Prince Harry nor anyone else knew it at the time, but he had sown the first seeds of what would eventually blossom into the Invictus Games.
COMPETITOR PROFILE:
MAURICE MANUEL, DENMARK
Maurice Manuel speaks perfect English. That in itself isn’t unusual for a Dane, but in Maurice’s case his fluency comes from more than just education. His father was American – a Vietnam vet who did two tours of duty in that most agonising of wars and then decided to stay in Germany.
‘He was told it was a better life there than it would have been for a black army veteran back home at the time.’ A conflict which was becoming polarisingly unpopular and with the civil rights movement at its most fractious: whoever gave Manuel Snr that advice was probably spot on. So stay in Germany he did. He became a radiologist and married Maurice’s mother, a Danish lady.
The lure of the military burned strongly in Maurice, even though in Denmark soldiers weren’t so revered as they are in the United States or respected as much as they are in the United Kingdom. The majority of Danes opposed intervention in both Iraq and Afghanistan right from the start. When Maurice went out to serve in the Middle East, therefore, he knew he was doing so for a country at best ambivalent about his presence there.
Maurice did two tours in Iraq and four in Afghanistan. He was a military policeman for all but the last one, for which he studied Pashto, the official language of Afghanistan, so he could become a combat interpreter and help liaise between the Western forces and the Afghan National Army.
It was 14 December 2010 when his life changed. He doesn’t need to look the date up, he remembers it as easily as he would his own birthday.
‘It was a completely normal patrol. We were down there before sunrise, and I was in charge of the sound commander.’ A sound commander is, more technically, a ‘wide area mass notification system’: it can broadcast messages to be heard far away, and the operator can also programme in sound effects such as suppressive gunfire and helicopter rotors to give the impression of a larger military presence than actually existed.
‘I left it somewhere while we continued the patrol. When we’d finished, I went to get it. I saw it down the end of a path. I’d not gone 20 metres when 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!’
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