Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit. Boris Starling

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 ruins, where the 757 had hit at a speed of more than 500mph. Their official mission was to locate and bring out ‘non-survivors’, a deliberately 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 СКАЧАТЬ