Willie Apiata is from Mangakino in the middle of the North Island, of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui descent, and was a territorial soldier working as a farmhand and a labourer before he passed New Zealand SAS selection in 2001.
In 2004 his troop was in Afghanistan, laagered up for the night in vehicles in rocky country, when a group of fighters attacked the position with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns in the dark. The first grenade blew Apiata clean off the bonnet of the vehicle he was sleeping on. Beside him, Corporal 'D' — his name has never been released — was lying with a severe stomach wound and bleeding badly.
The two of them were on one side of a small hollow and the rest of the troop was on the other, seventy metres away across ground the enemy machine guns had fixed. Apiata made a decision he later described as taking about two seconds: he picked the man up, carried him on his back across the open, handed him to the medics, then took a weapon and went back into the fight.
The wounded man lived. In July 2007 Apiata was awarded the Victoria Cross for New Zealand — the first and still the only one, and the first to any New Zealander since the Second World War. He was a corporal.
He then did something almost no recipient has done: he gave the medal away, to the nation, so that it would be held in the National Army Museum at Waiouru rather than in a drawer at home. In 2008 the country voted him the most trusted New Zealander, replacing Sir Edmund Hillary. He left the regular army in 2012 and does not much like being asked about any of it.
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