Chuck Komppa remembered

The candy and assorted toiletries were nice, but the twin sheets that Petty Officer Second Class Chuck Komppa's grandmother sent to him in Iraq were the real prize of the care package.

"Now I can make up my bed, and I won't have to sleep in my sleeping bag," Komppa, 35, of Absarokee, Mont., told his grandma Helen Bradshaw in Minnesota over the phone two Fridays ago.

Komppa, who just a few weeks earlier had arrived in Iraq as part of the 3rd Naval Construction Regiment, also made sure to tell his grandmother, then back at her home in Sebeka, Minn., that he was OK. "Don't worry, grandma. I'm safe."

Five days later, Komppa was killed along with four Marines when the Humvee they were in was hit by a roadside bomb in Anbar Province.

Kommpa, an electrician and a father of two, had been on his way to conduct electrical inspections at a base.

"He told us before he left [for Iraq], that if anything happened, it was God's will, that he was supposed to be over there," Komppa's younger brother, Steve, said Sunday night.

"We supported him, obviously, in everything he decided to do," said Steve Komppa, who lives in Colorado City, Texas.

His brother grew up mostly in Texas, but he craved winters in Minnesota and all the snowmobiling and outdoor fun they can offer.

For a few months' stretch during sixth grade, and again in ninth grade, he lived with his grandparents in Sebeka, which is about 180 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

On his second stay, he quite literally left his mark.

The throttle on the snowmobile he got on one Saturday when it was 30 degrees below zero froze and the machine slammed into the furnace room of his grandparents' home, poking through the wall.

"It felt like the house was going to fall to pieces," Bradshaw recalled.

After high school, Komppa joined the Navy in 1990, serving until 1995. He was stationed in Iraq on a battleship for a year after the start of the first Gulf War.

He and his wife, Delisa, a high school classmate, were married during his Navy stint. Their children, Alicia, 14, and Gary, 11, were born while he was based in Bremerton, Wash.

After his discharge, he and his family moved to Minnesota, first to Sebeka, then Wadena.

There he graduated from an electrical program at Wadena Technical College in 1998.

He soon landed an electrician's job in Montana, where he had long dreamed of living and fishing and hunting. "He wanted the mountains, he wanted the streams," Bradshaw said. "He wanted the wilderness aspect."

His family has lived in Montana ever since. Funeral services for Komppa will likely be held there this weekend.

His aunt, Rebecca Komppa of Sebeka, said she will remember a gentle, soft-spoken nephew who at 6-3 towered over her and many of his relatives and whose belly her nose got buried in whenever he gave her a bear hug.

Several days before he was killed, he sent an e-mail to her, describing his hope for an end to the fighting.

"We will be able to lay down our arms and breathe real peace and feel no fear," he wrote.

From the Star Tribune

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Charles V. Komppa killed by roadside bomb