Who would think of making a kiddush Hashem with army surplus?

The following is more from the Hamodia article by Dvora Frankel. See the main article HERE

During Operation Desert Storm, Rabbi Feld was deployed in northern Iraq, or in military parlance, “in harm’s way” in northern Iraq. Half a million Kurds fled Saddam Hussein to the mountainous region on the northern border with Turkey. It was winter in the mountains, freezing cold, and the Kurdish refugees in their tent cities were dying by the hundreds and thousands.

“I have never seen such unbelievable, horrible human suffering,” shudders Rabbi Feld. “When we got orders to pull out of Turkey, we were instructed to destroy all our supplies so nothing would fall into Saddam’s hands. I just couldn’t see destroying all that food, such baal tashchis, when so many Kurds nearby were starving to death.”

But their tent cities were infested with all kinds of infectious diseases, like diphtheria and typhus, so most American soldiers were afraid to go there. Rabbi Feld himself wasn’t even inoculated against all these diseases – but how could he stand by idly?

“I filled some trucks with these MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) – they happened to be kosher meals – but I don’t know how to drive an eighteen-wheeler truck. I shifted the trucks into neutral and rolled them over to where a Kurd I knew was waiting, and he drove the food to the tent city. I don’t know how many lives were saved by those MREs.”