Colchester army medics get medals after Afghanistan evacuation

Army medics who helped evacuate thousands of Afghan nationals from Kabul last summer have been awarded operational service medals.

Some of them were caught up in the aftermath of a bombing which killed 13 US marines and dozens of others.

Maj Will Jenkins, who led the team, said he was "about as proud as I could be" of the 30 members of 16 Medical Regiment, based in Colchester.

The BBC has spoken to some of those who were recognised on Thursday.

Thirty medics were deployed to Kabul for two weeks to run a medical treatment facility at its airport - among them was Cpl Hannah Beaumont, 26, from Manchester.

They were part of Operation Pitting, the mission to evacuate British people, entitled Afghans, and civilians from partner nations as the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August 2021.

"We dealt with a lot of stuff that we weren't expecting to have to deal with until we got there, but it was an experience that I'll never forget, and I learned a lot from," she said.

They were treating evacuees and military personnel, including many with heat exhaustion after they had been walking for days, but after the two bombs went off, there were "a lot of trauma injuries", she said.

"There were some patients that we took to.... hospital, who, if we weren't there, they wouldn't have survived.

"I think the army kind of prepares you to deal with that sort of thing - when you're deployed it's something that you know you're going to have to deal with."

But she said they were not able to help everyone which was "something that, as a nurse, I wouldn't ever want to do to anybody ever again".

One, she said was a 16-year-old boy who had lost his whole family - "I had to leave him behind."

L/Cpl Chloe Sanderson 23, from Dorset, heard the attack.

"Seeing the casualties was... not what we expected at all," she said.

"We ran up, grabbing our body armour and helmets and then we got CS-gassed as well.

"I went to the Americans and unfortunately some of them had died."

One of the "scariest parts" of her deployment was "when the [civilians] broke onto the airfield - because that was my first day there", she said.

"They were breaking into the planes and hanging on to them while they were taking off.

"It was probably the worst experience of my life, probably because we were just confronted with such chaotic scenes."

Maj Will Jenkins led the medical team in Kabul.

"Many of us have remarked that this was like a six-month tour of Afghanistan and it compressed down into a very short period," he said.

"It had everything you might want, and a lot of things we didn't want - but it was a great success and I'm really proud of what our soldiers managed to achieve.

"I was in Kabul airfield at the time [of the attack] - we were receiving the patients that our soldiers had triaged and trying to save lives with a number of surgical techniques and emergency medicine."

He said talking about the experiences was useful, "but also remember the things you did well - the number of people that we did get out, the 15,000 that were successful".

"On that evening we saved 64 individuals that were in the hospital, many more people will have survived because of the point-of-care aid that our medics gave before they went into the Afghan system.

"I would say this was arguably the pinnacle of my career.

"It was my first time in command on operations... and having trained my soldiers, prepared them and then taken them out into a danger area [and] brought them all home safely - I'm about as proud as I could be."

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