Spc. Christine Ndururi, 21, died November 5th while enroute to Iraq. According to the Massachusetts Eagle Tribune:
Army Spc. Christine Ndururi of Massachusetts called her family Monday morning to give them the news that her first overseas deployment would be to Kuwait and then Iraq.
The next day the Department of Defense announced that the 21-year-old soldier died of a “non-combat related illness” at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait.
The family is still waiting for an explanation about how she died.
The public affairs office at Fort Hood, Texas — where Ndururi was assigned to the 4th Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment — released no further details about the death. Spokeswoman Nancy Bourget said it remains “under investigation.”
“She has not been sick,” Ndururi’s father, Wilson Wachira, 45, said yesterday at the family’s home at 46 Woodbine Path. “I’m waiting for them to tell me what happened. She was not ill, unless she was ill after 9 o’clock when she talked to her mother. Before she was deployed there, she had to have a medical checkup.”
Ndururi, an automated logistical specialist, called her mother at 9 a.m. Monday from a pay phone in Rhode Island to tell her about her assignment.
Then the parents heard from the military at 9 a.m. on Tuesday that their daughter was dead.
“To me, she was OK,” said her mother, Mary Mwaniki, 45, recalling the last time she spoke to her daughter. The conversation didn’t last long. Mwaniki, a nursing aide, was at work. She told her daughter to call back, but she never did.
Ndururi enlisted in the Army reserves while a high school senior, her father said. The family moved to Massachusetts from Kenya when she was 16.
The Mother's Day Project 
My heart goes out to Spc. Ndururi’s family. I turned 21 on Nov 5 a day before the news of her passing at the same age. It is such a tragedy to lose one so young, let alone someone who was such a joy to her friends and family. May her family in MA and across the world find peace. As we say in Kikuyu, Spc Ndururi, urookoma kuuraga( may you rest in peace).