Baghdad IED: Saving Comrades While at Death's Door | TEA & MEDALS

everything went into slow motion and i knew him instantly when my left foot touched the ground that it wasn't right he was very calm in a situation where he could have had every right to lose his composure lose his bearing but he stayed professional throughout the whole ordeal even as he was coming in and out of consciousness it's not a friendship it's a brotherhood and it's something that you endure together and we have become family pete nick and i the three of us have become very close what is it that drives people to be brave to commit acts of heroism often in the face of the enemy i'm darren coventry former soldier and now video and podcast producer at bfbs i've been talking to men and women who've received the uk's highest military honours we talk about what happened what they thought at the time and how they feel about it now this is team medals [Music] major pete norton uh the formerly of the royal logistics corps and recipient of the george cross um thanks for coming it's a real honor to meet you thanks for inviting me along it's a real pleasure to be here um the most important question regardless of everything else is how do you take your brew oh definitely julie andrews white none please we need a kind of a chart i think of how everyone takes it maybe it needs to appear in the in the video somewhere um so pete you um served in the army and in a job that some people might understand and know as a bomb disposal um but your official title would have been an ammunition technician and then later as a ammunition technical officer ato um so tell us tell us about that tell us about your your job it was a bit weird because it was never really meant to be never been my intention uh i'd always wanted actually to join the air force as a pilot but unfortunately a family doctor at some point in my childhood had written that i'd got asthma and as there were no recruiting issues at all at that point all they did was take one look at that on the on the documents and wouldn't even consider me for any further um so that was a sort of a bit of kick in the teeth um sit back and think about what one wants to do i ended up leaving part way through my a-levels at school because i wasn't enjoying it it wasn't really firing all of my rockets as it were so after a little period working in civvie street i decided to join the army my brother had been in for a little while and he was enjoying it so initially i applied for a commission in the royal army ordinance corps and went to blackdown barracks in january 83 as a potential officer cadet to do a three-month potential officer cadet course that was fantastic fun really put through the mill for three months lots of fears lots of leadership tasks lots of high stress situations to be put into constantly being assessed and then went forward to regular commissions board at westbury they took a look at me there and unfortunately turned around and said we think you've got something but go away and finish your a-levels well i'd already taken that decision i didn't want to do the a-levels myself along with a couple of other guys that had done the poc course with me and got the same sort of knock-back deferral all three of us decided that we'd enjoyed the three months so much we were going to join up as soldiers so the ordnance corps offered us the trade of ammunition technician it was the only one that they really wanted us to go into because of the educational requirements and the fact that it gave us the most money it was a technical trade um so we all signed up for that and after doing full another three months of proper basic training to become qualified soldiers we then went on to our trade training and passed out as ammunition technicians class two pete completed his training and left as a lance corporal he was posted to five ordnance battalion in germany where he ended up working at 5-2 ordnance company postings followed for pete in the normal army fashion at the time moving every few years between northern ireland and germany by 1986 he was the senior ammunition technician responsible for bomb disposal in northern ireland eventually it reached the rank of wn1 conductor at the time one of the most senior soldier appointments in the british army and a real testament to his knowledge and experience pete then commissioned and took up an appointment as a captain at raf whitton in cambridgeshire looking after ground to air weapon systems but he soon found his way back to the army i actually got pulled out of whitten a year early there was a manning issue in the 11 eod regiment so i got pulled back into 11 eod and went to ash church which was the headquarters of 71 eod squadron and assumed the role of two ic of the squadron there had to sub in there as the oc for six months initially on arrival because the oc had to deploy on something else but then it was pretty obvious that soon i was going to get pulled out to go and support an operation either in afghanistan which was looming or as was more likely and as it turned out to support operations in iraq you're you know as church and then you deploy to iraq yep so you had to be a late entry captain so and that i mean that's exactly your experience so you bring all that experience with you both from northern ireland and out and having sort of come up through the ranks and done weapons in before to to assist them and guide them in setting up and running this unit and the americans are very good at this you know they bring all the manpower and the money to the party in this instance we bring the experience but then very soon they learn from you and they just start running away with it and bringing in more money and making it much bigger than we could ever because it sounds like afghanistan and absolutely yeah yeah yeah um but so essentially it's the same sort of things we used to do in northern ireland with our bomb intelligence team which then became weapons intelligence teams and weapon intelligence company and it's basically to find out what is the enemy doing how are they doing it what they're using who are they and it's a combination of technical and biometric intelligence that helps you identify and hopefully defeat the enemy yes it's real like intelligence at the cutting edge of operations you know it's really affecting every aspect of almost how vehicles are built how how troops move around and it's all done by a very diverse team that's brought together you know that so that whole sexy unit let's say you know you've got u.s navy personnel you've got us army personnel you've got british army personnel some australian army personnel you've got civilians from usa various u.s agencies you've got fbi guys there all working together to get that same job done and it's two of those fbi guys who are an important part of this story my name is nicholas beauchers and i'm a supervisory special agent with the fbi and i've been with the fbi since 1999. in 2005 i was a line special agent bomb technician and was assigned to the boston field office and i was deployed to iraq in support of the combined explosives exploitation cell and essentially was assigned there for about three months my name is christopher vergopoulos i'm an fbi supervisory special agent bomb technician uh i work in the explosives unit in the fbi laboratory i've been an agent since 1997 so you know a pretty full career there pete met nick and chris who is also known as rigo when he joined the combined explosives exploitation cell sexy all right c-e-x-e yes you put that together it's sexy all right and literally they were calling you know the guys say the sexy guys are here and we couldn't shake it so we had to own it so we actually embraced it and that became our our thing it is what it is so our primary mission at that time was in working with our coalition partners specifically united kingdom uh as well as australia we were present to conduct post-blast investigations to determine when there was a complex attack or the potential use of sophisticated improvised explosive devices our role was to conduct a essentially a preliminary on-scene investigation not only to gather facts or gather evidence but also to kind of do an examination of the tactics techniques and procedures in order to try to keep our forces safe and at the same time attempt in every way possible forensically and investigatively to determine who the individuals were that were actually building those devices and through that type of work continual exposure to the trends and the movement of ttps we would hopefully get information and have opinions we could present back to the the the armed forces and give them an idea of what's happening so they could adjust their tactics as well to prevent more attacks and save lives and just kind of be in front of it so the unit itself depended really what was going on in some cases most of the unit might deploy in two humvees which would typically be about 10 people deploying our go but actually on a day-to-day basis we developed this sort of system where actually we might just deposit in five in one vehicle so that you're not constantly all going out and because it's literally day on every time maybe four or five times a day in some cases occasional quiet days but most days were quite busy we're here to talk about your george cross but i think it's worth talking about some of the other stuff that happened on that tour before we get to that because it was as you say it was a very hectic busy tour well day one was a great example literally sort of got off the hook um was met by the guy that i was replacing taken back and within half an hour basically unpacked my kit got my assault vest all ready to go and everything's rock and rolling and half an hour later we're out and in the first two days i think it was five car bombs and suicide bombs and the light that we deployed to yeah and that was that was it that was straight in to the job um pretty much yeah yeah and there are a number of occasions where either myself and my team or the other team were out there and you know you get car bombs going off quite close or the brpgs fired into your area yeah and baghdad was a real wild west it was pretty yeah yeah yeah one incident that i did read about was about a suicide vest that you were looking at so all the local eod teams would send in their stuff that they'd rendered safe so that it could then be exploited a lot of the exploitation was if it wasn't something particularly high threat or high priority at the time then we'd have a quick look at it and triage it and if it was safe etcetera then it would actually get boxed up sent back to the uk or us for the full exploitation but of course that triage thing that was also part of my major part of my daily job when i was not deployed out on the ground was triaging the stuff that came through and i got to the bottom of this box that i turned up there was this sort of fairly standard sort of looking suicide vest a lot of american c4 which had obviously been captured or found stolen from somewhere loads of ball bearings on the front and then i found out it was about seven detonators still inside of it they hadn't been removed or anything it's like probably ought to do something about this see i imagine this now is you know cameras rolling hollywood movie stuff it's like better thought this that one no it was it was it was um better sort this out uh so took some photos before i took it apart and then just started cutting it over with the scalpel and and getting them out basically just to reduce the danger because it was literally in our triage area next to the office and yeah yeah i think that you know from what i've what i've heard about you and talk to some of your friends as we'll discuss you know that kind of epitomizes your your cool cool nature by the sounds of it i think you're cool i think annoys my wife sometimes um there's have you ever seen the bridge of spies with yeah tom hanks and the russian spy that gets caught and a number of times during the film we have ten chances are you not worried and the responses would it help no well that's true i mean it's a really good way to look at it but that gets us on to the 24th of july and you were working with your team at sexy and you got called to a serious incident which involved a unit from the 121st georgia national guard um which i'm assuming is quite a routine shout for you guys well yeah this was a classic one so the sunday was actually a fairly quiet day up until that point um and i think it was late afternoon when the first call came through so we just had to get the team together and we did the same sort again just deployed as a small team so in this case one vehicle five of the senate servers myself there's nick beaucheers he was fbi uh chris rogopolis fbi uh ken chisholm who's atf uh andrew martin who is australian army and so at the time if you can picture obviously a very dusty environment where often you couldn't see but a few meters ahead of you temperature was in excess of 50 degrees c and you know you're wearing about 25 to 30 kilos of kit and cramped into armored vehicles and essentially going outside the protection of the base to conduct our job and so we did that obviously with the support of the military to ensure that we were safe and that we were able to get our job completed as quickly as possible uh unfortunately uh it's a high threat environment uh we were going to places where attacks had just taken place or had taken place very recently so we're constantly under the threat of potentially taking hostile fire or what we would consider follow-on devices um so we drove basically as i said about 15 minutes without leaving cam just to get to 48 brigade combat teams uh op center got a briefing in there as to what was happening and ideally really would have liked to have deployed onto the ground straight away still daylight always good to get out on the ground in daylight so you can see what's going on but you've also got to sort of work with the unit who are trying to control what for them is obviously quite a traumatic time there's a lot going on yeah a lot of different moving parts and they wanted to get um recovery section out there because they'd got you know basically the remains of the vehicle and a load of equipment and body parts all that which needed recovery so instead of us just going out there with our american mp escort that we normally had we were sat around for quite a while actually waiting for this recovery team to be able to join us and go out as a convoy to the scene so by the time we got to the scene uh it was early evening and it was it they've already got dark which is never ideal but you know it is what it is you've got to do the job uh so it's about probably about 6k southwest of baiap so not not that far out of camp victory really but it's a very flat open rural area a lot of agriculture going on a lot of big irrigation ditches traversing that whole area and as the incident was on this one long road that runs east to west and basically that day they'd had a vehicular patrol going along there and i think it was second or third of the top memory i'm not certain humvee got hit by this massive buried ied um whether it was commanwa or rcid i i don't know and it just destroyed the humvee largest part that was left really was the engine block with the front sort of axle attached the rest of it equipment and unfortunately the occupants were just spread for 50 meters all over the place so when we arrived the unit had already been on the ground for quite some time obviously they're trying to secure the routes in make sure nobody can get in and out that's a very wide open air they're open to attack they're getting under threat yeah they're under threat constantly could have been indirect more to fire proof like rockets could have been a suicide vehicle bomb ied happened all the time constantly every day every everything you go to so the soldiers are really on edge they know and at the same time they're on edge but we know that we've got to get the job done as quickly as possible to get them out of the way so they're not under threat and they've already been there for quite a long time so we turn up we stop short where we can see the guys at the side of the road do our fives and 25s straight away so for those that don't wear five five and twenty five five meter check the first thing you do when you stop out on operations in that sort of sort of threat area is five minute look before you can get out you're looking out the windows is there anything around here i should be suspicious of doesn't matter that a unit's already there you do it all the time every time so it becomes second nature you don't want to be in a situation where the guys are wondering if this is a job where i should do a check or shouldn't do a check just do it automatically 5's and 20s have actually made their way into military yeah well it used to be 5's and 20s and 20s in northern ireland in a racket the size of 25 so basically once you've done that initial five there's nothing that i can see around here that's a threat then the guys get out do walk around that five physically check the five make sure there's nothing that they're not happy with and then if we think we're going to be in that particular location before i will then extend it out to do a full 25 check so we've sort of done that and i'm talking to the guy that sort of identified himself as yesterday commander at the time and he's given me a brief on what's going on and in front of me basically there's a in within the confines of what you can see in the dark is a scene of devastation and lots of glow sticks and basically what they've done is they've gone around and marked all the body parts and hazardous such as ammunition grenades etc with these glow sticks so it's quite a surreal scene uh in front of me at the time what would would often happen at scenes is once we've got the information we need i've got one of my team acting as described which was was drew martin the aussie i would have basically said right this is what we're going to do guys this is a plan we're going to get in exploit the scene gather what we need whether that be samples from the seat of the explosion like the crater because if we get the samples there chemical analysis can give us an idea of what we use what type of explosive etcetera and maybe if we identify any fragments and likely collect those up as well all depends on the job itself so you asked the guys to stay behind in in the safe area and you went forward by yourself i ended up doing a one-man walk down which is kind of how normally in northern ireland we would would never all go in as a team that was just something that i developed in iraq so i did this one man walk around i've gone down the right hand side big crater in the middle of the road but what i was really concerned about was that sort of verges down both sides of the road where it'd be easy to conceal something particularly an antenna for a receiver or something like that and i was using just a combination really of white light night vision equipment etcetera and doing a careful slow walk around and i was on the way back towards the hard top when jess everything went into slow motion and i knew him instantly when my left foot touched the ground that it wasn't right and that was just followed by this massive explosion feeling being thrown through the air just really fast hard wind hot punching past me and being thrown eventually landing you know you see films where it goes into slow motion clearly it doesn't but i think actually when your body and your mind suddenly finds itself in a situation like that i don't know maybe switches to a different mode where it just processes everything so much faster that it seems like it's happening in slow motion and it's one of those moments where you know you can once again replay it in your mind 100 times and you know where were you or how how did you react well in this case uh the id functioned and uh knocked all of us to the ground that's how close we were to this because remember we were standing in your humvee you know and pete was within a visual distance of us and it was a night job so you know now it's it's like now what do you do right yeah that's where your training once again kicks back in and you have to react and so there was obviously some smoke it was obviously dark and uh you know it was milliseconds after that uh that you know chris called out you know hey pete are you are you good we didn't hear anything uh and so as chris started forward i moved forward with him i think it landed head first but thank god in the helmet on and obviously had wind enormously knocked out of me um and i think probably could have easily died if i just relaxed but i was on the deck there and i thought about my kids my boys and get back home to them probably seen too many war films over the years but the only thing that came to mind then was just to shout out loud medic [Music] really just to let him know where it was so you know he's not where he was where is he and that's one of those moments where you're starting to scan you know it's once again as dark and smoky and things i could hear him very close by and he he flew in the air probably about 20 something feet away from the from the secondary blast so i went directly to that's that site and once again having done this type of work for for a long long time and also haven't been on the firefighter with our royal metro fire department you know having seen many trauma scenes and reacted as a medical responder you know i've you know you've seen it all until you haven't right well in this case it was quite unique for me personally because now it's my guy it's always been somebody else but today it was my guy that was injured right and those was moments you know there's my tl my team leader it's horrific traumatic injuries uh his one leg was gone his arm was mangled he's bleeding out you know and he's still you know lucid he's you know giving us you know still commands it's fascinating on his part that he had the the abilities to continue that so as well as moments where you know where were you you know there you are right and personally i paused for a second got it you know started attending to the peace wounds and uh with like a pressure dressing then on my heels uh shortly right behind me was my partner uh nick bush years you know and once again he had the same medical training i did you know prior to coming in the bureau so he kicked into action right he was in his his normal battle kit uh obviously which had sustained some uh damage due to the explosion and so uh you know his rifle had been knocked from him a little bit a ways away and so you know we had to quickly assess uh that situation uh so i called for a medic and meanwhile applied a tourniquet to his leg uh which was obviously amputated and then started trying to address his other wounds while that was happening of note you know pete displayed a tremendous amount of what i would call grit during that situation in that chris was doing his best to keep him conscious and to get information but pete was freely offering information and trying to make sure that we understood what he knew up to the point of the incident happening and so it was one of those situations uh you know hindsight being what it is and reflecting back on it it's almost like a movie um because he was very calm in a situation where he could have had every right uh to lose his composure or lose his bearing but he stayed professional throughout the whole ordeal even as he was coming in and out of consciousness they called him perfect pete you know in the in the british uh community bomb community and there's a reason for that you know he was still giving his commands about uh the area he was walking where he went where he didn't go stay away from this area police's his weapon find his his ammo don't leave it behind all those things that you would that you would say where it's interesting um you know as we're tending to pete's wounds and we're stabilizing his injuries so i want to make sure it doesn't go into shock you know i said pete your leg's broken you know it's gone right however i don't know if he was aware of that at that moment just told him it's broken just for the moment at the same time you know just give him a little piece of mind and say then everything else is where it should be all right so that laid that out too because you know everything was below the waist you know his injury of his leg so make sure he knew everything else was was good to go so we'll just say that nick and chris basically got to me first from from my recollection um and got down next to me um and basically just very lucky that both of them from their previous military background and other jobs that they had done were essentially paramedic yeah trained um so they basically got to work to me they had um tourniquet combat application tourniquet with them so they applied that to my leg um i was uh attempting at the time no i could couldn't really see much but um attempting to get i had a morphine injection in my pouches which all the brits carried but actually turned out none of the americans had it was something that they weren't aware of as well so i'm actually trying to get this thing out with my left hand little did i know that actually my left hand probably wasn't in any sort of condition at all to do anything but i was like why can't i get this open sort of thing i bet she gave up on that i think they managed to find it but then they didn't know how to use it yeah anyway i've never monkeyed with this kit before so i'm trying to figure out how to use it you know this poor guy's in the worst pain of his life and now i'm monkeying around with this kit and i broke it you know i broke his kit right so now i can't give him the morphine that he really needs i mean we laugh about it now yeah but at the moment you know it was like oh my gosh i just wrecked it so there's that all right so that that was just an interesting kind of a moment um which uh after that never happened again we got we trained up on the on the british kits so we knew what to do in the future so when the medic arrived the medic i i don't know but i would i would say that the medic was a bit taken aback uh by the seriousness of pete's injuries and when he went to try to start an iv he was visibly shaking and it was pete who actually was like hey it's gonna be okay you got this mate you know i mean you know very very again displaying a lot of grit uh in a situation that you know i think others would have folded both chris and nick had started out their careers as firefighters so we're trained paramedics pete believes this saved his life and despite his injuries and the pain he was in he also saved theirs it comes back to this whole you know not happy about this place anyway and included i've just been proven right um there's one that's just got me there's probably or at least one maybe or two or three more and what i didn't want the worst thing that would for me at that point was for them to then start wandering about and get hit on the way down you know there's nothing i could do about controlling them when they rushed to me to give first aid but now that they're there so you know it was essentially instructing them don't go anywhere i think there's more but i can't help but back up and and focus on the the the abilities pete had where he was giving us orders his commands as he was keeping us tight there's another reason for that right that was part of the training part of his experience and once again you know we're focusing on him we're kind of running around making sure we're squaring him away but at the same time we're listening to him whereas we are staying close well they're there they're treating me they're reassuring me telling me you know that i'm going to be right there i haven't lost my bits and all that sort of stuff and i'm sort of more concerned really about you know their safety because i don't want them to step outside this immediate area where i'm almost convinced that there's more devices so once they've sort of got me to the point where they're happy that they've stabilized me they've got tourniquet on um when they get a stretch up to me then they they take me back to the icp um we're waiting for the blackhawk to come in and obviously already called in the paramedic helicopter to come in and uh continuing to reassure me and say about that let the wife know i'm okay um but i i'm still now convinced that you know we need to make sure that nobody else goes in tonight there's there's more down there it needs rather than an intelligence clear out he needs an eod team to go in there so before they put me on the helicopter i get them to promise to me that nobody else is going to go in there tonight that they'll hold the ground and get eod team in tomorrow which i understand they subsequently did so in a nutshell you know it was it was harrowing chaotic terrifying at the same time it was inspiring in the fact of pete's his leadership his behavior that he demonstrated on that scene and uh some people will say you guys saved him no he saved us he did through his actions through his leadership and his gut feeling he kept us in a position we could go home to our families what we didn't know was about 12 feet away was not another secondary but a tertiary a third improvised explosive device that was buried in that location once again that's a ttp that the insurgents would use very effective but from pete's actions he kept us close had we gone down there on the first walk we all could have been taken out had he not kept us close on that on our response to him we would have been taken out it's my in my opinion so what made pete think there might be more than one ied it's something that's always puzzled rigo my question for peter is you know was that a gut feeling that he had because sometimes in our craft we rely on that and you can call it what you want you call it a gut feeling you can call it a sixth sense some people might call it an angel on their shoulders a little voice woman's intuition depends on how you how you couch it but i've always wondered for pete if that kicked in not for him to keep us back by the humvee well he did this the first check you know after the area was even cleared i've got to be honest that whole day even before the incident came in there was some i'm not a believer in paranormal or anything like that but that whole day just within me it felt like something was going to happen that day and i had that feeling all the way up to the deployment and then on the ground particularly yeah i i told the guys for quite a while afterwards that no i don't didn't have anything but i did it something wasn't right without a doubt so that's why i ended up doing this i guess you get evacuated and you don't see nick or probably anyone else for quite some time you know you go in i remember um being put onto the helicopter um sort of you know looking up and just seeing the roof inside this black hawk and people start leaning over me and trying to put stuff into me and that's really my last memory although i mean i was informed that i was conscious all the way to central baghdad to the combat support hospital and onto the table but that's where they basically put me into an induced coma um did all that sort of life-saving surgery and then basically left me overnight to see whether or not i'd die or survive as we all know by now pete norton is made of strong stuff he made it through the night and was flown out to ramstein in germany to the u.s medical facility after a few days there he was moved back to birmingham's celiac hospital so you know i lost my left leg above the knee my left arm basically got amputated just below the elbow um i lost eight percent the right buttock all of the right hamstring uh most of my sciatic nerve on the right nothing worked below the knee uh fractured ribs fractured vertebra collapsed lungs so it wasn't there's a lot going on that's it's not visible as well oh yeah yeah quite a bit um so i was in saudi oak hospital for almost a year um before they then moved me down to hedley court which is our medical rehab facility at the time down in near leatherhead and i've been down there for a number of months um starting that whole sort of rehab process yeah and i guess everything you're doing in that rehab facility is quite energetic you know you're trying to um learn new ways to move around and deal with or just just to move things yeah you know i'm having been in the hospital for so long with limited mobility i mean i think it was uh more than three months before he even managed to get out the bed uh nearly six months was out of the bed for the first time so not ideal i'd been there for a few months and it was almost like being cut off partic certainly at celio even to the degree because actually if you think back into 2005 all the smartphones that we've got now the email on demand it wasn't there um so actually it was almost like being cut off from your friends society and colleagues um putting into isolation for a period which was quite strange to adapt to with no contact um but eventually um yeah i got some two surprise visitors at hedley court and nick and rigo were there there was no hesitation when we had an opportunity to visit pete when he was at headley court uh shortly after we departed theater to see how he was coming along and then from that point forward we just stayed in touch and made sure that he was getting what he needed and just making sure that he knew he wasn't alone and you know back to that grit his resiliency is also something that is just extremely admirable to go through all the surgeries that he's gone through and all of the associated dynamics and impact that takes place on the family uh it's it's impressive and he every time comes through it uh at a level that is beyond comprehension nick and rigo weren't the only ones to be impressed by pete the army was too and told him he was going to be awarded the george cross [Music] uh so that was when i was still in in selly oak uh in march 2006 and a colonel from m d main building came along who i didn't know and basically said look we don't normally do this because it's normally released on the day but because of your situation you're still in hospital we're going to give you sort of a sneak preview and you're going to be awarded the george cross which which helped me like a sledgehammer because i was fully aware of what the award was for my colleagues of mine have received them in the past and ammunition technicians and atos in the past have received them um so i'm fully aware of its standing what it means um so yeah it was it hit me big the british army is very thorough they really are i'm impressed with their processes and stuff and and there isn't they did an inquiry you know into the event uh that we all participated in we were interviewed you know by the british uh uh investigators you know on on to the what happened and there's a follow-on later which is to be expected um one of the commanders uh colonel sudden uh asked if i would be willing to write a letter you know a written letter yeah for the board of inquiry you know i s absolutely it'd be my pleasure to do that so yeah i wrote this letter and i asked my unit chief you know hey send this on to the to the the brits do i send it to the embassy and have them walk it over whatever and you know my boss said nope send it right to the colonel you know direct so point senate and and and that you know is just gonna be part of this package so the interesting thing was it was about a month and a half later the colonel calls me back says says rigo you know thanks for the drafting letter everything's good to go with the inquiry no issues um pete's doing great he's in you know the hospital he had he's had you know multiple surgeries um and he he advised uh that he was going to be awarded the george cross which is absolutely amazing you know and uh it was kind of funny how the colonel put it he goes yeah your your letter was part of that package and to and actually it was read by the queen herself and i was like okay so to my guys my squad i remind them you know be careful what you're right you never know who's going to read it so what did pete's family and friends think at the time obviously everybody was was you know supportive and surprised and certainly from trade perspective proud i guess it wasn't the best of times sort of that point onwards really family wise unfortunately a year in hospital after you know three four months on ops followed by a year in rehab and all the issues that go with that resulted in a breakdown of the marriage it was just too much and unfortunately the army didn't really help they didn't do as good a job as they could have in supporting the family and relieving the stresses that they were under not sure they even recognized it so unfortunately that was not a good time lifewise so when i when i eventually left rehab i didn't end up going back to a family i ended up coming here to shriven them into a single room to start a masters course right so your life changed in in a lot of ways absolutely yeah and i guess emotion that must have taken a huge toll as well and that slowed the whole recovery down it's complicated everything i guess you you know and you said you came here to do a masters is that a way for you to put your mind into something uh it provided that i mean it wasn't the reason i actually got blown up three weeks before i was due to leave and come here and do that masters anyway um and you know thankfully the the mod kept the place open for me um so when i eventually did return from rehab i was able to go straight into that and get on with that and so that that sort of provided me with a focus whilst trying to deal with all the other things that were going on in life at the time as well and uh i guess you went to beckham palace is was it a backhand palace uh it was um slightly un unusual to be honest uh so normally um something like the george cross on the victoria cross you would get presented by her majesty the queen but i don't know if you can cast your mind back to 2006 late 2006. and it's one of the very few times during her reign when her majesty has had to stop doing duties and she had a bad back okay which must have been bad for her to stop yeah um but i i'm going to say i bet it was not her decision um but the whole thing the whole investiture had already been sort of booked i'd already accepted the dates we got lunches booked for people and the whole thing i was still at heady court at the time i actually got a call the day before from the palace and i'm sure not many people get calls like this and you know imagine sends apologies but she's not going to be able to do the investiture tomorrow would you like to reschedule um i had a quick think on my feet and it's like i've got so much organized other other people booked you know coaches dinners in regent's park barracks and all that it's like you know what i can't i'm i'm going to have to continue i think i'm probably the only person said george cross presented by princess anne and she at the time said you know this i never get to give these out um and it was quite nice in in some respects as much as a disappointment as it was not to have it presented by her majesty at least princess anne was our colonel in chief i'd met her on a couple of occasions so it was it was quite special in that respect as well and the palace were fantastic but it wasn't the only honor pete received one of my counterparts one of the special asian bomb technicians who knew pete who was in iraq uh he's made the suggestion he's like hey uh why don't you put pete in for the fbi star i'm like that's usually for only for fbi agents it's kind of like a purple heart for fbi agents only agents have received it at that moment he goes yeah but he's part of your team and i'm like you know what you're right so i kind of had the letter written earlier the one i sent for the inquiry you know i i just kind of retooled it a little bit and i sent it to fbi director mueller at the time you know for consideration you know once again he's a foreign national he's not an on duty fbi agent and it was it was pretty awesome it came back they went absolutely he's going to get that i think uh he he's not one of the first if not in conjunction with another uh uh four national that got the fbi star first ones in in our history it's pretty neat uh so the fbi star is uh awarded for actions which result in a serious injury and you know that's typically in the course of a hostile action and so given that we were in a team environment and given that our team was responsible for conducting what i think could be best described as rule of law operations uh in addition to force protection uh you know when my my colleague chris was like hey what what do you think about this i said you know that is fantastic that is a terrific idea and he's most deserving of it yeah that was weird one that was a few years afterwards actually i got i think it was 2010 off the top my head i can't remember exactly now so i'd finished my master's degree um and i'd stayed on as a directing staff and lecturer at shriven at the defense academy and i was in the office and i got a phone call and it was like hi i'm from the fbi and i don't get these calls every day and we'd like to give you an award can you know could you come over on this date and unfortunately the first thing i had to say is i don't know actually um because i've got to get approval from main buildings so they literally phoned me up directly um so i hadn't come by at the end no i haven't gone through the md or anything so so i said look let me call you back um and i phoned up the mod uh desk at honors because um having already sort of got the george cross by then i got them on speed dial pretty much yeah and i phoned up and said look i've just had a phone call from the fbi they want to give me an fbi star and go over there to an official awards ceremony uh you're okay with this um and the female major at the other end meant no you're not allowed to it's not says hold on a second you want me to turn around to the fbi and say no thanks i'm not you can stick your award she went yeah you can't i said i'll tell you what you and me never had this phone call i'm off to her i'm off to the states um so yeah she basically went yeah we never had this phone call um so i phoned him back said yeah and give us updates um i do have a little uh video to show you which uh we like to drop this on everyone so i'm just going to key it up and then you get to see an amazing fbi set up hold up can you see that all right it's quite loud so you should hear okay yeah so you know obviously when you're in combat which is kind of hard to describe unless you've been there you do form a bond even with individuals that you may not necessarily associate with on a non-combat basis so there's definitely a bit of of a brotherhood in that respect way past that it's not a friendship it's a brotherhood and that's something that that you endure together and we have become family i see we pete nick and i have the three of us have become very close over the years sharing personal events family events the biggest thing i can say to pete is thank you and i would not be where i am now i would not have the family that i have now if it wasn't for pete and for his grit and again just being himself and so that is something that will always always resonate with me but the message i guess i would say is you know i want to thank you pete uh yeah you saved our lives on uh on uh that that uh horrific day and our families are uh and gratitude to you as well so it's our pleasure to uh be now related to you because you're stuck with us all right that's that's my message brilliant so i didn't want to drop that on you um that is um rigo and nick yep um to your fbi colleagues so you're now really close friends you know as they say family family yeah um and use godfathers they're great guys i could not have wished for any better people yeah to work with with that um we've had some stories um but fbi they they play it all straight officially but um yeah they can be a bit naughty actually yeah and so can pete rigo had told me a story about when he took pete to a halloween party in the u.s whilst i was here doing my masters um i met uh i sort of got divorced and i met a wonderful girl called kate who was doing her phd and basically fell in love and and got married in 2013 which is why we now now have two young daughters but the two of us uh were over in the states uh visiting the guys and it was around halloween time so that they invited us along to one of their colleagues halloween parties and the americans do these big halloween parties yeah well here's pete's crazy sense of humor and his wife kate they're two peas in the pot uh pete uh was gonna go as a zombie patient okay his wife is gonna be the zombie doctor so imagine he got the whole zombie persona going on right well pete uh used his his limbs or lack of limbs as part of his costume including like like bloody stumps and and and cut off pants and stuff like that he absolutely you know took it to the next level and kate as the doctor you know she's all you know geared up the same way they looked awesome the pictures are great a couple of years ago pete had his right leg amputated above the knee originally i wanted them to get rid of the right leg but they wouldn't do it they just wanted to save as much as i could so i ended up living sort of in a wheelchair and with that right leg uh holding me back in many respects because it's practically a dead weight uh holding that for some what 14 15 years and then in 2019 after what was actually a long battle against the system particularly the nhs but the uh part of an md and nhs trial i flew out to sydney and australia i had my right leg amputated above the knee and in the same operation two titanium rods inserted one up into each femur which i can basically just always stick out the end of my legs now uh and then i can attach prosthetic knees directly is that was that new is that why that it's a relatively new thing it's been around for a number of times but it's not widespread it's certainly not available directly on the nhs at the moment although hopefully it will be but basically it means that i can now i am in the middle of learning to walk on so that microprocessor knees your your decision and your fighting to get it done is has allowed you then to take move on to the next step which was holding you it was holding you yeah so up earlier this year january i took uh receipt of my my new knees as it were and had them fitted and everything set up and i've had a couple of rehab sessions typically about three weeks at a time now i put the defense medical rehab at the new one at stanford hall where i've now successfully been able to walk several hundred meters um some of it using just a stick at the moment uh still on relatively flat yeah even services like you say it's been a lot of years so you've got and i've got to build up strength and learn a lot muscle memory has been lost um so that's an ongoing thing at the moment uh keeping busy work with work uh running my own consultancy for a few things and just passed an interview and been accepted to do a phd here at cranfield an extract from pete norton's citation reads before allowing them to render first aid he instructed his team on which areas were safe and where they could move despite having sustained grievous injuries he remained in command and coolly directed the follow-up actions it is typical of the man that he ignored his injuries and regarded the safety of his men as paramount as they administered life-saving first aid to him it is of note that a further device was discovered less than 10 metres away and rendered safe the following day captain norton's forthright and clear orders in the most difficult of circumstances undoubtedly prevented further serious injury or loss of life [Music] [Music] you

Channel: BFBS Creative

Views: 71,985

Keywords: peter norton, pete norton, bomb disposal, eod, rlc, royal logistics corps, ordnance, iraq, baghdad, bomb, fbi, george cross, medal, bravery, courage, tea and medals, podcast, darren coventry, bfbs, bfbs creative, life saving, Baghdad IED: Saving Comrades While at Deaths Door, IED

Id: S4X1mgSX9kk

Length: 53min 31sec (3211 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021