When a soldier tripped a live grenade, he didn't run for cover: Instead, he dove onto the grenade to save his fellow men. Amazingly, he survived.
On February 9th, Matt Croucher, a Lance Corporal with the British Armed Forces, was traveling with his troop through Afghanistan at dawn, searching for a compound where they believed members of the Taliban were making bombs. It was dark, and the soldiers could barely see a single step in front of their own feet.
Suddenly, Croucher stepped into a tripwire, which pulled the pin out of a grenade that had been hidden in the ground.
“Grenade!” Croucher shouted, to warn his fellow troops.
But as the other soldiers dove for cover, Croucher didn’t run away: Instead, to protect his fellow men, he lay his body down on top of the grenade just before it exploded.
“I thought to myself, ‘I’ve set this bloody thing off and I’m going to protect the others,’” he told The Mirror. “So I jumped on the ground with my back to the grenade and used my body as a shield for the blokes behind me.”
“My reaction was, ‘My God this can’t be real’,” Croucher’s patrol commander, Adam Lesley, told The Times. “Croucher had simply lain back and used his day sack to blunt the force of the explosion. You would expect nine out of 10 people to die in that situation.”
When the grenade went off, Croucher’s backpack was flung about 30 feet in the air, but remarkably, the brave soldier himself was virtually uninjured, though the incident had left him in a temporary state of shock.
“My head was ringing. Blood was streaming from my nose. It took 30 seconds before I realised I was definitely not dead,” Croucher told The Times.
Croucher’s fellow soldiers were astounded by his bravery under such extreme circumstances, and he’s now being considered for Britain’s highest honor, the Victoria Cross, which has only been awarded to nine servicemen since World War II.
If anyone deserves such an honor, he certainly does –but Croucher plays down his act of courage: “To be honest, I’m amazed at the fuss,” he told The Mirror. “I was just doing my job. I’d got us into the mess and I wanted to get us out of it.”