Kitabı oku: «Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit»

PROLOGUE

THE NIGHT WHICH COVERS ME

1 March 2008

Five miles above the earth, the night inky-black outside, the young officer bit down hard on his anger.

The transport plane was full of blokes going home: tired, happy, relieved to have survived their tours in Afghanistan pretty much unscathed, at least on the outside. The officer wasn’t part of these men: he was a Second Lieutenant in the Household Cavalry and his men were still out in Afghanistan. He was going home not because he wanted to but because he’d been ordered to, and he wasn’t at all happy about it. He’d been in Afghanistan for 10 weeks and his tour was supposed to be 14. Ten weeks was easily long enough to get a campaign medal, but he didn’t much care about that: he cared about being with his men until the end.

He’d loved it out in Afghanistan. For the first time in his life he’d been treated as a normal bloke rather than anyone special. He’d trained hard and done his job well: patrolling the deserted bombed-out streets of Garmsir, southern Helmand Province, defending his position from Taliban mortar and machine-gun attacks, and calling in airstrikes on enemy positions. To the pilots who dropped 500lb bombs on the co-ordinates he gave them he was just ‘Widow Six Seven’, his callsign – they didn’t know his real name and they wouldn’t have cared if they had. It was the people back home who cared, not the men in theatre. He’d slept alongside those men in Hesco wire-mesh gabion bunkers and used the rounded ends of missile cases as shaving bowls with them. He was a good soldier and a good man – that was all that mattered to them.

There was only really one thing the officer hadn’t seen, and that was death or serious injury. Sure, he’d called in many medical evacuations for soldiers who’d been blown up by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or shot in contact with Taliban fighters. Sometimes he’d said ‘op vampire’ when the casualty needed a lot of blood, and that always sent shivers down his spine. He’d lain in bed late at night and felt the place shaking from the downforce of a Chinook or a Black Hawk carrying the wounded, but he’d never seen someone killed or maimed.

Here, now, on the transport plane high above the Black Sea, he saw it.

The plane had been late leaving Kandahar Airfield because it had to wait for the coffin of a Danish soldier. Morten Krogh Jensen, just 21, had only been in Afghanistan three weeks. He’d been one of those people whom everyone had naturally liked: in a no-holds-barred team review of each soldier’s performance, Krogh had been the only one with nothing negative said about him whatsoever. Now his body was being repatriated to the seaside town of Frederikssund, where he’d helped his friends paint the hulls of boats in the harbour, where he’d convened groups to head for techno concerts in nearby Copenhagen, and where his family waited with an unfathomable hole in their lives.

Krogh’s coffin was kept out of sight, as were three British soldiers who’d been seriously wounded and were being taken back to Britain’s premier military hospital at Selly Oak in Birmingham. These soldiers were behind a curtain at the front of the plane, yet now and then the curtain blew open slightly and the young officer could see them. They were in a bad way: wrapped up in what looked like clingfilm and with bandages round the stumps of missing limbs. One of them was clutching a tiny bottle full of shrapnel removed from his skull. They were all in induced comas.

The young officer saw all this, as raw and visceral a face of war as could be. Too raw and visceral to be shown on the news, too raw and visceral for a public who didn’t, couldn’t, know the true cost of conflict unless they knew this. He hadn’t prepared himself, and the sight shocked and rattled him somewhere deep within himself. It certainly put his own frustrations into perspective.

The transport plane made its relentless way north-west, over the sleeping cities of Europe through which so much history had marched. It was daylight when the plane landed at Birmingham to unload the three wounded men, and mid-morning by the time it made the short hop back to RAF Brize Norton, where most people were disembarking. The young officer was 41st off the plane. No special treatment.

No special treatment, that was, until his feet stepped onto the tarmac. He may have been 41st off the plane, but he was still third in line to the throne, and numbers one and two were waiting for him. In Afghanistan he had been Second Lieutenant Wales. Now he was Prince Harry again.

He’d been pulled out for his own safety after details of his presence in Afghanistan had been made public. Once the news was out it was out, and so too was Harry.

He drove back to Windsor with his father, Prince Charles, and his brother, Prince William. The English countryside rolled past the windows, so much gentler and greener than the harsh browns of Afghanistan.

He thought about the men he’d seen behind that curtain. He wondered what he could do for them. There had to be something. But what? He had questions but no answers; he had a problem with no solution. But at least he was asking those questions. At least he recognised there was a problem.

Neither Prince Harry nor anyone else knew it at the time, but he had sown the first seeds of what would eventually blossom into the Invictus Games.

COMPETITOR PROFILE:

MAURICE MANUEL, DENMARK

Maurice Manuel speaks perfect English. That in itself isn’t unusual for a Dane, but in Maurice’s case his fluency comes from more than just education. His father was American – a Vietnam vet who did two tours of duty in that most agonising of wars and then decided to stay in Germany.

‘He was told it was a better life there than it would have been for a black army veteran back home at the time.’ A conflict which was becoming polarisingly unpopular and with the civil rights movement at its most fractious: whoever gave Manuel Snr that advice was probably spot on. So stay in Germany he did. He became a radiologist and married Maurice’s mother, a Danish lady.

The lure of the military burned strongly in Maurice, even though in Denmark soldiers weren’t so revered as they are in the United States or respected as much as they are in the United Kingdom. The majority of Danes opposed intervention in both Iraq and Afghanistan right from the start. When Maurice went out to serve in the Middle East, therefore, he knew he was doing so for a country at best ambivalent about his presence there.

Maurice did two tours in Iraq and four in Afghanistan. He was a military policeman for all but the last one, for which he studied Pashto, the official language of Afghanistan, so he could become a combat interpreter and help liaise between the Western forces and the Afghan National Army.

It was 14 December 2010 when his life changed. He doesn’t need to look the date up, he remembers it as easily as he would his own birthday.

‘It was a completely normal patrol. We were down there before sunrise, and I was in charge of the sound commander.’ A sound commander is, more technically, a ‘wide area mass notification system’: it can broadcast messages to be heard far away, and the operator can also programme in sound effects such as suppressive gunfire and helicopter rotors to give the impression of a larger military presence than actually existed.

‘I left it somewhere while we continued the patrol. When we’d finished, I went to get it. I saw it down the end of a path. I’d not gone 20 metres when I thought: “I don’t think this path’s been swept [for IEDs].” And that second, that very second, I stepped on one. There was dust everywhere. I was thrown backwards, I looked down, and I saw the bottom of my right fibia sticking out of my boot. I grabbed a tourniquet and wrapped it round my thigh as hard as I could.’

Some of his colleagues were a kilometre and a half away when the IED went off, and even at that distance they heard not just the explosion but Maurice’s shout of pain too. Not only did they have to go back and get him, but then take him out another 2km on a stretcher, as the Merlin medevac helicopter wouldn’t come in closer than that during a TIC (troops in contact) situation for fear that it too would be a target for attack.

The next seven or eight hours of Maurice’s life are just fragmentary memories through a haze of shock, morphine and ‘whatever heavier they gave me’. Now and then he woke for a few seconds to see lights in an operating theatre or surgeons leaning over him, the next moment he was out cold again. They kept him in Bastion for three days before flying him home the scenic route – Qatar, Germany, the UK and finally Denmark, where the surgeon told him he’d never be able to run again and he’d have to wear corrective shoes.

‘Let’s amputate,’ Maurice said.

But the surgeon refused. He thought it would be better to keep everything intact if possible. Reluctantly, Maurice agreed, and spent the next nine months in rehab, trying to build the damaged leg back up to some kind of strength again – ‘It was a fiasco from the get-go.’

Maurice did his research: he found medical papers online, he talked to a couple of US Rangers who’d sustained similar injuries. Then he went back to the surgeon and told him they’d tried rehab, it hadn’t worked, and now he was insisting on what he’d asked for at the start: he wanted to be a below-the-knee amputee. This time the surgeon had little choice but to agree.

‘I had the chop on 15 August 2011.’ Another date he doesn’t need to look up. ‘Three weeks later I was up and walking on a prosthetic. Two months after that I was running.’

The invitation to the 2014 Invictus Games came through the Soldier Project at the Danish Handicap Association, and Maurice didn’t need asking twice. He’d been a keen sprinter and basketballer before his injury, so he signed up for track and field, wheelchair basketball (where he was made captain and coach) and wheelchair rugby too.

It was a busy schedule for anyone, and made more so by the fact that one of his family members was unwell and he had to spend a lot of time caring for them. If it stressed him, he never let it show. He competed in the best traditions of both soldier and sportsman: no quarter asked nor given on the field of play, but generous in his praise and commiserations once the final whistle had been blown or the finish line crossed.

He won a silver in the javelin and three bronzes, in the 200m Men Ambulant IT1, the wheelchair basketball and the wheelchair rugby. But a greater prize than any of those was waiting. The organising committee saw his contribution on and off the field, saw his determination and integrity, and gave him the Land Rover Unconquerable Soul Award. Out of more than 400 competitors, Maurice had been deemed the one who most embodied the Invictus spirit.

He smiles when I remind him of this. ‘It was an honour beyond measure. Words can’t express how special that was. It still gives me goosebumps, even thinking about it.’ As for Prince Harry, ‘I can’t tell you how important it is that a person like him does this. He’s a prince, sure, but he’s an ordinary guy too. Thousands of people are so grateful to him.’

Two years later Maurice was back in Invictus Games action, this time in Orlando, Florida. This time he captained the wheelchair basketball team to victory over the Netherlands in the bronze medal match, and then went one better in wheelchair rugby with silver, losing to the USA in the final – much to the relief of then Vice President Joe Biden, whose pre-match pep talk to the American team had been along the lines of ‘I have to meet the Danish Prime Minister next week and I don’t want to have to wear an awkward smile’.

Five medals from two Games, then, but no golds. Not that Maurice minds. ‘It’s been an honour and a privilege to be here,’ he said after the wheelchair rugby final in Orlando. ‘Words can’t describe what it means. This is for physical disabilities and PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], it’s for proving to the world and ourselves that we can. Every single athlete here has risen to the occasion, there’s no doubt about that.’

None more so than Maurice, the Unconquerable Soul himself. He now plays professional wheelchair basketball in Florida for the Fort Lauderdale Sharks while studying for a Bachelor’s in Crisis Management at Everglades University. He does more with one leg than most people do with two. ‘If you can think it, you can do it,’ he says simply.

Before we end the Skype call, I tell him I have one more question. ‘Shoot,’ he says.

OK. On the ARSSE (Army Rumour Service) website, there’s quite a lot of chat from female contributors about how he’s so ‘easy on the eye’ and how they needed ‘a lie down after seeing him on the basketball court’. What does he think about being an Invictus Games sex symbol?

He throws back his head in laughter, flashing the whitest pair of teeth I’ve seen in a long while. ‘Get outta here!’