Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit. Boris Starling

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.

      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,