Unconquerable

by Boris Starling

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!’

  1

  FIND ME UNAFRAID

  The English market town of Salisbury can be a bleak place on a winter’s day. Four o’clock in the afternoon, the market traders are packing away whatever they’ve failed to sell beneath awnings flapping in the wind, people are hurrying from one place to another, coats zipped up to their necks and hands thrust deep in pockets. It doesn’t look like a place with one of the UK’s most important cathedrals, let alone somewhere so intimately connected with the world-famous Stonehenge, just up the road.

  Josh Boggi has just returned from training in Mallorca. On such a grey day, and with the queue for the dentist so long he decided to abandon it altogether, he must be tempted to turn round and go straight back to the Balearics. We sit by the window of a coffee shop and he tel
ls me his story.

  His surname – soft ‘g’, to rhyme with ‘dodgy’, ‘podgy’ or ‘stodgy’, three adjectives which could hardly be less applicable to a man so decent, so fit and so dynamic – is Italian. His grandfather came over from Tuscany after World War Two with his siblings: seven brothers and one sister. They all opened restaurants in the East End of London, which in itself sounds like the pitch for a comedy film or family drama. Josh’s father served in the Royal Engineers for more than a decade, and for as long as he can remember Josh wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps and become a sapper (a combat engineer who, among other things, lays roads, builds bridges and clears mines).

  In January 2004, aged just 17, he signed up and underwent basic training – phase 1, general training, to a base level of military competence, and phase 2, specific training for the Engineers themselves. He was then selected for 9 Parachute Squadron, an airborne detachment of the corps with a history so long and distinguished that you can chart much of Britain’s wartime and post-war military history through its service records: the Dunkirk evacuations in 1940, the 1944 defence of the bridge at Arnhem, clearing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem after the 1946 Irgun bomb attack, the Falklands in 1982, rebuilding Rwandan infrastructure after the 1994 genocide, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, and of course three decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

  It was a history of which Josh was well aware. ‘The minute you put the uniform on you feel proud. Grown-up.’ He loved the British Army and everything it offered him. He’d always been a sporty kid, particularly keen on football (‘I was a goalie. All the nutters play there’) and ice hockey, the latter a craze sparked by seeing the Mighty Ducks movies. Now he could not only indulge his passion for sports and adrenalin but get paid for it too.

  Every soldier who joins up itches for real combat, and there was plenty around for Josh. All British operations in Afghanistan went under the codename ‘Operation Herrick’, with each new order of battle receiving its own ordinal. Josh was first deployed as part of Herrick IV in 2006.

  For six weeks nothing much happened. Then it all kicked off.

  The 9 Squadron were sent in to Musa Qala, a dusty town in Helmand Province, to assist the Pathfinder platoon stationed there. The soldiers controlled a central compound of low cement and mud buildings surrounded by a 10ft wall, and a 10ft wall was nothing when the compound was surrounded by a maze of rubble-strewn buildings. Paradise for the Taliban militants using those buildings as cover and a nightmare for the men inside the compound, knowing they could be attacked from any direction and at any time.

  Which is exactly what happened.

  ‘I was 19 years old,’ says Josh. ‘The moment the first bullet flew past my ear, it was like, “shit just got real”.’ Every time the British troops dropped one militant, another two would pop up. It was like a nightmare pitched at the exact intersection of the Alamo, Rorke’s Drift, a spaghetti western and a video game. The Pathfinders had been in Musa Qala some weeks already and were exhausted and jumpy, particularly at twilight – ‘the witching hour’, they called it – when they most expected the attacks to start again. They were running low on food, water and ammo, and they had no more batteries for their night vision devices. They needed resupply, but any kind of air support was out of the question: it was too easy for the Taliban to shoot down any helicopter which came near, and they’d all seen Black Hawk Down.

  There was only one thing for it: a forced relief ground mission. A Danish squadron was on its way from Bastion, but it wasn’t as if the Taliban were going to wave them through with open arms. Josh’s men were tasked with clearing a way for the Danes, come hell or high water. It’s 60 miles from Bastion to Musa Qala, but it took 9 Squadron and the Danes five days to make the journey, and even then it needed fixed bayonet fighting and six 1,000lb bombs on Taliban positions before they could break into the compound itself.

  Hell of an introduction to war.

  It was Josh’s first tour of Afghanistan, but it wouldn’t be his last. He went on Herrick VIII in 2008 and again on Herrick XIII in 2010, when he was deployed to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Khar Nikah. On the last day of the year, New Year’s Eve, Josh was second-in-command of a search team sent out to clear a suspected Taliban compound. It was a patrol which, if not exactly routine, was hardly uncommon: get out, perform the task, get back in again. Simple enough.

  But for Josh it all felt off, right from the start. Not by much – more a sense that the world had slightly tilted on its axis, that things were slightly out of alignment – but not by much was quite enough when it came to a place like Khar Nikah and the narrow margins between safety and danger, between life and death.

  They went out of a different gate than usual.

  Narrow margins.

  The muezzin was calling the faithful to prayer at sunrise as always, but for once the ululations sounded menacing and ominous, sending a slow cold sweat crawling down Josh’s spine.

  Narrow margins.

  Josh concentrated on the basics. Tread in the footsteps of the bloke in front of you. Keep your distance. Keep your eyes open. Keep looking. Never get complacent, not for a second. A second is all it takes. No one on Herrick XIII underestimated the Taliban. They were very good fighters (certainly those blokes who’d served in Iraq as well rated them far more highly than the Iraqi insurgents), their predecessors had seen off everyone from the Soviet Army back through the British in Victorian times and beyond, and they could rely not just on each other but also on what the Westerners called ‘Tier Two’ – those who weren’t proper Taliban but helped them out with supplies, cover and so on.

  The 9 Squadron liked to Grand National rather than mousehole: that is, they preferred to climb over walls rather than blast their way through them. Grand Nationalling was quicker, saved materiel and was less likely to advertise their presence. The problem with Grand Nationalling was that if the Taliban saw you doing it they’d shoot, and it was hard to shoot back when scrambling over a wall. So this time Josh’s men went the explosive route: two half-bar mines and in through the breach point. Each time they marked the safe area, where they’d swept for mines, with white lines either side.

  Narrow margins.

  Mine, prime, breach … Mine, prime, breach … Watch the white lines.

  The day slightly off; that strange sense of foreboding.

  Josh took a step to the side … Just one.

  One was quite enough.

  A beautiful cloudless day in the Golden State, warm enough for Sarah Rudder to be sitting outside by the pool even though it’s not yet mid-morning. An all-American scene for an all-American girl, even one who grew up a long way from California: in the northern English town of Chorley, Lancashire, to be precise, where she played for Chorley Ladies’ premier league soccer team and was top scorer for three seasons running. The Mia Hamm of Chorley? She laughs. ‘Exactly that!’

  But her heart was always in America, and from the age of 12 even more specifically set on the US Marine Corps. She’d seen them performing a silent drill, a dizzyingly slick routine of weapon handling, spinning and tossing performed without a word – the weapons in question being rifles with fixed bayonets, which provide obvious incentives not to mess up the catches. What captivated young Sarah was not just the beauty of such split-second timing but everything that came with it: the endless practice to make perfect, the discipline and confidence to execute it so flawlessly when it mattered, the absolute trust you had to have in your comrades and they in you.

  She enlisted in the Marines as soon as she was legally able, in 2000 at the age of 17. But it wasn’t plain sailing. She twisted an ankle so badly that she needed surgery, and on the way to hospital in Maryland for a post-operative check-up she was involved in a car crash which left her with a broken nose, ribs and scapula. But Marines are made of stern stuff, and Sarah was no exception. She was back in training as quickly as possible, and within a year was promoted from Private First Class to Lance Corporal.

  Her promotion ce
remony took place on a day as piercingly blue and bright as the one on which she’s telling me her story: a late summer’s day in Arlington County, at Marine Corps HQ, just opposite the Pentagon, 18-year-old Sarah, smart and proud in her dress uniform, her entire career ahead of her and the world at her feet. Friends and families in the audience, glowing as they choked back happy tears of pride.

  An all-American day for the all-American girl.

  A sudden roar so close and loud it made everyone jump. They were military people and they knew – they thought they knew – what that sound was: a ceremonial fly-by, a fighter jet opening up its throttles to make pure thunder. But fly-bys don’t tend to take place in the nation’s capital on a Tuesday morning.

  A silver streak past their vision, an impact which shook their building like an earthquake, and then a fireball climbing high and fast in roiling clouds of orange and black. All in a matter of seconds before anyone knew what was happening.

  It was 9.37 a.m. on 11 September 2001, and American Airlines 77 had just crashed into the Pentagon.

  Newly promoted Lance Corporal Rudder and her colleagues swung into action. They sprinted across to the Pentagon and began performing basic triage on the injured: the walking wounded they sent to base corpsmen, the more serious they loaded onto tarp stretchers for the paramedics to take to hospital. Then they began to help the firefighters any and every way they could: bottled water for when they came out of the inferno gasping with thirst, new socks to replace the sweat-soaked ones inside their heavy boots.

  Sarah did 12 hours’ duty at the Pentagon, another 12 on patrol at Marine HQ, and then back to the Pentagon, where she had to pick her way through the mountains of flags and flowers left there. Running on adrenalin, she didn’t sleep for three days straight. On the second day, when the building had been declared safe – or safe enough – she and her best friend, Ashley, joined the search and rescue team. They donned hazmat protective body suits and went inside, to the hideous twisted ruins, where the 757 had hit at a speed of more than 500mph. Their official mission was to locate and bring out ‘non-survivors’, a deliberately anodyne term which scarcely hints at the horrific sights Sarah and Ashley saw in there.