Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit

And she had her fair share of near-misses too. One night she led a 12-vehicle resupply convoy to the Black Watch regiment near Amarah, south-eastern Iraq: ‘Black Watch were undercover, so you get to a certain distance and then they call you in on the radio. I saw a soldier come out. He must have been a sergeant major or a staff sergeant. He waved his hands, signalling us, so my commanding officer told me to verge off into the desert. After we’d gone a little way they came on the radio and told us to stop immediately and don’t move. He hadn’t been signalling for us to go that way – he was trying to tell us it was a literal minefield! My commanding officer said, “Private Simpson, put the tyres of the truck exactly where I tell you, just like you learned in training.” At that point I thought: “Why did I have that dream when I was seven years old?”’

But that was small beer compared to the moment in Basra on Simi’s second tour in 2007, when she saw two mortar shells flying towards her. She just about had time to shout ‘Incoming!’ before the mortars hit the wall next to her, bringing it down on top of her.

‘I didn’t know if I was dead or alive. I started to sing an old gospel song, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”, the one my surrogate mum used to sing to me in Cascade. I was thinking of her, I was trying to say goodbye.’

Buried under the rubble, her songbird voice cracking through effort and fear, Simi forced the words out.

His eye was indeed on the sparrow, because even as she sang, Simi could hear voices, colleagues calling her name: ‘“Simi,” they were shouting, “we’re not going to leave you, we’re going to dig you out.”’

Having survived the worst that Iraq could throw at her, Simi figured – perhaps understandably – that her next deployment to Germany would be easier. She was sent there in 2010 before a tour to Afghanistan and threw herself into training: she was always efficient, always on time, never late.

Just for one day, she should have been late.

Just once wouldn’t have harmed. Just once might have saved her. She was coming back to base on her bicycle one night, bang on time as usual. Even a few seconds late would have changed everything.

She hardly saw him. Those mortars in Basra had taken an age to arrive in comparison. A local driver running a red light. No time for Simi to react. Just him and her, car and bike, and the squeal of tangled metal as they collided.

Fighting in Afghanistan is a seasonal affair. It eases off in the winter when the mountain passes are snowbound and ramps up again in the spring and summer. The latter, of course, brings its own problems to troops on the ground. The intense heat, well into three figures Fahrenheit, means soldiers have to carry vast amounts of water with them, and it can also play havoc with electronic equipment such as radios and microwave radar. Even tyre pressures have to be adjusted downwards to prevent blowouts.

By the time October 2008 came around, Mike Goody had been in the country for six months, watching the danger and the action rise with the heat and now begin to fall away slightly. He was deployed on Herrick VIII with the RAF Regiment’s 1 Squadron. Despite its name, the regiment comprises ground troops rather than pilots: it’s a specialist airfield defence corps whose members are known as ‘rock apes’ after a 1952 incident in Aden when one officer accidentally shot another after mistaking him for a hamadryas baboon, known locally as a ‘rock ape’.

The military ran in Mike’s blood. His father had served in Northern Ireland, and his godfather, Stanley Duff, who was so close to the family that Mike simply called him ‘Uncle Stanley’, had been the youngest RAF squadron leader in World War Two – ‘He was a great man in himself, kind to all, but to me he was more than a man could ever be. I owe this man more than I could ever wish or have to give. He was one of the main reasons that I joined the Royal Air Force myself, not as a pilot like he was but as a Regiment Gunner.’

And now here Mike was, on a day which though a few degrees down on the sledgehammer heat of high summer was still pretty hot. He was on patrol around Kandahar, where the airfield served as NATO’s main base in southern Afghanistan. Sometimes it seemed less a military installation and more a small town: the perimeter fence was 30km long, and inside it were almost 20,000 soldiers and civilians from a dozen different NATO countries.

The rock apes liked to go out in soft hats rather than hard helmets whenever they could, knowing that hearts and minds were easier to win over if you weren’t dressed too much like RoboCop. It was a fine line, and they knew that even with the best will in the world they would never be able to fully convince the locals that their presence here was welcome. Whenever a patrol left the airfield they would see a sudden rash of kites in the sky: the local children signalling to the Taliban that the infidel were on the move.

Warfare starts young in Afghanistan.

And always the gnawing danger of the IED. It was a constant game of cat and mouse. Every time the Western soldiers found a way to detect or disable the devices, the Taliban changed their tactics: from pressure pads to phone signals, from phone signals to laser beams. You never left the base without thinking about them, without scanning the road for them, without doing everything you could to find them before they found you. Signs of digging, suspicious debris, a mound in the dirt that looked too exact to be natural … You never stopped looking for those things.

And sometimes you could take every precaution imaginable and still find it wasn’t enough.

Mike’s patrol were a kilometre from camp, just far enough for anyone planting an IED to have been missed by the watchtowers standing sentinel on the airfield’s perimeter. The patrol knew – because they always tried to think like the enemy – that if they were going to bury an IED somewhere, this was exactly the kind of place they’d have chosen. So they stopped and scanned the ground with metal detectors.

But when an IED is right up close to a vehicle, a metal detector won’t work on it – it’ll be too busy detecting the 4.5 tons of armoured vehicle nearby.

They put away their detectors, climbed back in the vehicles and set off again, with Mike driving the lead vehicle.

Mike was driving the lead vehicle right over the bomb.

A Skype connection across 10,000 miles, 11 hours’ time difference and about three times that in temperature, and Darlene Brown from Brisbane laughs so readily and easily it feels as though she’s in the same room as me. She’s one of those people you can never imagine not liking.

Her dad had fought in Vietnam, a veteran of the famous Battle of Long Tan in 1966, when barely 100 Aussie soldiers holed up in a monsoon-lashed rubber plantation had defeated 1,500 Viet Cong. Darlene wanted to follow in his footsteps and sign up for the Army at 16, the earliest she was allowed, but he put his foot down: the Army, he said, was ‘no place for a lady’.

Two years later, by now old enough to do what she wanted whether or not he agreed, Darlene joined the Navy. It was 1999, and right from the start she loved Navy life – loved it so much, in fact, that she volunteered for extra sea deployments in place of shore service, an attitude greatly appreciated by her senior officers.

It wasn’t until much later that the effect of such a relentless schedule would become clear.

Darlene was assigned to the frigate HMAS Adelaide as a Communications and Information Systems Officer. In the aftermath of 9/11, when all eyes were on Afghanistan, the Adelaide’s concerns were closer to home. In October 2001, 100 nautical miles north of Christmas Island, it intercepted a vessel carrying more than 200 asylum seekers.

This wasn’t the first time a Navy ship had been called into action this way, and the illegal immigrant issue was controversial, especially with a federal election only a month away. ‘We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come,’ said Prime Minister John Howard, and it seemed most Aussies agreed with him.

Politics or not, the Adelaide’s orders were clear: they were to ‘deter and deny’ the vessel entry to Australian territorial waters. A party from the Adelaide boarded the vessel and set it on a course back towards Indonesian waters. The situation grew tense. Some asylum seekers began sabotaging the vessel: 14 men either jumped or were thrown overboard.

In the confusion, there were rumours that the asylum seekers were also deliberately throwing children into the water in order to force the Adelaide to rescue them. The 14 men in the sea were fished out and put back on board the vessel; the ‘children overboard’ rumour turned out to be false. As it was, the vessel subsequently sank while under tow by the Adelaide, and all the asylum seekers ended up on board the frigate anyway.

It was only through a combination of chance and the professionalism of the Adelaide’s crew that no one had been killed. But the incident affected Darlene badly. It wasn’t the only one to do so, nor was it a game-changer in itself, but little by little she was feeling her reserves ebbing away. Every time she came across a life-threatening situation – and there were some, of course there were, this was the Navy – her resistance was stretched thinner and thinner.

By 2004 she had been at sea almost constantly for three years, and she was changing – ‘I was in the Gulf and I was starting to get angry. I wasn’t the same person I was before. I was screaming my head off at people.’ With the rages came the tears: long periods of uncontrollable sobbing, totally disproportionate to anything which could possibly have triggered them.

She needed help. But if she didn’t know what was wrong with her, how could she know who to ask?

In 2016, when the BBC were looking for new Top Gear presenters, Bart Couprie (with tongue firmly lodged in cheek) put himself forward – ‘I’m tall, balding, un-PC, slightly obnoxious, and I own a suitable wardrobe.’

Top Gear could have done much worse. Bart is funny, articulate and a good talker. But the BBC’s loss is the New Zealand Navy’s gain. At 49, he is still serving after 31 years.

He never wanted a normal nine-to-five job, and his father was in the Royal Netherlands Navy (the Dutch heritage is strong: Bart’s full name is Bartus and his twin brother is Boudewijn), so a life at sea was a natural progression.

In those 31 years he’s been stationed in many different places, including the South Pacific, South-East Asia and a 1999 peacekeeping stint in the Solomon Islands, ‘which all went pear-shaped. We were playing a rugby match with the islanders, and not long into the second half we had to abandon it because a bunch of rebel groups were shooting at each other. Which was really annoying because though we were 13–8 down, we were coming back strongly.’ Eighteen years on and he can still remember the score and the match situation.

Only a Kiwi …

In Hawaii, he laid a wreath over the wreck of a New Zealand ship sunk by a Japanese submarine in World War Two. For Bart, history and the traditions of the Navy aren’t adjuncts to his role, they’re an integral part of it – the past inseparable from the present. From his first days in uniform at the local Sea Cadet Corps unit – ‘old, scratchy, ex-Navy surplus, but a uniform’ – he and his colleagues would march to the local cenotaph every 25 April, Anzac Day.

‘During my first parades, I would fidget, look about and try to get a glimpse of what was going on. I noticed all the men – some aged in their seventies, some in their fifties and sixties – who would gather and talk, but at a certain moment their backs would straighten, their shoulders would square up and at the order to step off, they would begin to march. You could almost see the years fall away as they stepped forward, the bodies remembering the drill from so very long ago. There always was a sense that there were many more people marching than I could see. There was always a presence, in the pre-dawn darkness, that the fallen were marching with their old comrades.’

Bart’s first Anzac Day parade was in 1979. He hasn’t missed one since – ‘I’ve paraded at Anzac services in places like Dargaville, Whakatane, Mt Maunganui, Browns Bay, Birkenhead, the Auckland Museum, Apia, and most memorably at the Kranji War Cemetery in Singapore.’ And time has marched alongside him. When he started out there were World War One veterans still marching – ‘Now they’re all gone and even the World War Two vets are rarely seen.’

He remembers the medals those old-timers wore – ‘Row upon row of medals. Always worn humbly, almost out of a sense of obligation rather than pride.’ Over the decades he gained his own medals, for his length of service and peacekeeping missions like the one in the Solomon Islands, but he always felt that these baubles paled into insignificance compared to the ones from yesteryear, the ones ‘awarded for a time when it seemed the whole world was aflame, awarded for years of combat, for the struggle for civilisation itself’.

Then one Anzac Day, before dawn, he had an epiphany. They were marching ‘onto the hallowed ground at the Auckland Museum’, and the number of serving personnel exactly matched the number of veterans: ‘We halted on either side of the cenotaph and turned to face each other. They looked at us, we looked at them, and I imagined a mirror between us. In us they saw their past, and in them we saw our heritage. They gave us the traditions and the values that we in the military hold so dear. We gave them the knowledge that the ideals and values they fought and died for lived on in us.’

From that day on Bart saw his medals, the ones he had felt second-rate and undeserved, in a new light. He realised that ‘they represent more than just my service. They represent all the values that I live by, and they are a touchstone to the past they fought in, and the future they left for us.’

But no matter how laudable the values, life in the armed services is often hard to reconcile with maintaining a happy and stable marriage. After more than two decades together, Bart and his wife split up – ‘From a happy house full of family, I ended up in a small townhouse, with the cast-offs of my 22-year marriage strewn around me. Without knowing it, when my life started to unravel, I started setting myself goals. Goal one, keep a relationship with my children, which has been difficult, but rewarding. Goal two, try to have an equal and fair settlement. Goal three, buy a property (not easy in Auckland, but I did it!). As each hurdle came up, I set another goal to overcome it.’

He was about to come across the biggest hurdle of all.

In November 2014, still reeling from the effects of his divorce, Bart’s future in the Navy – and by extension his entire life – was suddenly thrown into jeopardy.

Over the years he, like most men, had taken a ‘perverse pride’ in highlighting the times his body had almost failed him, like ‘the minor leg infection picked up from a rugby field which flared up into a full-blown fever at sea, halfway between Papua New Guinea and Manila. X-rays later showed I was within millimetres of the infection reaching the bone, and that would have led to an amputation. A manly tale of a manly man doing manly things. Drain pint of lager, burp, refill, repeat.’

But this time was different. He noticed that he was having trouble urinating: his bladder never felt properly empty, and his stream was very weak. He went to see a doctor, who examined him and then sent him for a blood test, which indicated a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) count of 68.

Sixty-eight? What did that mean? Was it good? Bad? Normal?

‘Put it this way,’ the doctor said. ‘We get concerned if a PSA’s more than two.’

Mary Wilson lives in a spotless Edinburgh apartment with her partner, Judi, and their German Shepherd dog, Max. She brings coffee and biscuits. Max sniffs around me, decides that I pass muster, plonks himself down on my feet and promptly goes to sleep. On the far wall is a framed photo collage of men and women honoured for their services to Scotland. Just above the picture of Mary and Judi is one of Gavin and Scott Hastings, the nearest that Scottish rugby has to royalty. Decent company to be keeping.

Mary was always sporty: she played badminton and swam for Scotland, and represented Edinburgh at tennis. She joined the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps in 1993 at the age of 29, and had only been in the Army a year when she was mentioned in dispatches for bravery while stationed in Hong Kong: not that ‘bravery’ gives any hint of what she actually did, which was to defend one of her patients against a drunken soldier from the Royal Scots, who beat up Mary so badly she needed a hysterectomy.

From Hong Kong she went back to the garrison at Catterick, north Yorkshire, and from Catterick, she went out to Bosnia. She was in charge of mental health for the entire British contingent out there, a responsibility deemed so onerous that her tour was three months rather than the usual six – ‘It was terrible. There was a lot of alcoholism, a lot of underground drinking. It was the only way most people could cope with what they were being asked to do’ – most infamously, as detailed in the TV series Warriors, being forced by their peacekeeping mandate to stand by and watch as atrocities were perpetrated against civilians they couldn’t help, as even to evacuate them would have been deemed assisting in ethnic cleansing.

How many troops were drinking too much out there?

‘Oh, about 80 per cent at least. Maybe more.’

Mary was on call round the clock. If a squaddie wanted to talk to her at three in the morning, she had to listen, no matter how tired she was or how much stress she was suffering – a considerable amount, unsurprisingly, having to take on all these soldiers’ problems but with no one to really listen to her in turn.

The following year, 2000, she was thrown from her horse and into a wall during a course with the Royal Horse Artillery. Mary broke her cheekbone, two toes in her right foot and ripped her bicep muscle from her right shoulder. She needed two operations, but they didn’t really cure her properly: in particular, she was having trouble holding and firing a gun, and if you can’t pass the weapons handling course you’re not much good to the Army.

The worst was yet to come. In 2004, while serving in Northern Ireland, she noticed problems with her balance and co-ordination – ‘I kept falling over my left foot and I had blurred vision. At first they thought I had cancer, or a brain tumour.’

She was sent for tests.

The results came back: Mary didn’t have cancer, and she didn’t have a brain tumour.

Mary had multiple sclerosis.

COMPETITOR PROFILE:

CHRISTINE GAUTHIER, CANADA

Christine Gauthier signs all her e-mails ‘Christine and Batak’. Who’s Batak? An alter ego? Partner? No, Batak’s more than that. Batak is her Labernese service dog (a mix of Labrador and Bernese Mountain Dog), and he’s beside Christine in everything she does.

When she slides under the bench press bar, he’s there with her.

When she gets in her specially adapted canoe, he’s there with her.

He pulls her wheelchair, helps her keep her balance when transferring in and out of it, picks coins off the floor, nuzzles her when she’s having a bad day, and a hundred other things besides.

‘Without Batak, I wouldn’t be here,’ she states simply. ‘He really, really saved my life.’

Christine’s father was a cop, and to start with she wanted to follow in his footsteps: she went to police school in Montreal and became an officer in Quebec. But the lure of the Army proved stronger. She served with the Artillery for a decade, including two peacekeeping tours with the UN in Cyprus and on the Golan Heights in Syria.

Then, during a training exercise which involved jumping into a six-foot hole, she landed badly and damaged her knees, hips and back. Repeated surgery – she underwent eight operations in all – failed to repair the damage.

Christine found herself confined to a wheelchair.

She lost her job in the Army; she lost pretty much everything else too. Before the accident she’d been endlessly, relentlessly active: cross-country skiing, cycling, weightlifting, volleyball … You name it, she did it. Now she couldn’t do any of that. She lost her spark, her joie de vivre. She’d still go and see the doctors three or four times a week, but the prevailing opinion on rehabilitation at the time was to do as little as possible in order to keep your condition from deteriorating still further. There seemed nothing they could do to get her better, and therefore nothing they could do to halt or reverse her long slide into total apathy.

‘I was 10 years inactive in my house. Completely depressed and totally out of shape and left completely isolated.’

In 2010, the Winter Paralympics came to Vancouver. As Christine watched the coverage, it was like a light had come on in her head. These people were doing amazing things. These people had the same kind of disabilities she had: some of them, in fact, had it far worse. If they could do it, so could she.

She began to participate in adaptive sports. On the sledges in sledge hockey or out on the water in her paracanoe, she felt her strength coming back in great waves: not just her physical strength but her mental strength too, her will to overcome, her will to live.

Christine found a charity, the MIRA Foundation, whose mission statement said that they aimed ‘to bring greater autonomy to handicapped people and to facilitate their social integration by providing them with dogs that have been fully trained to accommodate each individual’s needs of adaptation and rehabilitation’. That described her and her needs in a nutshell, she reckoned. The Foundation agreed and they paired her up with Batak.

It was love at first sight.

She also received assistance from Soldier On, a programme run by the Canadian Armed Forces to help ill or injured personnel get back to as much normality as possible. And it was Soldier On who in 2014 asked whether she wanted to be part of the Canadian team which was going to the first Invictus Games in London.

The Canadian team was small, so they all got to know each other pretty fast. Just as importantly for Christine, the military shorthand they shared meant they could bypass the usual awkward questions they’d get from civilians. ‘It’s a certain type of people who join the Army,’ Christine says. ‘Sometimes those people don’t fit in with the civilian world. But you see each other in the street and you just connect. I’m a reserved and shy person normally, not the kind to jump in a conversation, but when I’m in a military group that falls away.’

None of the team had any real idea of what they were going to. Unknown territory, it might be brilliant, or it might be garbage. Ah well … At least it gave her a chance to put on a Canadian uniform again, and at least they’d get a trip to London.

But it wasn’t garbage, of course: it was brilliant. Only two Canadian competitors won two medals, neither of them Christine, but the experience made her hungry to do it again, to do it bigger and better. Like everyone else there, she was struck by Prince Harry’s energy and enthusiasm. ‘I’m not impressed with his title,’ she says. ‘But I am impressed with what he does with it. I’m admiring of the man he is.’

She threw herself into training for the 2016 Invictus Games in Orlando, which for her would be both a stepping stone and a time-out from her other main goal of that year: the Rio Paralympics. By now Christine was a multiple world champion in paracanoe, and had once qualified for a world championship final while paddling with a fractured elbow – ‘When I go race, I know my mission, I know what I want to do. I just block everything out and do the best I can do. I have no boundaries, I just go for it.’