Two things that made me proud and sad

I think, regardless of if you support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you've got to support the troops who are serving. Two stories today about service personnel caught my eye. 

The first woman pilot has been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. She got her medal for flying her Merlin chopper into Basra city at night, wearing night vision goggles, in a dust storm, under enemy fire and landing her chopper right next to the wounded man with few visual cues. She evacuated the casualty and the medical team under increasing RPG fire and got him back to the hospital in under 14 minutes. The full story is here

There were a number of military honours announced today and all the stories are amazing but some how Michelle Goodman's struck a chord, probably because she's a woman. She said in the story I heard on the radio that even though she and her crew had been warned of all the dangers (intelligence said the insurgents were going to target a chopper that night) she did it because if she was in trouble she'd want other people to do everything they could to help her.

The other story was about a campaign to get a set of postage stamps produced with photos of all the UK service men and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a really great project and I'm trying to sign the petition but the site doesn't load properly for me. It does for the 9000 or so other people who have signed so if you want to, it's worth a try. The site is here The photos of the men and women who have died are awful because they're all so appallingly young. They're kids really and it's so very sad.

EDIT: fixed the petition problems by installing Firefox, something I should have done years ago