I’ve DIED TWICE and I didn’t really rate it...

Four men broken by the Afghan war are rebuilding their lives with a unique new motor-racing team...

THE four men sit in a semicircle on a sofa in a motorhome behind the pits at Donington Park. A low growling noise, like an artillery bombardment in the distance, throbs through the walls as they speak.

After the things they have seen and the ways they have suffered, this noise is their balm now. The supercharged V8 engine twitching and grumbling in one of their Jaguar race cars in the garage, simmering and barking like the ocean’s pounding roar, represents their hopes and dreams.

These four men, broken by war, have been brought together as a team, the kind of team that motor sport at this level has never seen before. Four broken men being made whole again by the challenge of reinventing themselves as racers. Four men who have trained and learned and practised relentlessly for the season ahead.

Four men, shattered either physically or mentally by military service in Afghanistan, selected from more than 50 candidates to compete in two specially commissioned Jaguar F-Type SVR GT4s in the British GT Championship, starting at Oulton Park tomorrow.

Four men searching for a substitute for the excitement they lost, searching for the pride they lost, searching for the fulfilment they lost, searching for the drive they lost, searching for the rush they lost, searching for the peace they lost.

Four men racing half a season each in the Invictus Games Racing team, a collaboration between the Invictus Games Foundation and James Holder, the co-founder of Superdry, who is funding the team.

‘All the things the Invictus Games stands for resonate with me,’ says Holder. ‘ Success o vercoming adversity, fierce competition done in great spirit, huge mental and physical challenge.’

The four men start to tell their stories, not in order of significance or of pain or of former rank. Just from left to right as they sit. And so Basil Rawlinson goes first, quiet, unassuming, self-deprecating, and, like so many former servicemen who have seen things human beings should not see, reluctant to relate his experiences.

His wife is in labour but she has, he says, given him permission to be at Donington for today’s testing session. He says she’s a legend.

‘Good plug for the wife,’ he says, and the other men laugh. Military banter is still safe ground.

Rawlinson, 33, isn’t comfortable talking publicly about why he is here among other men who have suffered more obvious wounds. So we speak a couple of weeks later on the phone. He has a new daughter called Heidi Elspeth now. He talks a bit more about what happened.

He joined 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment in 2009 and spent nearly seven months in Afghanistan in 2010-11. He slipped and fell on a night-time incursion into enemy territory while carrying 200lbs of equipment and injured his back.

He was discharged in 2012 and began suffering from mental health issues. ‘It was things I saw,’ he says. ‘Things I saw in our engagements, things I saw in contact.

‘ And j ust t he way of l i fe in Afghanistan, the lack of respect for human life. It didn’t fit well with my delicate, sensitive Western ideals.’

There are more things, too. He does not want to speak publicly about them.

The next man on the sofa is squat and strong and bullish. ‘Paul Vice, MC,’ he says by way of introduction. The other men laugh again.

More banter. More relief. Vice still hums with a need for combat. Of any kind. ‘MC stands for Military Cross, if you didn’t know,’ says Vice. ‘It’s kind of a big deal.’

Vice is the most famous of the four. A documentary was made about what happened to him in Afghanistan. It was called The Commando who Refused to Die.

‘Being in the Marines is the best job I ever had,’ he says. ‘I had some ecstatic highs and some devastating lows. I went on six operational tours. You can only roll the dice so many times before you roll a one.’ Vice rolled a one on his last tour.

On August 25, 2011, he was on foot patrol in Helmand Province. ‘You land in the bad guy’s back garden and smash them up,’ he says. ‘We were doing that. It was 5am and you get a feel for these things: we call it atmospherics. The mood changes. It’s like you are in the middle of the moors and you walk into a country pub and the juke box stops and everyone turns round and looks at the strangers. The children all legged it.

‘I saw a couple of guys hunkered down off to my right in a field. It didn’t fit. I followed my eyeline back and there was an oil drum poking out through the bottom of the wall and I knew what it was but by the time I span round and got one step, bang, off it went. Then I was flying through the air on fire.’

Vice suffered a traumatic brain i njury. Surgeons removed 400 pieces of shrapnel from his body. His rehabilitation was gruelling and painful. Then he had to come to terms with the fact his injuries had taken from him the one thing he felt he was born to do. ‘ When I realised I wasn’t going to be a Marine any more,’ he says, ‘I didn’t take that well at all.’

Vice found salvation in the 2014 Invictus Games and won a gold medal in cycling. ‘I felt like a rock star for a whole week,’ he says. He was still suffering complications from his injuries and in 2015, his left leg was amputated below the knee. At the 2016 Invictus Games in Orlando, he competed as an amputee and was the competition’s most successful male athlete.

Vice, 34, was the poster boy for the Games but when he wasn’t selected for last year’s event in Toronto, it hit him hard. ‘I was lost,’ he says. ‘ The amount of combat that front- line servicemen have seen over the last 10 years is more ferocious than anything since the Korean days and you don’t ever come back from an environment like that with everything good upstairs. I’m not saying I’m a severe PTSD case but I have my issues. I managed them quite well. One of the ways I managed them was through sport and when I thought that opportunity had gone the wheels came off.

‘ I started going down and my default setting is to go straight to booze and shroud it all out. I went down like a ton of bricks. When I was not quite at the bottom but pretty much on the way there, I got the opportunity to try out for the Invictus Games Racing team. It gave me the drive. Look, I live every day as if it’s my last because I know it can be. I mean I’ve died twice and I didn’t really rate it. I look at the car I’m going to race and I can’t believe I get to get in that weapon they have built.’

The third man on the sofa is Steve McCulley, a former major in the Royal Marines. McCulley, 40, is one of the two veterans who will race.

McCulley has been driving competitively for a couple of years. He has become a qualified racing instructor, too. Everything about him tells you he is a natural leader of men. He has an air of authority. Nothing l oud. Nothing overt. Just quiet assurance. The Taliban sensed that, too. That was why they

targeted him. He was leading 175 Royal Marines in Helmand on a mission in enemy territory in 2011 near Loy Mandeh. They approached a crossing point over an irrigation ditch but skirted it because they knew such crossings were favourite places for improvised explosive devices. The Taliban had anticipated that.

McCulley and his men waded through the ditch six or seven metres away from the crossing point but the Taliban had buried the directional fragmentation charge in the side of the crossing point so that it pointed towards the ditch. They waited until McCulley waded into the ditch and detonated it.

McCulley was severely injured. He had an emergency thoracotomy. Surgeons made an incision in his chest and tried to repair some of the damage. He was in a coma for three weeks and spent two years in rehab. He began to suffer internal bleeding. The surgeons performed another thoracotomy and dug out 15 more pieces of shrapnel.

He, too, had to come to terms with the fact that his military career was over. He, too, found salvation i n motor sport, f i rst t hrough Mission Motorsport, the services’

I’ve done a lot of adrenaline fuelled activities and motor racing is the closest to a firefight in war

motor sport charity and now through Invictus Games Racing.

‘Fortunately or unfortunately,’ he says, ‘when you have been in a firefight, the adrenaline during it and afterwards is indescribable. I have done a lot of adrenaline- fuelled activities and motor racing is the closest to a firefight. The downside is that it’s addictive and you want the opportunity to keep doing it.’

The fourth man is Ben Norfolk. His story and his recovery may be the most affecting of all.

He was not a soldier. He was in Afghanistan as an aircraft engineer with the RAF. He was part of the team who helped to maintain the Chinook fleet of helicopters.

In 2010, he was at Camp Bastion when a Chinook returned from a recovery mission. Usually the aircraft would set down at the landing site in a different part of the camp to offload casualties and then fly to the area of the base where Norfolk, 41, would check its functions.

This time, he walked out to the helicopter and climbed in the back to be met with a scene of unimaginable horror. A number of soldiers had been on patrol east of Lashkar Gah when their Snatch Land Rover drove over three stacked anti-tank mines. The force of the blast threw the vehicle into the air and dumped it 20 metres away. The details of what Ben saw are still too upsetting to relate. It is enough to say the incident left him with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

‘I didn’t realise quite how much of an impact it was going to have on my life,’ he says. ‘Over the next eight years, my mental health gradually declined to the point where, after three lots of therapy, I had a nervous breakdown. Two and a half years ago, I tried to take my own life. In the end, I got the help I needed, help I still have today, and now I am able to enjoy what’s here.

‘For me, Invictus Games Racing takes all the best parts of the military and casts aside the ones that aren’t so good. It’s the teamwork, camaraderie, being part of an organisation where people are going in the same direction, where everyone has the same goal.

‘It’s a great showcase for recovery sport and for us as ex-military people, to show what we are capable of doing. In such a short time, to go from the person I was to where I am now, well, I hope that shows some resilience. To be able to have this opportunity to affect some people who have gone the other way and have got depressive symptoms and want to hide away and sit on the sofa is a precious gift.

‘I’m struggling now to know how can I use that to be able to get those people out, not necessarily into motor sport but just to get to do whatever it is they want to do that gives them fulfilment and that lust for life, that passion, back.

‘For me, it is motor sport. For other people, it might be basket weaving, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Just to show them that there are hurdles there but you can overcome them as we have all had to, as we have been trying to get our racing licenses or going through our recovery to get to this point today.’

They will all be there at Oulton Park. Broken men, mending. Men racing in cars emblazoned with a logo that says they have new hope. ‘I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul,’ it says. Rawlinson thinks about that for a second, about what they are putting behind them and what lies ahead. ‘It all starts feeling right again,’ he says. ‘Life starts feeling right again.’