Not long before Private Eleanor Dlugosz returned to Iraq for the second and
final time, her grandmother asked her: “Darling, have you killed anybody?”
Somewhat startled, Eleanor, a combat medical technician, replied: “No,
Granny. Not unless I’ve given anyone the wrong medication. The army don’t
let me kill people.” Less than a month later Eleanor and three of her
comrades were killed, together with a civilian interpreter, when a roadside
bomb ripped a hole in their Warrior armoured vehicle near Basra. She was l9,
the youngest British woman soldier to be killed in Iraq.
Today, six weeks after her death, Eleanor’s mother Sally Veck, 41, and her
grandparents Lionel and Mary Veck, both 68, are remembering the “beautiful
girl whose dream it had been to join the army”.
“Eleanor loved to be in the thick of the action,” says her mother. “If she
could’ve been up there fighting with the boys on the front line she would.
The problem is Iraq has no front line.” Her death has particular resonance
this weekend after the army barred Prince Harry from serving in Iraq with
his regiment. The Veck family was indignant at this news. If it isn’t safe
for Harry why should it be safe for anyone else? “Harry chose to go into the
army – just like Eleanor. But she didn’t choose to go to Iraq,” says Sally.
“When it was decided Harry shouldn’t go to Iraq I was very angry. It seemed
Harry was too precious to go.
“I thought, ‘I’d lost my child in the army. Whyshouldn’t Harry go too?’” Then
her mother suggested that Harry’s mere presence would put the soldiers he
was with in even greater danger, and Sally changed her mind.
“I thought that wouldn’t be fair. Maybe Harry could go somewhere else. I’d be
beside myself if I’d thought Eleanor had been sitting next to Harry in the
vehicle.
“After all those awful threats, like the Iraqis threatening to cut off Prince
Harry’s ears, I did think it wasn’t fair to send him and no one should have
to put themselves in that sort of danger . . . Perhaps Harry should go to
Afghanistan – that would be fair. But he shouldn’t have to go to Iraq.”
IN the back garden of Lionel and Mary’s home near the village of Swanmore in
Hampshire, a magnificent horse-shaped white wreath is only just beginning to
wilt. Inside the back door, under the harnesses of Eleanor’s horse Polly,
lie her uniform hat and belt, so small they look like children’s dressing-up
clothes.
Eleanor was tiny and tomboyish, says her family, “a tough cookie who was
drop-dead gorgeous”.
She may have been petite and feminine – she was 5ft 2in and a size 8 – but it
was the pint-sized Eleanor who could beat the biggest and brawniest at army
training in Cornwall and Winchester.
She was the first to jump into a freezing lake while the other cadets hung
around the edges as their sergeant-major shouted: “You wusses! You’re going
to be beaten by a girl.” (They were.)
On a weekend training camp in the woods the other cadets groaned when they
were told that their tea was three live chickens in a cage.
“Oh, for goodness sake,” Eleanor said as she took out her pocket knife, cut
off a chicken’s head and put the carcass in front of them. “There’s your
tea.”
Eleanor’s bravado and femininity were part of her appeal. One senior army
officer wrote to the family: “Eleanor was a strikingly alluring young
woman.” His letter is one of dozens of cards and letters of condolence that
spill from every surface of the Vecks’ cosy front room, alongside the
flowers that still arrive regularly. The letters tell of a girl “with a
heart of gold” who “lit up every room” and for whom “nothing could be too
much trouble”.
A soldier, Rachel, has written to tell Eleanor’s family about how bullied and
homesick she’d been during training, and how Eleanor had had cheered her up
by “playing the clown”, mimicking the corporal who’d shouted at her.
“Eleanor sat up helping me polish my shoes until 3am,” wrote Rachel. “She was
the only happy memory I have of my army training.”
On the table lie piles of photographs of Eleanor, as a little girl on
horseback, in uniform on parade, glamorous in a ballgown, mostly of her
smiling and all looking stunning. The Vecks recall a vibrant, determined
“action girl” who wanted to help others and be busy, in the thick of things.
SALLY VECK separated from her naval seaman husband when Eleanor and her
younger brother Andrew were small. She lived close to her parents in
Somerset and then in Hampshire.
Eleanor first sat on a horse at the age of three, and soon discovered “the
exhilaration of galloping over the fields”. When her grandfather took her to
feed pheasants, “she’d walk over planks over ditches, and I’d say, ‘Put your
hands on your head, like soldiers’,” says Lionel.
Soon Eleanor was accompanying him shooting rabbits. “She’d helped skin them
and we’d put them in a pie, with vegetables. They were happy, free days,”
says Sally. “Eleanor was very in touch with what mattered because she knew
where things came from.”
At 13 Eleanor went to an army activities week at her school. “And that was
it!” says her mother. “She absolutely fell in love with the army.
“I didn’t want her to join, but if anyone tells me not to do something it
makes me all the more determined, so I’ve tried never to say no to her.
“I knew she was never going to be a sales girl at Woolworths. I knew she would
do something special. I could only believe that the army is a huge
organisation and the person above her knew what he was doing.”
At 17 Eleanor went to an army recruitment centre but initially failed to be
selected because she was told she wasn’t assertive enough.
“So we gave her bossy lessons,” giggles Mary. “She’d say, ‘Please pass the
tomato sauce’, and we’d say, ‘Pardon?’”
“And she’d shout.” Sally bellows: “‘Pass the tomato sauce!’”
Then, having been selected, she was disappointed to be told she should train
to be a nurse. “She really wanted to fight and be in a tank,” says Sally.
“She’d have driven the tank if she could.”
Training to be a combat medical technician – “which meant jumping out of
helicopters to rescue wounded soldiers on the front line”, explains Sally –
seemed a sensible compromise.
To train, Eleanor needed a size 4 pair of army boots. “It was like trying to
find rocking horse poo,” laughs Sally. “I drove 200 miles touring army
surplus shops. We found a size 5 and I thought she should just stuff her
shoes, but then I came home and found a size 4 on eBay.”
In the right-sized boots there was no stopping Eleanor: she was awarded the
prize for best student and won prize for best shot.
Afterwards she was bored. “All I’m doing is counting tents,” she complained to
her mother. “I’m thinking, ‘Good!’” says Sally.
Last October she was sent to Iraq. The Vecks disliked the war, but they
supported her in every way they could think: they wrote e-mails and shopped
for what she requested – ladies’ razors, lip balm, flip-flops.
“She loved fruit so we’d send her raisins, apricots and prunes. We sent her so
many she wrote to us saying ‘No more raisins’.”
Eleanor wrote about how terribly hot Iraq was and how awful the food was on
the base, how she had had to put breeze blocks around her bed to protect
herself at night from mortar attacks, and how she had to sleep in her
helmet, boots and flak jacket. On Christmas Day her dinner was thrown off
her plate by a mortar attack and she’d had to scoop it back off the floor.
“But nothing seemed to worry her,” says Sally. “You’ve got to real-ise that
Eleanor thrived on what would worry us. When the wall was blown out of Basra
palace where she was based for a while, she wrote to tell us how exciting it
was. Exciting! All during the time she was in Iraq I didn’t watch any news.
I just couldn’t. I’d think if I ever have to hear anything I will – and of
course I did.” ON January 7 this year Eleanor came home for training. “She
was exhausted,” says her mother. “She’d had to work every day, and often she
had to be up and ready to go at 2am and she’d very little time off.
When she was home she used to love to have long hot baths, with bubbles and
candles, and then bed, with satin sheets. She was always very girlie.”
Young men would ring Eleanor’s mobile, but nobody special, says the family.
Together they sang along to DVDs of Grease, HMS Pinafore and The Mikado; but
they didn’t question her too closely about Iraq.
“We thought she’d tell us if she wanted,” says Sally. “Now I wish I’d asked
her more. She’d say that when someone was killed she was always relieved it
wasn’t someone she knew. I don’t think she knew anyone personally who’d been
killed but she did say that the sunset ceremony when they have a service and
the coffins are sent back home was very sad.
“I think maybe her background helped. We’re not the sort of people who rush
around screaming when something happens to someone. Mum was a nurse and Dad
was a fireman so we’re used to being calm and practical and helping people.
She said she was going to take me out for a Chinese meal and she would take
me on a plane because I’ve never flown; we were going to go on holiday to
Tenerife. I think she was proud of us. Apparently she used to talk about us
a lot on the base.
“Just before she went back, I asked her if Iraq would be worse or better this
time, and she said better. But I know she was also dreading having to put
the breeze blocks around her bed again because it had made her hands raw the
last time.”
Eleanor returned to the army base in Catterick on Thursday, March 8, a few
days early. She always made a big point of saying she had to pack up all her
boxes. “‘In case I die,’ she’d said. She was a very practical girl,” says
Sally ruefully. “I said to her, ‘For goodness sake stop it’.”
On April 4, Eleanor phoned home from Iraq. Sally, who’d been on the night
shift at the hotel where she worked, was asleep.
Mary answered. “Eleanor had had a bad day and felt rather low,” she says. “It
was a good line that day; often we’re shouting. I said, ‘Darling, Mummy’s
asleep. What’s the matter?’ Now I wish I’d woken up Sally.”
Eleanor told her grandmother how she’d gone out to rescue two soldiers from
the front line. “One had been shot in the brain and it was fatal. She said
the smell was awful. I said to her, ‘You can’t perform miracles.’
“She wanted us to send her some sherry – in a shampoo bottle. Oh, don’t put
that in The Sunday Times because they’re not meant to [drink alcohol]. But
everybody did it, although we never sent any sherry to her. We were more
worried about her smoking. But we didn’t nag her because we knew it was a
stressful job.”
Later that day, when Sally was awake, she sent her daughter a text: “We love
you and please take care.”
The following day, April 5, Lionel heard a report of a bomb near Basra on
Classic FM’s midday news. But Mary says there was nothing on the television
lunchtime news. Maybe Lionel had got it wrong. JUST after 4pm, a man and
woman called at the door asking to speak to Sally.
“Army plainclothes,” mutters Lionel.
“Not plainclothes; weird clothes. They wore check,” contradicts his wife.
“I went to get Sally. By the time I joined her with the army people she was
screaming.”
“They said Eleanor had been in a Warrior on a routine patrol which had been
hit by a device and unfortunately she’d been killed,” says Sally. “Until
then I had no idea she was in a tank. I thought she was in a Land Rover.
“Half of me thought this was all a horrible nightmare and I was imagining the
whole thing. Then half of me hoped she’d been hurt and injured and not dead.
I begged them to tell me there might be some mistake.”
“But they have name tags to identify them, and they log them in and log them
out,” says Mary.
For several moments everyone sits crying, quietly remembering.
Mary puts an arm around her husband’s shoulder: “Our beautiful girl wanted to
help the ordinary people of Iraq but she just happened to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time.”
Later it was reported that Iraqi children had been brandishing Eleanor’s
helmet. “My sister-in-law phoned and said, ‘Don’t go buy the papers’,” says
Mary.
“I don’t think it was an appropriate thing to show on television,” says Lionel.
“But we don’t know it was Eleanor’s helmet,” adds Sally.
The report of the row over media payments after the release of the 15 Royal
Navy hostages from Iran was particularly galling.
For the first time Sally was angry: “I felt like screaming my head off and
letting the whole country know about what it was like to lose my beautiful
daughter, but I didn’t expect any monetary gain.
“But I have to remember that l3 of those young people didn’t sell their
stories. Perhaps the two who did shouldn’t have been in the forces in the
first place. As far as I’m concerned if anyone felt like donating something
to the British Legion I’d be very happy. Later someone implied I’d sent her
to Iraq. I was so angry I reared up like a horse and said, ‘I didn’t send
her.’ We suggested alternatives to joining the army but we couldn’t have
stopped her.”
On April 12 Eleanor’s body was flown back from Basra, and on the advice of the
army Sally didn’t look at it before she was buried in a military funeral.
The family asked it to be led by the Rev John Whitton, the army chaplain
who’d presented Eleanor with the prize for best shot at Winchester. He told
them it was the most difficult funeral he’d ever conducted, he had so much
material about Eleanor to choose from.
“She was neck or nothing,” says her grandfather.
“She was bold and brave,” says her mother.
“I’d have liked to have kissed her goodbye,” says her grandmother. “But maybe
it would have brought up too many questions. I just pray her death was
quick.”
