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Mandy Islam 2007.
The daughter of a highly decorated bomb
disposal warrant officer, Mandy Islam
was born on 17th June 1980. Educated at
Fort Hill High in Lisburn and Aylestone
High in Hereford, after working as an
apprentice hairdresser and beauty therapist, she joined the army as a soldier in the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. Transferring to the Intelligence Corps in 1999, she served in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and on Operations Telic 2 and 4 in Iraq before being selected, as a soldier entrant, for officer training. Joining 23 Platoon, Ypres Company on CC062, one fellow cadet remembered their first day at Sandhurst: ‘The blonde bombshell that was Mandy Islam came round the corner with her ironing board hanging out of the window of her Porsche Boxster’.
Commissioned into the Royal Military Police, she transferred to the Royal Army Medical Corps and completed operational tours of Afghanistan. In her free time, she qualified as a mountain leader, open-water diver, and yacht crew. However, while working at Army Headquarters in Andover, she suffered from leg pain during gym workouts and, eventually, sought medical advice. She was devastated to find that the pain was not only from a stress fracture but from a rare and terminal blood cancer.
She was determined to make the most of her remaining life, which the specialist informed her would be ‘between two and eight years’. Posted to the MOD in the newly created role of SO2 Defence People with Significant Illness, she wrote the policies to ensure that those with severe medical issues can continue serving so that they can get the most from the support the system and friends and colleagues within it has to offer – and also to ensure that their talents are not prematurely wasted by early discharge. She also set up the Armed Forces Chronic conditions and Disability in Defence (AF CanDiD) Network. For this, she was awarded the MBE in the 2019 New Year’s Honours List.
Having always enjoyed motor sports, she took to powerboat racing and competed in the UIM Voomquest V2 Series and was lining up an attempt on the round-the-Isle- Of-Wight record when her condition deteriorated. Major Mandy Islam MBE died on 30th November 2019.
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