H
hotrod
My newspaper had a review of notable Britons of 2009 yesterday. It was a list of 10 people and apart from Jessica Ennis, Joanna Lumley and the overall "winner", I had either not heard of the nominees or didn't think they were particularly worthy of a mention.
Regardless of your views on whether we should be out in Afghanistan and Iraq, you can't have anything but total admiration and respect for the jobs these guys are doing out there.
During last summer's Operation Panther's Claw, the military offensive to clear the Taliban out of southern Helmand, Schmid and his team methodically removed scores of IEDs that had been left by the retreating enemy, and in August he cleared a mile of dirt track in Sangin that had been mined with IEDs. On the day of his death, October 31, Schmid was conducting a routine bomb clearance in the vicinity of the British base at Sangin when the device he was defusing exploded, killing him instantly.
His dignified widow, Christina, said after his death: "Oz was perplexed when people asked him how many Taliban he had killed. For him, his job was about preserving life." In naming Staff Sergeant Schmid the Daily Telegraph's Briton of the Year, we do so not because he was different from the thousands of other British men and women who have served in Afghanistan, but precisely because he exemplified all of their qualities of selflessness, duty and courage.
Regardless of your views on whether we should be out in Afghanistan and Iraq, you can't have anything but total admiration and respect for the jobs these guys are doing out there.
