Soldier who gave hurt colleague 
piggy-back to safety honoured

Private Lewis Murphy, 24, of the Yorkshire Regiment, has been awarded the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery, given for bravery entailing risk to life.

Some 118 members of the Armed Forces are included in the latest Operational Honours list, published in the London Gazette today.

During his tour in Afghanistan last year, Pte Murphy was part of a team tasked with finding four insurgents who had abducted an Afghan police officer. After coming under fire from insurgents with machine guns two soldiers were hit, one in the neck, while another had a lucky escape when a bullet hit his body armour.

“At first, I didn’t know how serious it was but when you realise there are casualties everything changes,” said Pte Murphy, from Middlesbrough.

The soldier who had been shot in the head was critically injured, but the nearest place he could be airlifted from was a sandbank 20 metres away across a deep river, running above chest height.

Realising that carrying a stretcher was not practical, Pte Murphy took off his own body armour and helmet and put his colleague – who was still wearing more than 100kg of equipment – on his back and waded across the river.

“It was instinctive. I didn’t think about the danger of it, I just thought ‘if I leave my equipment on I’ll drown’,” he said.

His citation says he displayed the “highest levels of leadership and bravery under immense danger against a heavily armed, tenacious and determined enemy”.

A soldier who single-handedly battled insurgents in Afghanistan, two members of the RAF who defended Camp Bastion from an attack, and a female Army medic were also among those recognised in the latest military honours. Last weekend, Lance-Corporal James Ashworth, of the First Battalion, The Grenadier Guards, became the first recipient of the Victoria Cross since 2006, in a posthumous award. Captain Michael Dobbin, 28, from the Grenadier Guards, who was on the same patrol as L Cpl Ashworth when he died, is awarded the Military Cross after he led a 200m charge at insurgents in Nahr-e-Saraj last summer.

Today’s list also includes Lance Corporal Lawrence Kayser, awarded the Military Cross for saving colleagues from a “potentially disastrous situation” in Helmand Province in June 2012 when his platoon came upon a large-group of enemy.

Also honoured are Sergeant Roy Geddes, 43, from the RAF Regiment, and Corporal Kurt Lee, also from the RAF, who battled insurgents when they attacked Camp Bastion in September last year, Army medic Lance Corporal Abbie Martin, 20, who on her first tour of Afghanistan received the Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service,

She ignored Taliban bullets to treat a dying colleague on her first patrol and days later treated casualties after a grenade blast, successfully saving all the injured.

A Royal Navy pilot from Harrogate has been awarded the Air Force Cross for his courage during a rescue of a stricken climber in 2011.

Lieutenant Commander Craig Sweeney, 38, led the Sea King helicopter crew of HMS Gannet in Prestwick, Ayrshire, in the rescue of a walker in Argyll during blizzard conditions, plummeting temperatures and pitch darkness.