by John Nichol
Her grandfather, Lionel Veck, remembered her out hunting on Exmoor, always up with the pack on her grey mare and in the river up to her neck in pursuit of a stag.4 Her love of adventure and the outdoor life was why she had joined the army. On training camps, though just five feet two inches in height, wearing tiny size-four army boots and looking ‘drop-dead gorgeous’, she proved her toughness, never hanging back, being the first to jump into a freezing lake or to cut off the head of a chicken for the supper pot. The sergeant used to goad the big and brawny boys in her platoon: ‘You wusses! Are you going to be beaten by a girl?!’5
Though she longed to drive a tank, as a woman soldier she was denied a posting to a cavalry or an infantry regiment, so she opted instead to be a medic, because that guaranteed she would get to the front line. Her mother, Sally, proudly watched her graduation at Keogh, ‘so smart in her uniform, and all those young faces with her, eager and keen and ready to go’. Both of them knew the risks, though there was a tacit agreement between them not to mention the danger she faced.
Eleanor had one stint in the British hospital in Iraq and then returned to the UK for an upgrading course, taking her from a Class Two to a Class One medic. From basic first aid, cleaning up and scrubbing out, she graduated to more advanced work, the sort that saves lives. She learned how to make an incision through the skin and the cricothyroid membrane of the larynx to open up a patient’s airway. She could drain a lung and give resuscitation. At home, she drank sherry with her mother and, together, they sang along to the soundtrack of Grease and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, but her heart was elsewhere. She told her mother she was longing to get back to Iraq once the course was over.
She was deployed back to Basra at the beginning of March 2007. Major Phil Carter, officer commanding 24 Close Support Medical Squadron, remembered her return. A girl he had thought of as rather quiet and reserved in carrying out her hospital-based duties burst back on the scene with her Class One qualification, a changed person, confident and with renewed vigour. She was fully operational for front-line duties. He watched her setting out on patrol, climbing into a Warrior, chatting away to the infantry guys, and clearly valued and respected by them in return. They loved her obvious zest for life and the permanent smile on her face. It cheered them up on difficult days.
She had been back in Iraq less than a month when she went on a reconnaissance patrol with the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, to which she was now attached. With her was another RAMC medic, Corporal Kris O’Neill, and they were sharing a Warrior with Second Lieutenant Joanna Yorke Dyer, an Intelligence Corps officer, Kingsman6 Adam Smith and a civilian interpreter. They had been on a night-time mission to raid an arms cache and arrest an Iraqi whom Intel had identified as a key insurgent leader. They were returning to base when a massive roadside bomb detonated beneath the vehicle, tore through its unprotected underside and killed them all instantly. The one survivor, a military policeman, remembered hearing a big bang, ‘and the next thing I was looking up at the moon’.7 The blast made a crater three feet deep, and the following morning local children were seen dancing round the wreckage and waving a battered soldier’s helmet.
Phil Carter and his team were devastated by the deaths of two of their medical colleagues. ‘They were ours, and it hurt us,’ he recalled.8 The bespectacled twenty-seven-year-old O’Neill was a mature and unflappable medic to whom the others looked for guidance, DZ the bright young thing who trailed laughter in her wake. The terrible irony for their RAMC colleagues was that they had not even had the glimmer of a chance to try to save them. The two had been declared dead at the scene, and all the skill and determination of dozens of medics and doctors counted for nothing. ‘People dealt with the shock and the grief differently. Some took out their feelings in the gym, some talked quietly in groups, some kept their thoughts to themselves,’ Carter remembered. ‘I threw myself into work.’
He formally identified the bodies when they were brought back to the hospital later that day. Trained as a GP, he had seen death before, ‘but not on a personal level’. The bodies were laid out on separate trolleys in a tented area, and he lifted the sheets covering them to see their faces and confirm their names. ‘Strangely, it wasn’t shocking, just very quiet, and so desperately sad. The sergeant major was with me, but we didn’t speak to each other. No words were necessary. We tried not to show any emotion at the time, but we both found it hard afterwards. We took solace from the fact that we had done the right thing. In civilian life, a family member would normally identify a body, but on military operations that’s not possible. We are their family, and we performed that duty on behalf of their own loved ones.’
He then had to sit down and compose letters to those loved ones. ‘That was truly difficult.’ He could no longer bite back his feelings. The ramrod military shoulders drooped a little and cracks appeared in the doctor’s professional detachment. He was overtaken by a desperate desire to talk to his wife. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about my family and my kids. When you go off on operations, you always have that bravado that “It’ll never happen to me.” But as I wrote those letters, I knew that it could.’ He struggled with the thought that it might have been his own family who were on the receiving end of words just like the ones he was struggling to compose.
In the household in England that was soon to receive Carter’s tribute to his colleague DZ, there was a numb air of bewilderment. Two officers in civilian clothes had come to the door of her grandfather Lionel Veck’s home in Swanmore in Hampshire looking for Sally, Eleanor’s mother. They would speak to no one else. A retired fireman whose working life had made him no stranger to sudden death, he guessed their purpose. ‘I’d heard on the midday news that there had been an incident and four people had been killed in a Warrior. There was no detail, no mention that two were medics, but if you’ve got somebody serving in that part of the world and there’s been an incident, you think, oh God I hope it’s not… That happens every single time the news comes on.’ It was why Sally wouldn’t have a television in the house and never listened to the news. ‘I knew that, if there was something I needed to be told, then somebody would come and let me know – and they did.’
Sally, who was asleep after her nightshift as a hotel receptionist, was woken up and came downstairs to confront her worst nightmare. ‘They said that there’d been an incident and Eleanor had been travelling in a Warrior and unfortunately she’d died. There was nothing else they could say. They stayed about an hour, saying who was going to come and see me the next day and where I could ring. But it didn’t sink in. It was a blur, and I can’t really remember much. I was in a state of instant shock.’ In the garden was a shed, and she took to hiding there in the following days and weeks, not wanting to see any of the friends who came to offer words of comfort. There was no comfort for her. ‘I shut the shed door and just sat there in a chair, holding photographs of her and weeping. The dogs would come and sit with me. Dogs know. They can sense hurt.’
Hundreds of letters of condolence arrived, and great swathes of flowers. Two of the envelopes in the huge postbag had unmistakable handwriting – Eleanor’s. She had sent them before setting off on that night sortie in Basra. They were as chatty and bubbly as ever, telling her mother what she had been up to with her mates, but there was an undercurrent of reality about them that seemed uncanny in the light of what had happened. Some of her friends had been injured, she wrote, and she had treated them. She was worried that one of them was not going to make it.
Her funeral was a massive affair, with hundreds packing the medieval St Peter’s church in the small Saxon town of Bishop’s Waltham, near Winchester, and spilling out into the churchyard, where the service was relayed on loudspeakers. It was a spring day in a green and lush place, England in all her April finery, as far removed as one could imagine from the dust-strewn Middle East street where she died. Her coffin, draped in the union flag, was brought on a horse-drawn carriage, and eight RAMC colleagues carried it inside. On top perched her distinc
tive high-brimmed army cap, a woman soldier’s formal headwear. That two women had died in this one incident seemed especially shocking and sparked unusual media interest. Fresh debate began in some circles about whether it was right, even in these enlightened and egalitarian times, for women to be on the front line and exposed to such danger. The ever-cheerful DZ would have laughed away such an idea. ‘She loved the army,’ her mother said, her voice cracking with pain and pride. ‘It was what she wanted to do, the life she wanted to lead. I couldn’t have stopped her, even if I had wanted to.’
Eleanor’s death had a profound effect on Michelle Norris, for, between them, they encapsulated the lottery of war. Both were medics, both were nineteen, both went to Iraq. One returned with a top medal for conspicuous gallantry, the first Military Cross ever awarded to a woman soldier, while the other came home in a coffin, the youngest woman soldier to die in combat. One lived. One died.
‘Ella was in a Warrior, doing exactly the same job as me,’ said Michelle, nervous at the parallel, ‘and she was blown up.’ It could, she knew, just as easily have been the other way round. ‘You try and forget about the risks you’re taking and the danger you’re in, but there are certain moments when you can’t. You have to sit down and have a think, or a cry, or talk to someone. But there has never been a moment when I’ve regretted joining up.’ The late and much lamented Eleanor Duglosz would have said ‘amen’ to that thought.
For her grandfather, there was some solace in the widespread impact her death made. ‘It focussed public opinion on the reality of war. And the various ceremonies and services in Eleanor’s honour all help to keep that in the public eye. It would be so neat and tidy politically for what happened in Iraq to be lost in the smoke and forgotten, but for her sake I hope it never is.’ He was speaking a year after her death, by which time British involvement in Iraq was winding down, the troops withdrawing to an enclave at Basra airport and leaving the city and the countryside, theoretically, to the Iraqi army and police but, in reality, to the Shia militiamen who had been their enemies, the killers of Kris O’Neill and Eleanor Duglosz and the scores of other British dead. It was the debacle, verging on defeat, that many critical of the Iraq war had always dreaded.
It is hard to think of another foreign venture that British forces entered into with so little public support at home. Iraq was a politician’s war – Tony Blair’s, on the coat tails of the United States – every bit as much as the Falklands was Margaret Thatcher’s. But instead of a quick, clean kill, as in the South Atlantic, there was a long-drawn-out occupation that cost lives, sapped morale and missed many of its objectives. From the start, millions of ordinary people had doubts that the war was wise or winnable, but the politicians prevailed, through a dubious drive of anti-Saddam scaremongering. When, after the initial victorious invasion, no weapons of mass destruction were found, the case was unsustainable. But, by then, British forces were in place and could not be withdrawn without loss of face.
They stayed to implement an ill-conceived plan of reconstruction, while in the eyes of the Iraqi people they turned from liberators to a force of occupation, to be fought and resisted at every turn. Piggies in the middle of this absurd political muddle, British troops performed with exceptional bravery, skill and dedication, despite being undermanned and under-equipped. In December 2008, to everyone’s relief, the prime minister Gordon Brown announced an end – the remaining four thousand British troops would leave Iraq by the summer of 2009, which they duly did. By then, however, a not-dissimilar war every bit as bitter and bloody had been going on for several years a thousand miles away, against the Taliban insurgents of Afghanistan, and in the battle for that country of high mountains and dry deserts, there was no end in sight. It was less of a hole-in-the-corner conflict than Iraq and, to begin with at least, it was fought much more out in the open against a skilled and organized enemy. It was fierce and fast-moving, the quintessence of modern warfare. For medics, saving lives under these conditions would be hugely testing.
15. On Afghanistan’s Plains…
Corporal Stu Giles never knew for sure whether the first life he saved on the battlefield was that of an ally or an enemy. The man in the baggy shalwar kameez1 who was brought to him on a wheelbarrow with his leg smashed apart by a bullet could have been an innocent, a young Afghan farmer caught in the middle of this battle raging under a fierce summer sun in June 2006. More probably, though, he was a Taliban guerrilla, who, just moments before incurring his atrocious wound, had been trying to kill any khaki-clad Para he could line up along the barrel of his AK47 rifle. Giles was a company medic with the 3rd battalion of the Parachute Regiment, who were among the earliest batch of British troops to fly into Afghanistan that year in what was intended as a policing mission, to bolster the democratically elected government there in its struggle to contain Islamic extremists. This police work – taken on, to the horror of the military, while Iraq was still an unresolved mess eating up manpower and resources (as well as costing lives) – soon escalated into bloody war. At Now Zad, one of a number of hostile townships in the desert where the troops were tasked to make their presence felt, came the first major head-to-head.
For the Paras, this began with what to them was a routine ‘search and cordon’ mission of the type they had often mounted in Northern Ireland. Intelligence reports identified a mud-walled compound on the edge of the town as a bomb factory and a Taliban safe house. A force of around a hundred dropped in to seize and neutralize it. ‘We were being fired on before we’d even managed to get off the Chinook,’ Giles recalled. He never liked being in a helicopter, crammed in alongside his mates as if they were pilchards rather than Paras. The noise of the engines reverberated like an express train in your head while your mind tried not to think too much about what lay ahead when the ramp went down. For all its size and horsepower, it was a potential death trap. As he saw it, ‘you’re inside a great big tin with a couple of big engines strapped on. I couldn’t wait to get down on the ground and back on my two black taxis, my own feet. At least then you have some say over your own destiny.’2
The Chinook travelled low across country and came in fast, the pilot cutting his speed at the last minute to dump the aircraft down and disgorge its contents of fighting men on to the hot sand. As they raced off the ramp and fanned out, looking for cover, bullets came spitting from wadis nearby, and the sound of gunfire cracked through the air. An advance party of Gurkhas had set up a perimeter and was already engaging the enemy, who were putting up fiercer resistance than anyone had expected. Green tracer flashed backwards and forwards. A full-scale battle was shaping up, of a sort that the Paras, as a regiment, had not experienced since their glory days in the chilly wastes of the Falklands.
Giles, though medically trained, was first and foremost a fighting soldier, and he threw himself down alongside the machine-gunners, who had a bead on Taliban positions in an orchard a few hundred yards away and were returning fire. It felt good to be with his mates. They gave each other confidence. ‘Camaraderie is what Paras thrive on. It’s almost as important as your weapon.’
The fighting intensified. Masked and black-turbaned gunmen ran out from behind the shelter of a long mud wall, sun-baked and as hard as concrete, and stood to fire rapid volleys before ducking out of sight again, only to reappear, guns blazing once more, at a different point. Others lurked in the doorways of the compound, shooting furiously, then dodging away. There were eighty or more of them in all, circling like hyenas in packs of a dozen, one soldier reckoned, and popping up from every direction to bite and snarl and then run off.
Handfuls of civilians scuttled around and added to the chaos and the uncertainty. Women and children huddled in sheltered spots, terrified, adult hands curled over small heads as if they could ward off the storm of bullets. The Paras were being halted – pushed back, even, in places – until Apache gunships arrived in the sky overhead to rake the Taliban positions and break the deadlock. The troops moved in to secure the compound while, outside,
running battles continued for the next four hours.
Giles was spreadeagled in the dust of a dried-up riverbed when he got a call on the radio – a casualty inside the compound needed urgent medical attention. ‘I ran into the courtyard and was presented with this Afghan guy on a wheelbarrow.’ The medic ducked as bullets smacked into a wall behind him. ‘I had no idea who he was. He could have been in the local police or army and therefore, technically, one of us. Or he might have been a civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or a Taliban fighter. I just didn’t know. It wasn’t like the Second World War out there. We weren’t fighting an enemy in a recognizable uniform.’
The wounded man’s allegiance was, in any case, immaterial. ‘If you’re a medic, what you see is a human being in need of help, and your job is to give the same care to friend and enemy alike.’ This was something Giles had thought through and felt strongly about. ‘Isn’t that what we signed up to in the Geneva Convention? He’s a casualty. Somebody else can make the decision later about whose side he’s on. Of course, the enemy don’t think that way. But then, as my dear old mother used to say, “Treat people as you’d like to be treated yourself.” ’ Which, as guns continued to blaze around him, he did.
He knelt down in the dust to examine the man slumped in the barrow, his limbs, tipping over the sides, a mess of blood and mangled flesh. The Afghan’s tibula and fibula were totally smashed. ‘The bone was snapped in half, and his foot was closer to his knee than it was to the floor. By rights he should have been screaming in agony, but he was very calm and quiet.’ Giles found himself admiring the man’s stoicism. ‘Before I could splint him I had to untwist his foot and straighten his leg, but he hardly flinched.’ This was clearly an enemy to be reckoned with.