GROUPS AND SINGLE DECORATIONS FOR GALLANTRY
Radford, circled, with ‘D’ Sqn, 3 Troop on ANP Hill
As I ran towards him, I looked into the back of the destroyed vehicle. One of the guys in there was LCpl Ross Nicholls, one of my closest mates. They were obviously all dead. It wasn’t a nice sight. I remember seeing two of the crew of the first vehicle running in my direction. I think they thought I was coming to help them, and they were trying to let me know they’d extracted OK. I shouted something like, ‘You’ve got to put rounds
down...there’s one of our guys up there.’ They started firing into the tree line and I carried on running. I’d got to within 20 metres of the injured man when Mick Flynn, the commander of the first vehicle, appeared.”
As a Senior NCO in his 40s, and a Falklands veteran to boot, CoH Flynn was the old man of the troop though his fitness levels and fighting prowess were those of someone twenty years younger. He had left the Army to run a village post office but had rejoined after six years. Alongside Radford, he was about to win a Military Cross to go with the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross he had already won in Iraq during Operation TELIC 1.
“Mick’s wagon was stuck in the ditch and they’d had to abandon it. He shouted, ‘What are you doing?’ And he joined me while his driver and gunner gave us covering fire with their personal weapons. A few seconds later we got to the injured guy and did a quick assessment. He’d stopped moving, and I actually thought he was dead. I could see that it was Tpr Martyn Compton, the driver of the Spartan. He was burnt to a crisp, with all his clothing sticking to him or burned away. He’d also been shot twice in the legs. But as we started moving him, he began making
noise...moaning, but not really speaking. He managed to say, ‘Radders...help me,’ just about, but he wasn’t really with it. It was distressing, seeing him like that, especially such a good bloke like he is. You can never be trained for this exact experience I don’t think, but all my instincts for personal survival and to get Martyn out of there really kicked in.
Mick was checking his gunshot wounds and I got my morphine out. He was clearly in absolute agony. But because he was in such a state I didn’t know whether the morphine would just finish him off, so I put it back in my webbing. He looked like he was on his last legs, to be honest. I didn’t think he was going to make it. We picked him up and put him over my shoulders and I sprinted as fast as I could back to my wagon. You find strength you didn’t know you had - I didn’t even notice I had him on my back.
By now, the whole thing had probably taken about half an hour, tops. The weight of the fire was massive, with the lads in the vehicles covering me and Mick, and we made it back without being hit ourselves. I laid Martyn down on the front decks of our vehicle as best I could, the other three from the first vehicle jumped on alongside him, and we drove to where we’d left the HQ element, probably two to three kilometres away. We took our time because it was rough ground and we didn’t want to hurt him any more than we had to, because he was in such a bad way. I was brought up in a religious family and I think I said a prayer at this point. We had a brilliant medic attached to us, a lad called LCpl Paul Hamlet, and he did some really good work out there. I think he administered morphine to Compo while they called in the casevac Chinook and he was taken away. I still didn’t think for one minute that he was going to live.
We did manage to retrieve the bodies of the dead from the second vehicle. You cannot imagine what it’s like. You see things on the television, but it’s not the same, and you never think you’ll ever see the things that you are seeing. Absolutely unbelievable. I was amazed that Martyn Compton had survived. I’d assumed he’d been blown out of the vehicle and landed where we found him but it turned out the explosion from the IED had caved the front decks of the vehicle, basically the bonnet, down onto him. We’re talking aluminium armour, really heavy stuff. And he’d managed to push it off himself. It must have been pure will to survive. He was on fire - totally ablaze - and he rolled around on the floor to put himself out and crawled to where we saw him.
I was nervous when we went back out again. I didn’t fancy it, but we were asked if we were ready and if anyone hadn’t been they would not have been sent back out. My feeling was, if you put it off you’re just going to keep putting it off, so the quicker you do it the better. And that was the general feeling. We got back out, there were initial nerves but after a couple of days you know that sort of thing is not going to happen every day.
The Army are quite good about helping you with this sort of thing now. You’re offered the chance to talk to people, like the Padre, the doctors and other specially-trained people. It’s definitely there for anyone who wants it. But I didn’t want it. I’m quite philosophical - it’s one of the risks of being in the Army. Death is part of the job. You know when you join the Army that things could happen, and Ross would have known that. Onwards and upwards. I certainly have no plans to leave because of what happened. I get asked about the people who laid the IED, how I feel about them. The thing is, life is cheap out there. They had the Soviet invasion, there’s all the inter-tribal stuff, they’ve been doing this sort of thing since they were little boys. It’s all they know, I think. I don’t feel anything towards them, not hate, not anything. Obviously I wish it hadn’t happened, and it does sadden me, but it’s part of being in the Army.
www.dnw.co.uk
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