'Oh, Kylie! What did you do? Next time, please don’t...': What mother told Military Cross hero daughter who twice braved hails of bullets to tend war wounded

When Lance Corporal Kylie Watson was summoned to the office of her commanding officer for a ‘fireside chat’ she feared the worst. ‘Do you know why you are here?’ he asked the combat medic. ‘Am I in trouble, Sir?’ she enquired. ‘No,’ he told her. ‘You’ve been awarded the Military Cross.’



The 23-year-old, whose tour of Afghanistan’s Helmand province was her first as a fully qualified battlefield medic, was stunned.



‘Are you sure you’ve got the right soldier?’ she asked. But there was no mistake. The extraordinary heroism she displayed by twice running into Taliban fire to treat wounded comrades had been recognised with one of the UK’s highest honours.



Lance Corporal Kylie Watson, 23, is one of only four women in history to have been awarded the Military Cross

And now Lance Corporal Watson of the Royal Army Medical Corps – who stands just 5ft 1in tall in her Army-issue boots – is one of only four women in history to bear the coveted initials MC after her name.



‘It still seems extraordinary to me,’ she says, speaking from Invicta Park Barracks in Maidstone, Kent. ‘I believe anyone with a human heart beating inside them would try to help another who’d been hurt. Coalition soldier, Afghan army fighter, civilian – it makes no difference. When you hear someone shout, “Medic, Medic, Medic,” it only means one thing: trouble. So you go.’



Her citation for the medal spoke of her ‘immense courage, willingness to put her own life at risk and absolute bravery’. It revealed that she ‘saved the life of one warrior and acted as an inspiration to her platoon and their Afghan National Army partners’.



‘Ah, but it doesn’t mention the bit where I fell over,’ she grins, sounding more Private Benjamin than a thoroughly modern war hero. And then she retells her story which, like many footnotes of military history, contains as much chaos and grim comedy as it does courage and compassion.



‘We were patrolling by a compound on the outskirts of a village when the shooting began. A man went down about 70 metres in front of me. He was with British and Afghan soldiers in a ditch at the bottom of a hillock. I could just about see them but I couldn’t speak to them other than by shouting because we’d lost communications.



Cpl Watson, from Ballymena, Co Antrim, ready for patrol in Helmand province. She gave medical care in exposed open ground for 20 minutes

The army medic, who is barely 5ft, put herself in 'mortal danger' to treat a wounded Afghan soldier under heavy Taliban fire

‘I had on my body armour and my helmet, and I was carrying my SA80 rifle as well as my medical battlefield trauma kit. It’s heavy, it contains IV fluids and water, rations, drugs, tourniquets and airway equipment, not to mention the collapsible stretcher strapped to one side and the mine detector strapped to the other.



‘I’d run no more than a couple of metres away from the compound where I had taken cover when I fell over something – uneven terrain, my own feet, I don’t know. I went down.

‘I was very, very embarrassed but I reckoned that in the heat of the battle with bullets flying in both directions my platoon was too busy to notice. So I got back up and kept on running.’

The wounded man was an Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier whose pelvis had been shattered by bullets. He was deep in shock and drifting in and out of consciousness.

Watson made a 100m dash in full view of the enemy under sustained accurate fire to deliver life-saving first aid to a soldier who had been shot twice

‘The soldier tending to him was doing a brilliant job but he was a sniper and he was needed for the fight. I couldn’t let him do my job,’ says Kylie.



Beneath an exchange of fire between her platoon and Taliban fighters, she stemmed the casualty’s bleeding with field dressings and splinted his pelvis before a Chinook helicopter arrived to fly him to hospital at Camp Bastion, the British Army HQ.



The entire ‘contact’ took, she estimates, no more than 40 minutes, after which she and the rest of the patrol returned to their base at Checkpoint Azadie in Helmand’s ‘Green Zone’, an area of lush vegetation irrigated by the waterways of the Helmand River. ‘I didn’t dwell on it. It was just another day in Afghanistan,’ she reflects.



It was at Checkpoint Azadie that Lance Corporal Watson spent most of her six months in mid-2010. Like the men she served alongside, 9 Platoon of ‘C’ Company of 1st Battalion, the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, she lived rough at first.



She slept wrapped in a poncho, washed every second day with a field shower (a black plastic bag with a mini-hose attachment) and supplemented her Army rations with packet food posted out from home.



‘We nicknamed it “Hotel Azadie”,’ she says. ‘We had pushed out from a checkpoint a little under a kilometre down the road called Haji-Alen to build a new base. At first we came under fire every day but we made it plain we were there to stay. We even adopted a camp dog and called him Marra [a north of England word for friend].’



The lance corporal settled into life in her ‘hotel’. At camp she tended to the general health of the infantrymen as they battled the twin horrors of mid-summer in Afghanistan: searing heat and dust. As the only medic, she went out on all routine patrols.



It was just such a patrol which saw the second act of bravery that contributed to Kylie’s MC. ‘We left at sun-up for a patrol,’ she says. ‘It involved crossing the river by foot, which was always good for a laugh because I am only 5ft 1in tall, and the river comes up to somewhere between my waist and my neck, depending on the depth.’ (Kylie would have been too small to serve in the Corps under the height regulations that once held sway.)



The 23-year-old's tour of Afghanistan's Helmand province was her first as a fully qualified battlefield medic

‘I clambered out dripping green waterweed and slime. Then we got to a huge ditch. The infantry guys can jump it, I can’t. One of them lay down to make a human bridge for me to walk across. What can I say? I fell off sideways and went head first into the ditch. I went completely underwater and had to be hauled out.



‘I couldn’t bear to think about what was actually in the water so I was raging and the guys were laughing. It was obviously going to be another good day ...



‘We patrolled a wee bit further and had just stopped for a break when the gunfire opened up. The commander of the ANA soldiers attached to us came racing down a track towards us – he ran about 25 metres with bullets flying all around him, screaming for a medic. The platoon sergeant and I ran back with him.



‘We saw one of his men lying on open ground and I ran forward into the contact. There was gunfire in both directions but ... well, none of it seemed to be aimed at me.



‘The casualty had no pulse, he wasn’t breathing. He had a tiny entry wound in his chest but no exit wound. I began cardiopulmonary resuscitation [CPR]. The platoon sergeant said, “Kylie, have you seen where we are?” and I looked ahead of me and to the side and realised we were in completely open ground. “Right,” I said. “I think we should get back.”



'The citation doesn't mention the bit where I fell over...'

‘Three guys came to help and we evacuated the soldier under fire. I kept going with the CPR and one of his comrades gave him the kiss of life.



‘We fought and fought until the helicopter came. I wouldn’t give up, but I couldn’t bring him back. Sometimes you can’t change the outcome. You can’t save everyone, you just have to know you did your best. Then we got shot at on the way home too.’



Kylie paid her respects to the fallen soldier at a memorial held back at Azadie but her emotions are those of a controlled professional. ‘What happens in Afghanistan stays there,’ she says firmly, unwilling to let operational horrors seep into her happy home life back in the UK.



For just to add to the drama of her tour, her boyfriend, Lance Corporal Jacques Swanepoel, a combat medic in 16 Air Assault Brigade, proposed to her and presented her with a diamond engagement ring when she returned on leave. He met her at RAF Brize Norton and swept her off to an expensive hotel in nearby Oxford. Suffice to say it was a world away from Hotel Azadie.



‘Jacques had arranged for me to be pampered and have a massage. The masseuse told me I had a lot of tension in my shoulders and I just thought, “Well honestly, I wonder why ...”



‘Later, Jacques asked me to marry him and I burst into tears. He didn’t know whether that meant yes or no. But of course I accepted.’



Kylie left Jacques just days later to return to Helmand to complete her tour. She did not expect to see him again for six months, but in a scene worthy of a romantic novel the couple were unexpectedly reunited for a few hours at Camp Bastion. She was departing Afghanistan just as he arrived to begin his own six-month tour.



‘I found him in the NAAFI. I still had all my kit on, I walked across to him and said, “Hello!” ’ And what was it like to see him in such circumstances? She answers with a smile and one word: ‘Precious.’



Lance Corporal Watson asked, 'Are you sure you've got the right soldier?' when her commanding officer told her she'd been awarded the Military Cross

Kylie was born in Ballymena, County Antrim, where she was raised in a large and happy family of five children by parents Glenn and Lorna. And while her MC might have made her the pride of her regiment, it earned her a stiff telling-off from her mum: ‘Kylie! What did you do? Next time, please don’t.’



Her family has no history of military service but a childhood set against the backdrop of the Troubles of Northern Ireland prompted her interest in the Army. She joined up in 2006. ‘I could imagine myself being a soldier, doing something to help,’ she recalls.



After basic training and eight months of studying battlefield medicine, she joined the Corps in September 2007.



The following year she went on her first operational tour, serving six months in Basra where she took part in patrols, looked after health in camp and trained Iraqi army medics. She returned to the UK to study and qualify as a Class One medic, able to operate alone.



As the only woman in an operational team of around 20 men she is used to being treated with affectionate respect in camp and equality beyond it. She was not surprised to encounter prejudice from Afghan nationals – but she was ill-prepared for her gender to become an issue among saloon-bar bores in relation to her MC.



‘When I got to the Afghan soldier who’d been hit in the pelvis the interpreter began to say, “But you’re a woman.”



‘I stopped him right there and said, “He’s going to be treated whether he likes it or not.”



‘It was not a big deal for me. They can think what they want but when you’ve got someone’s life in your hands you must do what you can.’



However, she is a little angered by some of the online comments which followed the announcement of her MC, branding it an act of tokenism or political correctness, rather than the just reward for acts of heroism to match any man. ‘Those who say that are welcome to take my kit and go to Afghanistan for six months. They are welcome to wear my boots and be me,’ she says, adding that she can’t wait to return to operations because ‘I think I’ve done all right so far’.



Modest words from a soldier whose fierce, lion-hearted humanity took her into the white heat of battle to help others.



The motto of the Royal Army Medical Corps is ‘In Arduis Fidelis’: Steadfast in Adversity. And so Lance Corporal Kylie Watson MC has proved.

