A YORK teenager whose soldier fiancé was blown up in Afghanistan is featuring in a TV documentary tonight about her decision to stay with him and become his carer.

Vicky Swales cared for Rifleman Craig Wood for a long period before the pressures eventually led them to split up and call off their engagement.

Craig, then 18, had proposed to 16-year-old Vicky only three weeks before he was critically injured when a roadside bomb exploded on his first patrol back in Afghanistan.

He lost both legs and an arm in the attack in July last year, becoming one of only four triple amputees in the military.

Proud of her “man in uniform”, Vicky had to decide whether she could offer the support and help he needed as he sought to cope with traumatic injuries, and she decided to stay and become his carer.

In the BBC3 documentary, My Boyfriend The War Hero, screened tonight, Vicky tells how she admitted she was shocked when she first saw Craig at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. “He looked like a little child. It nearly killed me,” she said. At one point, Craig asked Vicky if she wanted to split up.

He said: “I thought she was just going to say ‘I don’t want you anymore’. I was just so scared that she was going to leave me.”

But she did not hesitate. “I was just sat there going, ‘I don’t want to leave him. I want us to be together’,” she said.

As his carer Vicky had to get Craig ready in the morning, cook his meals and do all the chores, as well as carry him up the stairs of the two-storey house, leaving her exhausted.

She moved from her parents’ house in York to Doncaster, losing touch with friends, and she had to put on a brave face when none of her friends from York attended their engagement party because, she said, they were worried about seeing someone as badly injured.

The couple faced more medical hurdles when Craig underwent an operation and contracted MRSA and septicaemia, leaving him critically ill.

Eventually, with stresses and problems that would be a struggle for most people to cope with, the teenagers split up.

Vicky said: “There’s so much more to deal with, it’s hard, it’s really hard and whoever thinks it’s easy, they’re really wrong.”