Families fear US sailors are hungry on Iran war ships, packages in limbo

Thousands of boxes sent to service members in Middle East are stuck in limbo. The US Postal Service has indefinitely suspended delivery amid Iran war.

Dan F. was alarmed when his daughter, a Marine aboard the USS Tripoli, a warship deployed to fight the Iran war, sent him a photo of a meal served on the ship. A lunch tray, two-thirds empty, carried one small scoop of shredded meat and a single folded tortilla.

A picture of a mid-April dinner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, shared by a service member with his family, was similarly unappetizing – a small handful of boiled carrots, a dry meat patty and a gray slab of processed meat.

Dan and other military family members worried that their loved ones deployed to the Middle East are going hungry are filling boxes with items they hope could help service members ride out prolonged deployments in the Middle East – homemade fudge, Jolly Ranchers, crossword puzzle books, playing cards, toothpaste, Girl Scout cookies and fresh socks. But mail delivery to military ZIP codes across the Middle East has been indefinitely suspended as of April, and packages in transit now hang in limbo.

Dan asked to go by his first name only to protect his daughter from retaliation.

Military says war conditions prompted suspension

The U.S. Postal Service temporarily suspended mail delivery to 27 military ZIP codes after the United States and Israel attacked Iran. The Army said there is no end date in sight for the suspension, despite a ceasefire in the war.

The Postal Service and the Military Postal Service Agency have suspended deliveries as of the beginning of April “due to airspace closures and other logistical impacts from the ongoing conflict,” Maj. Travis Shaw, an Army spokesperson, told USA TODAY. Mail already in transit when the suspension took effect is being held in secure Postal Service or military facilities “for future delivery once service resumes,” he said.

The suspension is “in effect until further notice,” Shaw added. “Resumption of mail service is contingent upon the reopening of airspace by civil authorities, and the area commander's evaluation of regional transportation and distribution stability.”

No mail is being “returned to sender” for those ZIP codes, Shaw said.

The Postal Service did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the delay. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment on the mail stoppage or reports that some U.S. vessels were short on food.

Dan F.’s daughter told him in sporadic messages – when the USS Tripoli reached a pocket of internet service – that members were rationing their food supplies on the ship. Fresh produce was nowhere to be found, she told him.

After his daughter told him the coffee machine on board had broken down, Dan said he stopped drinking coffee in solidarity with what she’s going through.

When Dan F.’s daughter said hygiene products were running low on the ship, the family sent a care package with shampoo and conditioner, deodorant, toothpaste and tampons, filling every open space with candy and snacks.

They filled the second box with Emergen-C vitamin C packets – Dan’s daughter said she was feeling a sore throat coming on – and clean socks.

The boxes were sent nearly a month ago, yet neither has reached its destination.

“We have the strongest military in the world. You shouldn't be running out of food, and you shouldn't not be able to get mail on the ship,” said Dan, 63, who also served in the Marines.

“The one thing we had over our adversaries [was] we fed our people.”

A Texas mother whose son, a Navy sailor, is also aboard the Tripoli, said she panicked after hearing he was hungry on the ship. Her family has now spent at least $2,000 on care packages, but none have reached her son. The mother asked to remain anonymous out of fear her son would face retaliation.

In message exchanges with him that she shared with USA TODAY, the sailor said service members on the ship eat when they can, and they divvy up food evenly when one person gets more than the others.

Supplies “are going to get really low,” and the crew doesn’t anticipate any port visits until the ship returns from its mission, he wrote in a message on March 11.

“Morale is going to be at an all-time low,” he wrote.

Karen Erskine-Valentine, pastor of a church in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, said she was alarmed to hear from a community member whose son is in the Middle East aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln about the poor quality of food on the ship. The Abraham Lincoln is one of two aircraft carriers sent to the region, along with the USS Gerald Ford. A third, the USS George H.W. Bush, is on the way.

“The food is tasteless and there's not nearly enough and they're hungry all the time,” Erskine-Valentine said. “That kind of breaks your heart.”

The community packaged and sent 18 boxes to the sailor to share with his shipmates. She sent another four boxes on April 15.

“I put out the announcement that they were in need of love and nourishment,” she said. “Within two days, I had 18 boxes of stuff.”

Sending the boxes wasn’t cheap – at least $540 for shipping alone, she said.

Six of the packages reached Tokyo on April 14, according to Postal Service tracking. They have yet to reach their destination.

The Tripoli has been at sea for more than a month since it left its home port in Japan to join the Iran war. The 3,500 sailors and Marines aboard the Tripoli and its two accompanying warships are now tasked with enforcing the U.S. blockade of ships leaving Iranian ports, according to the U.S. Central Command.

Other warships have been at sea far longer. On April 15, the USS Gerald Ford broke the record for the longest deployment of any aircraft carrier since the Cold War – 295 days. The carrier retreated to Naval Support Activity Souda Bay on the island of Crete for maintenance work March 23. The military said a laundry fire had erupted on the ship, and it was plagued with plumbing problems.

‘Extenuating circumstances’ affect military mail delivery

It’s common for wars and other operations to delay package deliveries to deployed military members, said Lynn Heidelbaugh, a curator at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. She said she had not come across an all-out suspension of mail delivery to a military ZIP code like those now in place, but the absence of a formal announcement, especially in the pre-internet age, doesn’t mean mail hasn’t been stalled before.

“There are always extenuating circumstances,” she said. “It’s far more complex than domestic mail.”

The Military Postal Service provides mail service across 76 countries, according to the Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General. It operates 1,670 Postal Service operations worldwide and moves about 80 million pounds of mail a year, an agency fact sheet says.

Non-expedited shipping of packages to the Middle East usually takes up to 24 days, the Postal Service says. In 2003, mail took an average 11 to 14 days to reach service members deployed to the Iraq war, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

Packages wait in living rooms, stuck between destinations

Karen Turgeon, organizer of an annual Thanksgiving care package drive for military families in Monson, Massachusetts, rushed to organize an extra drive for the four service members from her community who were sent to the Middle East after the war broke out.

None of the group’s packages have reached their destinations. Instead, the drive has redirected its energy toward dropping cards of encouragement and flowers at the homes of service members’ families.

“We're trying to cheer them up at home,” she said. “We give them an envelope filled with things to send so that when they can, they will.”

Dawn Penrod, treasurer of an American Legion Auxiliary chapter based in Edgewater, Maryland, said she spent an hour at the post office roughly two weeks ago trying to send a care package to her nephew, an Army Reserve member stationed in Bahrain.

In the package was a grab bag of small pleasures to ease the difficulty of a lengthy deployment – Kind bars, candy, homemade fudge, Girl Scout cookies, puzzle books, pencils, pens, decks of cards and other games. The auxiliary chapter gave Penrod $100 plus postage to spend on the package, and a client of hers gave another $50.

But Penrod said a postal worker told her she couldn’t send anything to the military address she had listed. She wasn’t even able to fill out the customs form required to ship a package to a military ZIP code abroad. She left the post office, package in hand.

“It’s sitting in my living room, waiting,” she said.

Others in the auxiliary chapter who had sent care packages to service members for decades had never seen such delays and suspensions, Penrod said.

“They were delivering mail and packages all the time,” Penrod said. “I just don't know why they can't now.”