were in diapers," Blake said, "I told them everybody serves. VISTA, Peace Corps, armed forces — it didn't matter which, but everybody serves. Of course, those were days when there was no shooting, and I thought it was this great peacetime thing. I guess somewhere, in the back of my mind, I knew how easily things could get turned around. ... I pray a lot more these days."

Courtney's husband, Iven Sugai, also a member of the 101st, expects to join his wife in Iraq soon.

Her brother and sister-in-law finished their active-duty time, and are now members of the Texas National Guard.

Iven Sugai, left, and Courtney Blake Sugai, husband and wife, are both officers with the 101st Airborne Division. Courtney is now on duty in Iraq.

Photo courtesy Hartwell Blake

Courtney and the other deployed members of the 101st may now be somewhere west of Baghdad, if Geraldo Rivera's reporting and sense of direction can be trusted, Blake said. He last heard from her at 5 a.m. yesterday, when she borrowed a French reporter's satellite phone and made a quick call home. She wouldn't give her precise location.

"A French reporter?" Blake said. "OK, I guess I'll take back everything I've said about the French."

Blake said he had been collecting bits and pieces of information about Courtney's hometown friends to pass along, but those all went out of his head when he heard his daughter's voice.

The former intelligence officer asked about morale. Courtney assured him it was good.

He asked where she was. She said Iraq, and advised him to watch the news for more information.

He asked about mail call. She said it hadn't caught up with them yet.

Blake was disappointed about that. He knew how important mail call was to a soldier. He could remember Vietnam, knew the envy the other soldiers felt toward those who always had a letter. He could see the faces of those who never got mail, turning away when the clerk announced that the mail had arrived.

Blake described the contents of the last package he'd sent: a brand of diaper cream that is effective in healing cuts on the feet or hands, chocolate macadamia nuts, handy wipes in large and small packages, eye wash.

His daughter nearly purred when she heard about the eye wash.

"She said she didn't go anywhere without her goggles, and the sand still got in her eyes," he said. "She said the sand was very fine and got into everything."

Blake said he knew the mail clerks would hate him for it, but he was going to keep sending packages. Lots of them. They'd build up and when she got them, it would be like Christmas, he promised.

He paused for a moment when he told that part of the story. He didn't want to think about Courtney being there on Christmas.

Blake said he knew many veterans got too wrapped up in the televised coverage of the war, so at first he tried to maintain a little balance in his life. He restricted himself to just a little viewing each day. He refused to get obsessed. He would use that air of detachment that had served him well in Vietnam. He knew war. He had dealt with it. Told himself that stuff happened, and that was life.

But last weekend he heard about the soldiers who had lost their way, got picked up by the Iraqis. Maybe tortured. Some killed. And suddenly he saw the big picture he hadn't seen in his youth.

Everyone in the war had parents, spouses, years of life ahead of them. Everyone.

That was when Blake started to pray for them all: the soldiers, the parents and relatives, the dead Iraqis and their families and their country, and the veterans of the first Gulf War who had suffered with undiagnosed illnesses. And then he continued to watch the television. Obsessively.

When he learned the men and women who had been taken by the Iraqis were from another unit — not Courtney's — he felt relief combined with sadness. Sadness, because he knew those other soldiers had parents, too.

And yesterday, when Courtney called, he got a little reprieve from the worry.

He said he told his daughter that people were asking about her, were praying for her. She said she knew. She and her fellow soldiers had already survived some close calls, she said. She had already seen the effects of those prayers.

"I told her to keep her Kevlar helmet on, no matter how hot it got," he said. "I told her to wear her flak jacket, no matter how much it started to stink. And I told her to keep her pistol loaded," said Blake, the former county attorney for Kaua'i.

Courtney told him she had traded her officer's pistol in for a rifle, and was very careful to keep it loaded. Blake told his daughter — his baby — that he thought she had made the right decision.

Then, for just a moment, he pictured her safe at home, teaching at Kaua'i Middle School, like she had once said she wanted to do. He saw his son-in-law safe with her and he imagined the grandchildren he and his in-laws would enjoy.

After his daughter said goodbye and the French reporter's phone gave up its link to the satellite, Blake finished dressing and went to a Lihu'e rally, held yesterday to support the deployed troops.

He said he felt a little sad for those parents who were still waiting for word from their sons or daughters, and very grateful for those people who said their prayers were with the men and women in the desert.

"I appreciate it when others say they are praying," Blake said, "because, what else can you do?"