Lt. Anrude led his troop out of Patrol Base Hanjar accompanying an Afghan Special Forces unit to speak with locals at a mosque. 

He was leading the patrol through a complex and unfamiliar maze of alleyways, when, without warning, a gunman appeared from a doorway only metres away and unleashed a hail of automatic fire. He was hit twice, once in the head, striking his helmet and once in the arm, while two other patrol members, including an Afghan soldier, were seriously injured with neither man able to walk unaided.

Ignoring his own significant injuries, Lt. Anrude took immediate and decisive command of the situation and courageously led his troop out of the close alleyways and into open ground where the patrol quickly came under sustained and accurate fire from at least two separate enemy ambushes.

Without effective cover and with casualties, he chose to extract his patrol across two hundred metres of open ground.Leading by example, he picked up the injured Afghan soldier and, with bursts of accurate fire striking around him, carried the soldier to safety, pausing only to return fire [2].