TWO Marine Commandos, one who has lost a leg, the other in the middle of a long and complex process to rebuild his arms and hands, are discussing pet hates. The phrase seems trivial in the context of years of pain and rehabilitation. But the subject of their annoyance, voiced almost simultaneously by Andy Grant and JJ Chalmers, is even more unexpected.
“My pet hate,” Chalmers says, “is people saying you’re heroic because you’ve been blown up. People say, ‘Oh, wrong place, wrong time’. But I don’t buy that. We were actually in the right place at the right time. We were just doing our job.”
Grant, a broad Liverpudlian who was blown up on patrol in Afghanistan in 2009, and Chalmers, a Scot who took the full force of an explosion in a Taliban bomb-making factory two years later, are members of the British team for the inaugural Invictus Games, which begin at the Olympic Park in London on Wednesday.
The Invictus Games lie somewhere between a school sports day and a full-on Paralympics. They are brilliantly named after the war poem by WE Henley (“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul”) and transformed from a rough idea — based on America’s Wounded Warrior Games — into reality by the unflagging passion and patronage of Prince Harry and an organising committee led by Sir Keith Mills.
Advertisement
At 130-strong, the GB team will be the largest, but 12 other nations are involved, including the United States, Australia, Canada and a small contingent from Afghanistan. Soldiers who once fought alongside each other now compete against each other at a range of sports including athletics, swimming, wheelchair rugby and cycling in a spirit utterly recognisable from the summer of 2012.
Grant and Chalmers have come to London to compete but also to tell their stories, which they do with humour and disarming frankness. They are spokesmen for a whole community of injured servicemen who are using sport, as Chalmers memorably puts it, “to reignite a flame”.
“I was a young, active, fit lad and I’d lost that,” Chalmers says. “I had a lot of things going on in life. I had to pretty well relearn everything to do with my hands. I wear slip-on shoes because I can’t tie laces. When I signed up for Invictus, all the good stuff, being on a team, having the adrenaline running through your body, all the stuff I’d forgotten even existed, came back. I didn’t realise I wasn’t myself, I guess.”
As a schoolboy, Grant had a trial for Liverpool. He didn’t make it, so he joined the Marines and had “You’ll never walk alone” tattooed on his right leg instead. When he was blown up, his leg and the tattoo were saved. After multiple operations, no marked improvement and months of anguish, Grant chose to have his leg amputated. “When I woke up from the amputation,” he says, “the surgeon said: ‘Andy, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that the operation went really well, the bad news is that your tattoo looks a bit different.’ He’d cut off the word ‘alone’”.
Advertisement
A few months ago, Grant returned to the Liverpool Academy to talk to the trainees. His story brought the house down and completed a neat circle in Grant’s life. Inspired by the great players of Liverpool’s past, he had become an inspiration to a new generation of dreamers.
The same theme pervades the Invictus Games. Grant was recently contacted by a colleague whose son had lost a leg. The boy will be coming to Olympic Park and Lee Valley, venue for the athletics, this week to see what can be done. Grant, who has ambitions to compete at the Paralympics, has run half-marathons, jumped out of planes (not on the Games schedule), cycled, swum and surfed more, he admits, than he would have done as a fit and active Marine. “When I look back on my life then it’s really quite depressing,” he says. “I wasn’t nearly as active as I should have been.”
If the highly competitive Grant does not win the 1500m and 400m the despair will return, but not for long. Chalmers, in contrast, is just happy to be part of the show, delighted that the symbol of the Games, IAM, is emblazoned atop Tower Bridge, that Brad Pitt has tweeted his support and that his life, at least for this week, is not all about skin drafts and reconstructive surgery.
Winning or losing at cycling, his event, comes a distant second to the sense of camaraderie, community and shared experience that will flow through the four days of the Games. Injured Commandos games will help. Right place, right time at last.