b. 1960 Cardiff, Wales.
DATE OF CGC ACTION: March – April 2003 Iraq.
Michael J Flynn CGC MC
Mick Flynn was born in Cardiff in 1960, the son of an Irish Catholic labourer, who had emigrated to Wales in the 1950s. Flynn described his relationship with his father in his autobiography as ‘I didn’t get hugs from my father,’ he writes, ‘I got lessons in self-defence.’ At the age of 14, Mick had become a bit of a teenage tearaway and became a burglar, once breaking into a dentist’s because he thought it would be full of gold teeth – it wasn’t.
A year later, a friend of his wanted to join the Army. With nothing better to do, Flynn accompanied him to the recruiting office. There he listened to the introductory chat and went away with the words ‘money’, ‘sport’ and ‘guns’ clanging away inside his head. He was too young to join up without parental consent, so his mother signed the forms without telling his father, who Flynn later stated “would have killed me”.
Sent off to Northern Ireland, he soon found himself in a fire-fight on the streets of Belfast. Flynn described his first impression of coming under attack “First comes fear, which gives way to self-preservation, and then to anger – ‘Pure and cold-blooded… the kind of controlled rage that means you’re ready to kill, but your mind is as clear and cool as glass.’ As for ‘the death thing’, as Flynn calls it, emotions are best kept tightly under wraps. He may have a glimmer of sympathy for enemy soldiers, but he has no qualms about killing them. After all, it’s what he’s been trained for.”
In the Falklands, he took part in the Battle of Mount Tumbledown and was involved in the final assault on Port Stanley. After the attack on Sir Galahad, which killed 48 British soldiers, he was later quoted as saying how ‘the dead were lined up on the beach in black body bags, ready for burial’.
One of the peculiarities of Flynn’s career is that he escaped unscathed from both Northern Ireland and the Falklands, only to be slashed in the stomach – ‘from waistband to ribs’ – by a disgruntled Cypriot in a nightclub in Paphos. Afterwards, in 1993, he decided to leave the Army. However, there were to be no sorry stints as a security guard or a bouncer for Mick Flynn. Bizarrely, he became a maggot dealer, and a very successful one, too. But always, it seems, the whiff of cordite was more alluring than the stench of maggots. Eight years later in 2001, Flynn rejoined the Army at the – comparatively – grizzled age of 41.
In 2003, about to cross the border from Kuwait into Iraq in his Scimitar, he suddenly found himself terrified, unsure if he was still up to it. As things turned out, he needn’t have worried: he earned his Conspicuous Gallantry Cross later the same year after disabling four Iraqi tanks and a rocket-launcher. He then served in Bosnia, before his first posting to Afghanistan. When he was first told he was going to Helmand, Flynn thought it was where the mayonnaise came from. He didn’t think it for long, though. Attempting to relieve the beleaguered garrison at Musa Qal’ah, Flynn’s Scimitar drove straight into a Taliban ambush.
He described what happened next in his book “Bullet Magnet” – Struck by a rocket, the inside of the tank filled up with a blinding fog of dust and debris. ‘I felt my legs to see if they were still attached,’ Flynn writes. ‘They were.’ But soon the metal inside the burning tank began to melt – ‘dripping down in soft folds like wax from a burning candle’. Flynn not only managed to regain control of the tank, but then got out to rescue a wounded British soldier. It was for this action that he was awarded the Military Cross.
Another of the peculiarities of Flynn’s career is that he has never actually been shot – despite his being widely known as Bullet Magnet in the Army. Or perhaps the bullets just bounced off him. His autobiography was published in 2010, and the preface was written by the now heir to the throne, Prince William, who served with him in the Blues and Royals. Flynn left the Army in 2012, one of most decorated men in service at the time.
CGC CITATION:
The Queen has been graciously pleased to approve the following awards for gallant and distinguished services whilst on operations in Iraq during the period 19th March to 19th April 2003:
CGC
24393724 Lance Corporal of Horse Michael John Flynn, The Blues and Royals.
LOCATION OF MEDAL: WITH RECIPIENT.