Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit

Chemox used canisters full of chemicals. Stephan slotted the canister into the apparatus. There was a flash and a bang, and suddenly the canister was alight and was spewing toxic fumes and black smoke and flames into Joe’s mouth and down into his lungs. He was screaming and Stephan and his colleagues were tearing the gear off him as fast as they could. But the apparatus was hard to undo, and in their desperation they got in each other’s way. Even so it only took a few seconds, but a few seconds is a long, long time when a man is yelling for his life.

‘It was screaming like I never heard before, it was awful.’

Joe was put on a helicopter and medevaced to hospital. Amazingly, given how horrific the incident had been, he recovered.

Stephan was not so lucky.

The vast shopping centre of Westfield Stratford City is almost empty at 9.30 in the morning. Most of its habitual clientele are either at work or still asleep. For Maurillia Simpson, 9.30 is the end of her day rather than the beginning. She works in the control room which ensures the security not just of the mall but also of the Olympic Park next door, and this week she’s on night shifts.

‘Simi’ – everyone calls her Simi – was born and brought up in San Fernando, Trinidad’s largest city, but for as long as she can remember she wanted to be in the British Army. There was no specific reason for this, no father in the services or anything like that – no father around at all for that matter, since Simi was brought up by her mum, a pre-school teacher, and her seamstress grandmother.

In 1985, the Queen came to San Fernando on an official visit. Simi was 10 years old at the time and her school was one of those chosen to line the route. Along came the Queen, smiling and waving the royal wave.

‘I was convinced she was waving at me!’ Simi says. ‘Absolutely convinced. So I shouted, “I’m going to live where you live one day!”, and the next thing I remember is this bang on the back of my neck from my teacher, trying to get me to shut up!’

Simi left home at 16 and went to Cascade, a suburb of Port-of-Spain, where she worked menial jobs and lodged with a family who became more or less her surrogate parents. She passed the exams for the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force, but never got the call to begin training. But she was undaunted: those twin dreams of being in the British Army and living where the Queen lived still burned fiercely in her.

She landed at Heathrow on a freezing February day in 1999. ‘This shows you how green I was, since I was dressed in shorts, T-shirt and shades. I had no idea where England was. I thought it was another part of the Caribbean, a quick island hop away, just like home. Then I looked out of the window of the plane and there were all these people in thick coats and you could see their breath in the cold air. I refused to get off the plane! “This is not England,” I said. “Yes it is,” the crew said. I wanted just to stay in my seat till the plane turned round and went back to Trini again. But of course I couldn’t do that. Eventually the crew gave me about six spare blankets and I wrapped them all around me and shuffled into the terminal. I was staying with my auntie in Southall, and when I got there the first thing I said was, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

‘“Tell you what?”

‘“Tell me that this place is so darn cold.”

‘“I thought you knew!” she said. “It’s not exactly a secret.”’

The very next day Simi went to join the British Army, swaddled in as many layers as she could find in her aunt’s house. The nearest recruiting centre was miles away in Edgware, Barnet, but she found it, and by the time she returned to Southall that evening she had signed up to be a driver and communications specialist for the Royal Logistics Corps – contingent on passing basic training, of course.

She was 24 years old and this was her life’s dream. That evening, Simi was the happiest person in London.

It wouldn’t always be as easy, of course. ‘The culture of the Army was very hard,’ says Simi. ‘There are times when you have to defend who you are and where you’re from. When I joined I was the only black female in my regiment and I was older than the other NCOs [non-commissioned officers]. They couldn’t understand what I was doing there or why I wanted to be there.’

Perhaps paradoxically, things got better in combat zones, where there’s always a certain purity to life: there are only two types of people out there, the ones trying to kill you and the ones trying to keep you alive. Simi did three tours of Iraq with 2/8 Engineer Regiment, including the invasion in 2003 and the final troop withdrawal in 2009. She ‘felt a real purpose’ out there, particularly when it came to the humanitarian side of aid work and infrastructure reconstruction – water, electricity, schools, bridges. She was also an object of curiosity for many Iraqis, who had never seen a black woman before and ‘always wanted to touch my hair and my skin’.

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.’