Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit. Boris Starling

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