Sally Veck’s daughter Eleanor Dlugosz, three soldiers and their Kuwaiti interpreter were killed by a roadside bomb
that struck their Warrior armoured vehicle outside Basra city, Iraq, in
April 2007. Eleanor, known as Ella or DZ to friends, was a private in
the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). She was 19, one of the British army’s youngest female soldiers to die on active duty.
“Eleanor will always be 19. She was very determined. She was desperate to be on the frontline. As a mum, you do whatever you can to support your child. We got her there. She went all the way, a Class 1 medic, which meant in Warriors, on the frontline. With the men.”
Dlugosz, whose parents were divorced, had a passion for horses as well as the army, which she had first fallen in love with at an army activities week at her school when the family were living in Somerset.
“She was so impressed with it. She said, ‘I am joining the army.’ I said OK thinking it would wear off. It didn’t. She wanted to be on the frontline and they kept saying to her: ‘You are a girl. You can’t go on the frontline. The only thing you can do is be a combat medical technician.’ ‘I will be one of those then,’ she said. ‘I want to jump off helicopters.’”
Dlugosz, whose father Chris served in the navy, first went to Iraq in the autumn of 2006 before coming back to Britain in January 2007 to train as a Class 1 medic.
By then Veck was living with her parents in Swanmore. “It was a six-week course and I thought, ‘Thank God, she is home. You know she is (training) in Aldershot. It is not far, about three-quarters-of-an-hour’s drive. I can see her, hug her, talk to her and she is not in Iraq.’ Little did I know that would be our last precious moment.
“She knew she might die. Eleanor had seen death all around her. She worked in trauma centrees in Iraq. But she lived for every minute.
“Eleanor will always be 19. She was very determined. She was desperate to be on the frontline. As a mum, you do whatever you can to support your child. We got her there. She went all the way, a Class 1 medic, which meant in Warriors, on the frontline. With the men.”
Dlugosz, whose parents were divorced, had a passion for horses as well as the army, which she had first fallen in love with at an army activities week at her school when the family were living in Somerset.
“She was so impressed with it. She said, ‘I am joining the army.’ I said OK thinking it would wear off. It didn’t. She wanted to be on the frontline and they kept saying to her: ‘You are a girl. You can’t go on the frontline. The only thing you can do is be a combat medical technician.’ ‘I will be one of those then,’ she said. ‘I want to jump off helicopters.’”
Dlugosz, whose father Chris served in the navy, first went to Iraq in the autumn of 2006 before coming back to Britain in January 2007 to train as a Class 1 medic.
By then Veck was living with her parents in Swanmore. “It was a six-week course and I thought, ‘Thank God, she is home. You know she is (training) in Aldershot. It is not far, about three-quarters-of-an-hour’s drive. I can see her, hug her, talk to her and she is not in Iraq.’ Little did I know that would be our last precious moment.
“She knew she might die. Eleanor had seen death all around her. She worked in trauma centrees in Iraq. But she lived for every minute.
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