A FYLDE mum is furious after receiving a desperate plea for desert boots and trousers from her 20-year-old soldier daughter serving on the frontline in war-torn Iraq.

Just weeks after her daughter, Vicky O'Connor, left for war, Thornton mum Donna Campbell was astonished to get a letter from her asking for basic desert gear, including combat trousers and boots.

Vicky -- a full-time civil servant and member of the Red Cross -- has spent the last three years as a member of the 5 General Support Medical Regiment with the Chorley Territorial Army.

She was called up for active service in February while working with disabled and disadvantaged youngsters for the Prince's Trust in the Lake District and is currently serving as a Combat Medical Technician out in the Gulf.

But, in letters home, Vicky told how she was struggling to cope wearing a standard TA clothes after officials failed to provide her with a specialist desert uniform.

The former pupil of Cardinal Allen High School asked her mum and full-time soldier brother, Ryan -- who is based in Hampshire -- to send her some lightweight trousers, boots and desert headgear to ward off the searing heat and blinding sandstorms.

Now Donna has had to fork out around £50 a time, plus postage costs, to get her daughter the correct clothing and says the lack of equipment is wrong.

Donna said: "It's not that I mind spending the money to get the clothes out to Vicky -- there are hundreds of army families in the same position as myself.

"But why are the Ministry of Defence sending young people out to war without the proper equipment?

"All I have to remind me of my daughter at the moment are family photographs, she didn't even have the time to say goodbye to her friends.

"To get such a heart-rending plea for basic military equipment from your child, currently living in the middle of a war-zone, is so wrong.

"Her letters are full of flowery references to the conditions out there.

"But I've managed to find out that Vicky is serving with the commando forces who were one of the first to go forward into Basra.

"Even Vicky has admitted she's surprised at the amount of responsibility she and her colleagues have been given out there, she'll be dealing with everything from chemical burns to prisoners of war.

"And the temperatures out there must be unbearable, yet she was making-do with her standard issue TA uniform until I got the proper clothes sent out to her.

"The US military have all been issued with the right gear, they have taken to calling the Brits, The Borrowers, because our soldiers are constantly making do with cast-offs out there -- it's ridiculous."