Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit

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 ceremony 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.

More than a decade and a half later, the California sun is not warm enough to keep her from shuddering as she remembers. ‘The smell. Urgh! God, that smell … The smell of death. We had to sleep with the windows and doors open to try and get rid of it. The clothes we were wearing, we burned them, but it didn’t do any good. The smell was still there in our skin.’

Even though her scapula was still healing, she’d taken her sling off – she couldn’t do any lifting with it on. She and Ashley loaded corpse after corpse onto stretchers and brought them out: these people had families, and Sarah wanted them to have someone to bury. She lost count of how many bodies they handled. While walking backwards with one of them, Sarah got her left ankle stuck in a concrete barrier, which then fell and crushed it. Somehow she worked herself free, and was glad to find the damage didn’t seem too bad. It wasn’t hurting too much, and nor was her scapula.

That night, back at Marine HQ, her foot was so swollen that she couldn’t get her boot off. And now the adrenalin was subsiding, her ankle was hurting, hurting really badly. Her scapula didn’t feel too flash either, but her ankle was worse. It would get better, though. Wouldn’t it?

It wouldn’t. And it wouldn’t be the end of her problems either. For Sarah Rudder, as for so many of her fellow countrymen in one way and another, 9/11 wasn’t an end to anything. It was just the beginning.

Stephan Moreau joined the Canadian Navy because of a drunken bet.

Well, in a manner of speaking. He’d been out with some friends in a bar and, after a few drinks, told them that he wanted to serve his country and was going to the recruiting centre first thing the next morning. They laughed it off at the time and probably didn’t even remember it the next morning. But Stephan did.

He wasn’t one of those guys who’d always wanted to be in the military, the kind who left high school one day and joined up the next. He was 27 when he walked into the recruiting centre that morning in 2000: old enough to have done things with his life he knew now weren’t for him, old enough to know what he really wanted.

He’d been brought up in Quebec City as the only child of a single mother, and sometimes the absence of a father grated – ‘My mom did a great job, but something was missing. She was working so much that I had to learn to be independent and deal with my own problems. My character was definitely shaped by having to look after myself.’

It was shaped by sports, too. Stephan enjoyed baseball and athletics, but like so many Canadian kids, his real passion was hockey. ‘It was hockey all the time. Outside rink in the winter after school and road hockey in the summer. I was shorter than most of the guys, but my speed and my feistiness made up for it.’

His hero, Calgary Flames winger Theoren ‘Theo’ Fleury, was cut from the same mould. At only 5’6” Fleury had been told repeatedly that he was too small for the big time, but his determination meant he ended up playing more than 1,000 games in the National Hockey League.

What job would allow Stephan to keep up his sport? Stephan’s uncle had been in the Air Force, and ‘he told me that 50 per cent of the time he was playing sports there! The military training was easy, especially boot camp. I was fit and I already had the discipline from playing hockey.’

He moved pretty much all the way across the country, from Quebec City in the east to Victoria in the west, and was stationed at CFB Esquimalt, Canada’s main Pacific Coast naval base. It was a great place to live: right by the ocean, where he had always found his peace.

He served as Leading Seaman and Naval Communicator on the HMCS Algonquin, a destroyer which had been built in 1973, the year of Stephan’s birth. The Canadian Armed Forces were busy after 9/11, and the Algonquin was no exception. Stephan patrolled the Gulf of Oman, checking out suspect vessels and boarding them, if necessary – ‘We were the first warship to intercept terrorists. I’ll always remember the buzz on the ship when we caught them.’

For those first four years on board the Algonquin, Stephan was happy: doing a job he loved and was good at, and feeling as though he was making a difference.

Then, in 2004, he was sent on a training exercise.

Those exercises were tough – three hours of sleep a night for three weeks, the dreaded red-hatted Sea Training Instructors waking everyone up in the middle of the night or making them start an exercise 20 minutes after going to sleep, that kind of thing – but of course that was the whole point of them. They were designed to test the sailors’ reactions and decision-making when they felt like zombies.

In case of fire, sailors were supposed to wear a rebreathing system called Chemox. Speed in getting the equipment on was vital, so this was one of the crucial drills they practised. The first four men to the zone were to start putting on firefighter uniforms, the next four there were to help them. Stephan was one of the second four, so he began helping his friend, Joe.