Christian Craighead is a pseudonym, and nothing more — a court order protects the identity of the man behind it. What is known is the service record: he joined the British Army at sixteen and stayed for twenty-eight years, through the Parachute Regiment and the Pathfinder Platoon and then almost fifteen years in 22 SAS, with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He retired on 7 September 2020.
On the afternoon of 15 January 2019, four al-Shabaab gunmen and a suicide bomber attacked the DusitD2 complex on 14 Riverside Drive in the Westlands district of Nairobi. The siege ran for more than twenty-two hours and killed twenty-one civilians and a Kenyan soldier. Craighead was in Kenya with a British training team and was off duty when it began.
He went anyway. Wearing jeans, a plate carrier pulled over a shirt and a baseball cap turned backwards, with a borrowed carbine, he joined the Kenyan response at the gate and then went into the complex — and kept going back in, floor by floor, block by block, through the night: escorting office workers out in small groups, carrying the wounded, steering the Kenyan teams onto the gunmen. Forces News later reported that he killed two of the four attackers. Around seven hundred people were brought out of the complex during the operation.
A photograph of him walking a group of civilians out — unmistakably a soldier, unmistakably dressed for a day off — went round the world within hours, and the British Ministry of Defence found itself with a hero it could not name. The internet named him instead: bearded, rifle up, moving through the compound, he became “Obi-Wan Nairobi”, and the name stuck so hard that Kenyan papers still use it. Officially he was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, second only to the Victoria Cross, having already been appointed MBE. His memoir of that day, One Man In, is still unpublished: the MoD refused permission in 2022 and the High Court dismissed his challenge in 2023. In the meantime he wrote a children’s book instead — The Wrong Wolf, about a wolf who is told what he is and decides otherwise.
Fotografije: zasebna zbirka, objavljene z dovoljenjem. · Wikipedia