New York Times -- An Army truck driver who had lived in the Bronx and Queens after immigrating from Surinam died on Saturday after a roadside bomb exploded near his Humvee during an escort mission in western Iraq, the Department of Defense said yesterday.

The driver, Staff Sgt. Regilio E. Nelom, was assigned to the 249th Quartermaster Company, I Corps Support Command of Fort Bragg, N.C. He was killed in Al Asad, Iraq.

Sergeant Nelom, 45, who moved to the United States from Surinam in 1987 and settled in the Bronx, had been in Iraq with his company since June. His wife, Cynthia, said her husband, who had also served in the army in Surinam, had tried for years to join the United States military and finally was able to enlist in 1994.

"He loved it, he loved it," Mrs. Nelom said last night, speaking in a soft voice by telephone from the couple's home in Killeen, Tex. "I know my husband liked to be a driver. He was always driving here and there. He had done all kinds of odd jobs before."

"He was so tired," she recalled. "We couldn't afford a car. But he said he was doing it for his family."

"I swear, he was the best," she added.

The couple had known each other as children, but became reacquainted in 1987, when her brother ran into Sergeant Nelom in New York and invited him to a Thanksgiving celebration, where he and Mrs. Nelom talked all night. A friendship blossomed, then love, and the couple married in the Bronx in 1989, and later moved to Woodhaven, Queens.

Two daughters followed, Megan, now 14, and Briane, 11. It was Megan who answered the door Sunday morning when two Army officials arrived at 6:30 a.m. and asked for her mother, who had already begun her shift at the nursing home where she worked. When Mrs. Nelom arrived home, she found Megan collapsed on the couch, sobbing.

"She knew when she saw them," Mrs. Nelom said, adding, "It's just something I don't wish on nobody."