Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit. Boris Starling

I thought: “I don’t think this path’s been swept [for IEDs].” And that second, that very second, I stepped on one. There was dust everywhere. I was thrown backwards, I looked down, and I saw the bottom of my right fibia sticking out of my boot. I grabbed a tourniquet and wrapped it round my thigh as hard as I could.’

      Some of his colleagues were a kilometre and a half away when the IED went off, and even at that distance they heard not just the explosion but Maurice’s shout of pain too. Not only did they have to go back and get him, but then take him out another 2km on a stretcher, as the Merlin medevac helicopter wouldn’t come in closer than that during a TIC (troops in contact) situation for fear that it too would be a target for attack.

      The next seven or eight hours of Maurice’s life are just fragmentary memories through a haze of shock, morphine and ‘whatever heavier they gave me’. Now and then he woke for a few seconds to see lights in an operating theatre or surgeons leaning over him, the next moment he was out cold again. They kept him in Bastion for three days before flying him home the scenic route – Qatar, Germany, the UK and finally Denmark, where the surgeon told him he’d never be able to run again and he’d have to wear corrective shoes.

      ‘Let’s amputate,’ Maurice said.

      But the surgeon refused. He thought it would be better to keep everything intact if possible. Reluctantly, Maurice agreed, and spent the next nine months in rehab, trying to build the damaged leg back up to some kind of strength again – ‘It was a fiasco from the get-go.’

      Maurice did his research: he found medical papers online, he talked to a couple of US Rangers who’d sustained similar injuries. Then he went back to the surgeon and told him they’d tried rehab, it hadn’t worked, and now he was insisting on what he’d asked for at the start: he wanted to be a below-the-knee amputee. This time the surgeon had little choice but to agree.

      ‘I had the chop on 15 August 2011.’ Another date he doesn’t need to look up. ‘Three weeks later I was up and walking on a prosthetic. Two months after that I was running.’

      The invitation to the 2014 Invictus Games came through the Soldier Project at the Danish Handicap Association, and Maurice didn’t need asking twice. He’d been a keen sprinter and basketballer before his injury, so he signed up for track and field, wheelchair basketball (where he was made captain and coach) and wheelchair rugby too.

      It was a busy schedule for anyone, and made more so by the fact that one of his family members was unwell and he had to spend a lot of time caring for them. If it stressed him, he never let it show. He competed in the best traditions of both soldier and sportsman: no quarter asked nor given on the field of play, but generous in his praise and commiserations once the final whistle had been blown or the finish line crossed.

      He won a silver in the javelin and three bronzes, in the 200m Men Ambulant IT1, the wheelchair basketball and the wheelchair rugby. But a greater prize than any of those was waiting. The organising committee saw his contribution on and off the field, saw his determination and integrity, and gave him the Land Rover Unconquerable Soul Award. Out of more than 400 competitors, Maurice had been deemed the one who most embodied the Invictus spirit.

      He smiles when I remind him of this. ‘It was an honour beyond measure. Words can’t express how special that was. It still gives me goosebumps, even thinking about it.’ As for Prince Harry, ‘I can’t tell you how important it is that a person like him does this. He’s a prince, sure, but he’s an ordinary guy too. Thousands of people are so grateful to him.’

      Two years later Maurice was back in Invictus Games action, this time in Orlando, Florida. This time he captained the wheelchair basketball team to victory over the Netherlands in the bronze medal match, and then went one better in wheelchair rugby with silver, losing to the USA in the final – much to the relief of then Vice President Joe Biden, whose pre-match pep talk to the American team had been along the lines of ‘I have to meet the Danish Prime Minister next week and I don’t want to have to wear an awkward smile’.

      Five medals from two Games, then, but no golds. Not that Maurice minds. ‘It’s been an honour and a privilege to be here,’ he said after the wheelchair rugby final in Orlando. ‘Words can’t describe what it means. This is for physical disabilities and PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], it’s for proving to the world and ourselves that we can. Every single athlete here has risen to the occasion, there’s no doubt about that.’

      None more so than Maurice, the Unconquerable Soul himself. He now plays professional wheelchair basketball in Florida for the Fort Lauderdale Sharks while studying for a Bachelor’s in Crisis Management at Everglades University. He does more with one leg than most people do with two. ‘If you can think it, you can do it,’ he says simply.

      Before we end the Skype call, I tell him I have one more question. ‘Shoot,’ he says.

      OK. On the ARSSE (Army Rumour Service) website, there’s quite a lot of chat from female contributors about how he’s so ‘easy on the eye’ and how they needed ‘a lie down after seeing him on the basketball court’. What does he think about being an Invictus Games sex symbol?

      He throws back his head in laughter, flashing the whitest pair of teeth I’ve seen in a long while. ‘Get outta here!’

      1

       FIND ME UNAFRAID

      The English market town of Salisbury can be a bleak place on a winter’s day. Four o’clock in the afternoon, the market traders are packing away whatever they’ve failed to sell beneath awnings flapping in the wind, people are hurrying from one place to another, coats zipped up to their necks and hands thrust deep in pockets. It doesn’t look like a place with one of the UK’s most important cathedrals, let alone somewhere so intimately connected with the world-famous Stonehenge, just up the road.

      Josh Boggi has just returned from training in Mallorca. On such a grey day, and with the queue for the dentist so long he decided to abandon it altogether, he must be tempted to turn round and go straight back to the Balearics. We sit by the window of a coffee shop and he tells me his story.

      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