Unconquerable

by Boris Starling

  She had a good cry and then pulled herself together and took stock. There were two choices, she knew: go on or go under. ‘Do I let this beat me?’ she thought. ‘No, I don’t. Fuck this!’ Told that running – which she’d always hated – might help, she began to do 10K races, and she and her partner Judi (and sometimes Max the German Shepherd too) started climbing the Munros, the Scottish mountains which stand more than 3,000 feet high.

  There are 282 of them, boasting names so exotic they could have come from Tolkien or Shakespeare – Ben Lomond, Cairn of Claise, Glas Maol, Schiehallion, Spidean Mialach, the Devil’s Point and the clue’s-in-the-name Inaccessible Pinnacle – and to ‘bag’ the lot of them is a well-recognised and considerable feat. ‘I didn’t want to be that person I’d seen in the bed. Anything but that. I took a new look at life and got even more determined.’

  There are three main types of MS, and Mary was initially diagnosed with the most common and least serious, relapsing remitting. Her symptoms would come and go, rise and fade. Sometimes she’d be fine, other times, and with little warning, she’d have mild relapses which could last a few days or weeks, and would leave her feeling exhausted and low on confidence and self-esteem – ‘Each day is different when you have MS. You get those difficult times when mood swings and frustration are terrible. The fatigue, pain, memory loss and lack of co-ordination can make life extremely hard.’

  But she could stay in the Army, and that was the main thing. In 2009 she was told she would be deployed to Afghanistan as the non-commissioned officer (NCO) in charge of the mental health team out there, but only if she could still pass the weapons test. She couldn’t hold a rifle because of her shoulder injury, and MS was wearing away her co-ordination and finger strength so it was hard for her to fire a pistol. Undeterred, Mary asked a friend in the Special Forces to help her with the training – ‘I just kept practising and passed the test.’

  Afghanistan was every bit as hard as she thought it would be. The second night she was there, staying at the Kandahar Airfield, one of the local Afghan workers inside the camp drove his car at her – a similar fate to that which would befall Maurillia Simpson in Germany the following year, though Simi’s was an accident and Mary’s was deliberate.

  ‘He was trying to kill me. I’ve no idea why, I’d never seen him before in my life.’

  She ended up with sepsis from fragments of metal in her thigh and buttock, lodged there while diving out of the way, and when she woke up in hospital she found a Taliban member in the bed next to her – ‘Yes, we’d treat them too when they were injured, and I knew that, but it still gave me a hell of a shock! That was tough to deal with, but I just got on with it.’

  Mary got to know the rhythms of camp life in all their workaday morbidity. When a medevac helicopter came in, she could tell simply by the sound of its engines whether its cargo was alive or dead: if the soldier was still alive, the ’copter would touch down for only a few seconds, just long enough to get him off and on his way to the field hospital, but if he was dead then they might linger on the ground for a minute or two. And sometimes, unbearably, they would find Afghan babies left outside the main gates of the camp, ‘tiny wee mites’ covered in burns after air attacks and dumped there as if to say, ‘This is your problem now.’

  There was no alcohol in Bastion, so Mary didn’t have to deal with the underground drinking which had been how her men had coped in Bosnia, but the mental challenges for the British troops out there 10 years on weren’t any less serious: how to deal with the constant threat of attack, how to process seeing your mates wounded and killed, how to keep yourself from worrying about families you knew were worrying about you, and so on. She spent many hours talking these things through with the men and women, trying to ‘give them support and the tools needed to go back out to do their jobs and function properly’.

  Afghanistan was to prove her last major deployment. In the end, it was a simple rule change which meant she could no longer pass the weapons handling tests, and in 2012 she was medically retired as a staff sergeant after 20 years’ service.

  But Mary was not finished yet – not by a long way.

  COMPETITOR PROFILE:

  SÉBASTIEN DAVID, FRANCE

  Many Frenchmen like to talk of their attachment to the land, but for Sébastien David the sea has always been just as important.

  When he joined the French Navy in 1997 at the age of 19, his aim was to become a member of the Naval Special Forces. He didn’t have to wait long: just a year, in fact, before he was assigned to the assault team. After five years in Special Forces he moved into Protection and Intervention.

  Sébastien’s deployments took him to, among other places, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Lebanon and Djibouti. Along the way, he picked up a number of injuries, coincidentally all spaced three or four years apart. One to the shoulder in 2001. One to exactly the same spot in 2004. (‘I got a few screws and everything went back to normal.’) One to the knee during an exchange with Lebanese commandos in 2008, after which he ‘got a few more screws, then went back to business once again’. Finally in 2011, during a night exercise he fell heavily, resulting in lower-back trauma. His days of active frontline service were over.

  ‘For the physical rehabilitation, I went to two large rehabilitation centres in France and got on medical leave for several months. As for the psychological rehabilitation, it was difficult at the beginning. I asked myself, “What will I become? What will I do?” But my wife helped me.’

  Sébastien is now an instructor at the marine rifle school in Lorient, a city on the Brittany’s Atlantic coast which is known as the ‘five-port city’ as it has separate ports not just for the military but also for commercial fishing, cargo, passenger ferries and yachts.

  As with many competitors from various countries, Sébastien first heard about the Invictus Games via national organisations set up to help injured servicemen and/or promote sport within the military: in his case, the CABAM (La Cellule d’aide aux blessés et d’assistance aux familles de la Marine) and the CNSD (Centre National des Sports de la Défense). ‘For me the military missions were over, but thanks to sport I still had goals.’

  He went to Orlando in 2016 – ‘I was able to defend the colours of France during the wheelchair basketball, rowing, swimming and archery. In the last of these I won the silver medal with my friends Captain Eric Baudrit and Adjutant Raphaël Perriraz. The atmosphere was incredible, and many families were present. It was magical. We don’t have that in France! This love for the military is unreal.’

  As for the best bit – well, that was easy, and it wasn’t the silver medal: ‘The best for me was the look in the eyes of my children. Because to them I was Superman. During the Invictus Games, all warriors are the stars. The Games allowed me to live a strong emotional and fantastic human and collective adventure. It helped in showing that the warriors are “the masters of their fate”.’

  It’s a sentiment echoed by his teammate David Travadon – ‘Please, no pity. We are strong, alive and determined. Many of our friends are no longer with us: they departed too early, we continue on for them. We are probably a little different now, but what is normality? We are still soldiers. We give everything for our country, for freedom, but we don’t claim your thanks. We just expect you to consider us as you would everyone else. It’s the nicest present you can give us.’

  3

  BLOODY BUT UNBOWED

  Just outside the point where London finally stops sprawling, hard up against the M25 orbital motorway, which encircles the city like a 117-mile-long belt and carries more traffic than any other road in the country, is a late Victorian mansion which plays host to some of the most advanced rehabilitation programmes in the world.

  It’s only three miles from Leatherhead station, half of them through country roads, whose peace and quiet seem incongruous so close to the city. Farmhouses sit nestled in valleys of gently rolling green: a barn has been repurposed as offices for a digital media company keener on using exclamation marks than
capital letters.

  And then at the end of the road is Headley Court, which would be a beautiful but rather typical stately home – bay windows edged with ivy, manicured gardens, topiary hedges, arcing gravel drives – were it not for the soldiers at the gate, who check my driving licence against both my face and the details they already have for me, or for the signs which read ‘COUNTER-TERRORISM RESPONSE LEVEL: SEVERE’ and warn that the Official Secrets Act applies on these premises. Headley Court may be a medical establishment but it is a military one too, and the reminders are everywhere you look.

  Built in 1899, it was originally a private home, but even then its connections with war were never far away. It was owned by Walter Cunliffe, who, as Governor of the Bank of England during World War One, was instrumental in both calming the markets at the outbreak of war and later liaising with the American government during their entry into the fighting. In World War Two it served as headquarters for units of both the British and Canadian armies, and immediately after the war it was used as a medical rehabilitation centre, first for the RAF and then for all three services, a role it maintains.

  Headley’s motto is per mutos – ‘by mutual effort’ – and the words are not hollow ones. Civilian contractors work alongside military personnel: patients are expected to give everything to their recovery and help the staff in the same way the staff help them. No one at Headley does things on their own – they’re all in it together, and they all take visible and genuine pride in what they do.

  Take Mark Thoburn. He works for Blatchford Services, a civilian company which makes and fits all the prosthetic limbs used here. When he started in 2006, he came in one afternoon a week, and he was the only Blatchford employee on site. Two years later, with the Afghan insurgency ramping up and the IEDs ripping limbs off more and more soldiers, there were seven people working five days a week. One day, he says, they might be back to one – the number of new arrivals is slowing now that Britain has withdrawn from combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq – and he’s determined he’ll be that one.

  ‘Best job in the world,’ he says. ‘Honestly, it is. To have the state-of-the-art stuff we have here, and to be able to do it for young men who still have their lives ahead of them, I just love it. If I was working on the NHS, I’d be fitting the most basic equipment to pensioners who’ve lost a leg to diabetes. Now, that’s rewarding in its own way, of course, but the NHS just haven’t got the resources to do any more than the minimum. We get you back to normal, or the nearest to normal we can. We’re always being challenged here – “OK” is not nearly good enough. I can give these boys the very best there is. And get the piss taken out of me in return, of course.’

  He rolls up his trousers: the bottom half of his right leg is artificial. ‘Motorbike accident. One leg, below the knee: as far as most of the guys I see are concerned, that’s nothing. I’m a pretend amputee.’

  The way he describes his work makes it sound part science and part art. The first thing he does whenever a new patient comes in is fit them for their prosthetics. Prosthetics generally come in two parts: the socket which fits onto the stump, and the ‘leg’ which fits onto the socket.

  But first things first. Onto the stump goes a suction liner of varying thickness, from 2mm at the top to 14mm at the bottom, where the stump will rest in the socket. Then Mark takes a cast of the leg, which he modifies with hand tools, and makes a diagnostic socket to check the fit. The socket is transparent at this stage, so he can see how the stump sits in it. It has to be tight enough to keep the soft tissue from moving around, tighter than you might think comfortable, but as far as prosthetic sockets are concerned, tight is comfortable. A badly fitting socket can be agony: imagine the worst-fitting pair of shoes you’ve ever had rubbing against a part of your flesh which itself has undergone savage trauma.

  When Mark’s happy with the fit, they make the socket for real. There’s a workshop on site, full of bustle and good-natured banter. It takes a few days to make a socket, which is then taken back to the patient for fitting and adjustment. The sockets are built high up the back of the legs to help with weight bearing – ‘Rather than get someone to put their weight through the end of the stump, we make sure most of the load’s borne by their ischial tuberosity.’

  By their what?

  ‘Their arse.’

  Sockets come in any number of patterns nowadays. Options available to the discerning amputee at Headley include the Union Jack, camouflage patterns, the V for Vendetta mask, skulls, a fake wood inlay and a rather fetching bright pink.

  Now come the legs, clipped into the sockets with pin line locks. Single amputees, who still have one working leg, obviously need an artificial leg which matches the length of the real one. For bilateral amputees – those who’ve lost both legs – the process is different.

  For a start, they have to learn to walk again from scratch, which brings with it questions of falling and balance. They therefore start on ‘stubbies’ – short, straight legs with no knee joints, which keep their centre of gravity low. Most amputees spend four to six weeks on stubbies before graduating to long legs. Many people hate them, at least to start with, because stubbies make them look like dwarves.

  But the stubbie is a grower. Even when amputees have mastered long legs, often they wear stubbies around the house, just as able-bodied people wear slippers. Stubbies are also pressed into service as drinking and dancing legs, when balance is both important but impaired.

  Once Mark and the physios are satisfied with the patient’s core stability, hip and pelvis control, they move onto ‘long legs’ – ‘After a month or so of stubbies, these long legs feel about as weird and alien to the amputee as a pair of stilts would feel to an able-bodied person.’ The exact choice of artificial legs depends not just on the injuries to a soldier’s real legs, but also on what other damage he’s sustained. ‘The more the patient’s missing, the more complex it is. If they’re a triple amputee then the whole process of putting those limbs on becomes much more complicated. If you’ve only got one hand, and that might be missing a finger, it’s much, much more difficult.’

  The most advanced legs are the Geniums, which at the time of writing cost around £30,000 – each – and have six separate sensors in the movable joints (ankle and knee) as well as gyroscopes, strain gauges, inclinometers, and systems to store and release energy. I examine a Genium: it’s a work of art, and Mark knows exactly what I’m thinking.

  ‘Makes you realise how amazing your own legs are, doesn’t it?’ he says.

  The process of getting people walking again begins on two parallel bars set into the floor. They’re only a few metres long, but for the soldier who’s learning to walk again those few metres can seem like a marathon. Drenched in sweat, arm muscles quivering with the strain, their progress can be agonisingly slow.

  One leg forward. Pause. Other leg forward. Pause. Repeat.

  It’s hard to get going and just as hard to stop: you have to shift your weight in much the same way as a skier does when executing a parallel turn.

  Reach the end. Turn round. Do it again.

  It’s not always as simple as this, of course. Progress in many cases is zigzag rather than linear: a man might get so far and then have to go for another round of surgery, lose his momentum and have to start again. But these are soldiers, these are warriors – they don’t give up.

  Physical rehabilitation like this is the most obvious side of what Headley offers. You see it not just in the prosthetics department but also in the swimming pool and in any of the complex’s three gyms – Waterloo, Trafalgar and Battle of Britain – where instructors work their patients on anti-gravity treadmills (which can be programmed to take all or some of the user’s weight), circuit exercises, weights sessions or contact wheelchair sports. If you didn’t look too closely, this could be any gym in the country: loud music, the steam-engine breathing of people working hard, the odd burst of laughter.

  But physical rehab is not the only thing which Headley offers –
far from it. The professionals here concentrate on the mind as much as the body. There are psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health nurses. Some patients need listening to as much as they need rebuilding. They have flashbacks, nightmares and feelings of guilt. Sometimes they talk to a counsellor, sometimes they just sit quietly with a nurse till they’re settled again.

  And sometimes – quite often, in fact – they find solace and comfort in one of Headley Court’s most unique features: its garden.

  A lot of blokes at Headley say the same kind of things when they’re first offered horticultural therapy – ‘No, not for me, thanks, mate’, ‘Bit boring, isn’t it?’ and even ‘It’s posh middle-aged women who do gardening, not my sort’. But often they don’t get the option of saying no. Headley is a military establishment, and its patients are subject to military discipline when they’re here: their duty is to work themselves to get better. Turning down a session because you think ‘it’s not for me’ is no more acceptable than missing parade or disobeying orders.

  And these rough, tough soldiers find a curious but profound peace in Headley’s gardens. They’re beautiful (the gardens, not the soldiers), but they also need maintenance, and the patients play a part in this just as much as the full-time professional groundsmen do.

  It’s only a few hundred metres from the M25, but the trees muffle most of the traffic noise, and so the atmosphere is one of timeless stillness. In decades past men came back to places like this from Passchendaele and the Somme, from Flanders and Ypres, from El Alamein and Normandy.

  They come here now too.

  They dig and plant and weed and tend seeds and water and potter round the kitchen garden. In one corner is a small area called ‘Thoughts of Home’: a postage stamp, really, a small picket fence enclosing a wooden hut, a bughouse and some shrubs, but a place which draws these men like moths to a flame.