Prince Harry launched an Olympics for veterans in 2014. The latest games open in The Hague under the shadow of a new war
he bullet that did for David Wiseman bored into his chest one Sunday in November 2009 when he was on patrol in Helmand province in Afghanistan. Wiseman, a 27-year-old captain in the British Army, commanded a small detachment charged with training Afghan troops. That morning he had been ordered to visit an isolated base in an area that British forces had recently taken over. The base was manned by five or six British soldiers and a larger contingent of Afghans.
“My lasting memory of the bullet is searing heat. It felt like someone had come along with a poker and put it in” Lying in the ditch, Wiseman was losing blood and consciousness. The unit’s medic struggled to stanch the bleeding. Around 15 minutes later, Wiseman was picked up by a helicopter and injected with ketamine, the preferred painkiller for chest wounds, as morphine depresses the breathing. The drug engulfed him and time seemed to slow down.
Not all experts think that wounded veterans are best served by pushing themselves to their limits. “The general ‘higher, faster, stronger’ Olympic ethos, mixed with the ‘crack on’ philosophy so beloved of our military…works for a lot of those with serious physical injuries, but not for everyone,” said Simon Wessely, a professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, who founded the Centre for Military Health Research at the university. Not all crises can be overcome through willpower alone.
Like other casualties, Wiseman needed to recover both from his physical injuries and the psychological trauma of the attack. In time he became involved as both an organiser and a participant in the Invictus games. On April 16th, the fifth iteration of that competition will open in The Hague. It has been less than a year sincetroops withdrew entirely from Afghanistan and the Taliban took over. A new war in Ukraine is creating thousands more injured service personnel.
He was haunted by his experiences. A few days before being shot, he’d been involved in the rescue of British troops who’d been attacked by an Afghan policeman. Five British soldiers were killed. Now, Wiseman felt like a dead soldier was following him around. “If I was driving along in the car at night I’d sense he was sitting in the back. If I was washing my face…and couldn’t open my eyes, I’d sense he was there with me,” Wiseman told me.
Wiseman had recently celebrated his 30th birthday: he was not ready to become a pensioner. He had already attempted an ascent of Mount Everest, organised by Walking with the Wounded. He trained in the Alps then successfully climbed Manaslu, another 8,000-metre Himalayan peak, but poor conditions thwarted his team on Everest. “It was absolutely devastating, this was something I’d dedicated my life to for going on for two years,” Wiseman remembered.
His second Afghan tour seemed to instil in him a new sense of sobriety. Prince Harry later reflected that the debauchery in Las Vegas was “probably a classic example of me…being too much army and not enough prince”. Shortly after his return, he went to America to watch the Warrior games, a sporting competition hosted by the United States Army for wounded service personnel, first held in 2010.
The team considered holding the games at a military barracks or outside the capital, in Manchester, Sheffield or another city with a record of hosting sporting events. They thought they had two years to prepare for the first competition in 2015. Then the event was brought forward by a year to coincide with the withdrawal of most Western troops from Afghanistan and the 100th anniversary of the start of the first world war – and to avoid clashing with the build-up for the Paralympics in 2016.
Then a Royal Marine general called Buster Howes came to visit the foundation’s office. “We still haven’t found a name,” Janvrin told him as he was leaving. Soon after, Janvrin received a call. “Have you ever read the poem ‘Invictus’?” Howes asked. “You should really look it up.” Invictus means “unconquered” in Latin, and the poem was written in 1875 by William Ernest Henley, who had a foot amputated as a result of tuberculosis, in the grizzly aftermath of Victorian surgery.
The Red Arrows, the ceremonial squadron of the Royal Air Force, performed a fly-past, streaming red, white and blue smoke behind them. Massed bands from the air force, the Irish Guards and the Royal Marines played stirring tunes. The Royal Horse Artillery wheeled antique guns around in a ceremonial display before unleashing a six-gun salvo.
At the closing ceremony, essentially a pop concert with some celebratory speeches, Prince Harry read letters he’d received about the games. He quoted a woman called Kara, who had an auto-immune disease: “I’m starting to think, now, that my game has just begun too,” she wrote. The crowd chanted the prince’s name before the Foo Fighters broke into song – Prince Harry had personally called the band’s frontman, Dave Grohl, to invite him.
Not everyone shares this view. Wessely, the psychiatrist from King’s College London, argues that sport as therapy could contribute to a notion that “mental health disorders are really failures of willpower or character, which is what the Victorians thought.” In his closing speech, Prince Harry mentioned the most fundamental challenge faced by veterans: getting a job and holding it down.
“My kids know they can’t surprise their daddy. They know that I sometimes have to go off into a room by myself” in Afghanistan in 2008. “It just rippled through my body, I felt everything,” he recalled. “Everything on the inside of your body is lifted up and then goes back down.” Goody was trapped under the vehicle for three hours, inhaling burning rubber and plastic. His leg didn’t look severely damaged when rescuers reached him but the shockwave from the impact had travelled up his calf, leading to compartment syndrome .
Even those whose reaction was less extreme worried about the dilution of the competition. “I think that that is an existential issue for Invictus,” Wiseman told me. “What’s the point, if you don’t have those men and women who have sacrificed themselves and bled for their country?”
Belgique Dernières Nouvelles, Belgique Actualités
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