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.
“We went down to Somerset when she was here and went through the house there. She boxed (her belongings) all up. She said: ‘This is boxed and so is all my stuff at Catterick – she was based at Catterick – and when I die, it will all be easy to sort out, Mum.
“‘I have even saved the special red box Tony Blair sent out for our Christmas packages, with a balloon and tin badge. When I die, you sell that for loads of money on eBay.’
“I have still got it. We would never sell it.”
In March 2007, Eleanor went back to Iraq. Weeks later she was dead. Veck, a hotel receptionist, who now lives in Soberton, a few miles from Swanmore, said: “I don’t cry every day. At the beginning, I was crying all the time. You are just so low, exhausted, how are you going to cope for the next half-an-hour? And then all of a sudden, it is eight-and-a-half years and you think, ‘How have I survived that?’
“When it happened, someone said to me, ‘You are very lucky to have had her for 19 years of your life.’ When I could get that into my head and understand it, it helped a lot.
“Nobody was to blame. Everyone around her in the army, on that patrol, did exactly what they should have done. When the inquest was held, I managed to get to the lads who were driving the Warrior, who were unhurt.
“I gave them both a big hug and said, ‘I have never blamed you. It is not your fault. Don’t dwell on it.’ That was important for me say, and it was hugely important for them to hear.”
“On Sunday, I will be standing in Swanmore village (in Hampshire), where Eleanor’s name is on the war memorial. I have made a horseshoe with some poppies on, with her name, to place on the memorial. I always make something myself.
“Swanmore is the hardest one. I can go to London and I am fine. But in Swanmore, it is with people I know. They are all looking at me and I think, ‘They are thinking, ‘Oh, she looks terrible; I am glad it’s not me.’
“I make it personal and it is so hard to get the personal bit done. If it is for the telly and the Queen, it does matter, but it is detached. Does that make sense?”
Veck has become a regular supporter and fundraiser for SSAFA, a charity that works to help families who have lost loved ones in military conflicts.
At first, when the organisation first approached Veck to see how they could help her, she was reluctant to meet others who had been through similar experiences.
“What if there are 50 people in the room all crying? It is like the weakest link, if somebody else cries, it makes you cry. I didn’t know if I could cope with it. I didn’t go for about two years, didn’t do anything about it.
“And then one of the invitations was to go to Westminster Abbey. Eleanor’s name is in the book of remembrance in Westminster Abbey under the RAMC’s stained glass window. I stood alongside the biggest, beefiest men crying their eyes out. They read poems. It helped and I thought, ‘I am not the only one and if I cry right now, it doesn’t matter.’
“Once we had had the cry, we turned it round to remember the good things about our children. It wasn’t a negative thing. It was a positive , uplifting experience. We have a certain language. You never say: ‘How are you coping?’ The answer to that has got to be, ‘I feel like rubbish.’
“What you do say to people is (something like), ‘Hi, how lovely to see you. You look fab’, and have a big cuddle. That is what is priceless.”
Two years ago, Veck went to the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall, London. “Up until that day, I had never been able to watch the service on the telly. I would see a veteran or a Chelsea pensioner burst into tears and I couldn’t cope. I have been able to watch it since. I now understand it.
“I am very careful what I watch. I have to protect myself. I don’t do war films, stuff like that. I don’t like comedy really. You never know what they are going to do. War jokes are quite cheap jokes sometimes.”
Veck’s son, Andrew, is a farmer and she worries about his safety in that job too. That is only natural since Eleanor’s best friend, Channing Day, with whom she did basic training, also died in action.
Day, 25, a RAMC corporal, was killed in October 2012 when the patrol she was with came under small arms fire in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
“I never expected to lose another soldier. They went through camp together. She used to come and live with me for weeks at a time. I went to a wedding in December. Eleanor’s friends are having children now. I am the Dlugosz granny. They are fab to me, my little medics, I adore them all.”
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