THE UNCONQUERED
Meet the brave women who fought for our country and are now ready to compete for Australia in the Invictus Games in Sydney this month, a sporting event to harness the fighting spirit of veterans. By Jane Albert.
Meet the brave women who fought for our country and are now ready to compete for Australia in the Invictus Games in Sydney this month.
When Trudi Lines was a little girl growing up in Shepparton she would often gaze up at the photos lining a wall of her grandparents’ home. Looking back at her were countless frames of her pop Harold Hansford as a young man, dressed in the uniform of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) alongside various crews during his years of active service as a bomber pilot in World War II. Her grandmother was also a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and dedicated much of her life to serving this country. A young child at the time, Lines regrets immensely not asking them more about their years in the armed services, and now it is too late as they have both since died. But one of the proudest days of her life was in 2014 when, 11 years after she herself joined the RAAF, she marched in uniform alongside her pop and other members of the Australian military family in the ANZAC Day parade. Although he was unable to walk, her grandfather delighted in being driven along the parade route in a new Ford Mustang. “Unbeknownst to me he was sick by that stage. But everybody flocked to him, it was just amazing, really special,” Lines recalls. “Unfortunately I’ve forgotten the in-depth details of what we talked about, because after that I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and the medication seems to wipe things. I wish I could put it in my brain and it would be there forever, but I can’t. It was still a very special day.” Her grandfather died the following year.
Now Lines is preparing for another ceremony with a very different but no less special family: her Invictus Games family.
The Invictus Games were created by Prince Harry in 2014, who, after visiting the Warrior Games in the Colorado the previous year saw “first-hand how the power of sport could help physically, psychologically and socially”, and decided to create his own version. Named Invictus (after the poem by William Ernest Henley), which is Latin for ‘unconquered’, the games are an international sporting meet for past and serving members of the military who have been physically or mentally injured during service. But they are much more than a sporting competition. For Lines they have provided a lifeline that has helped her rediscover a purpose in life, one that is still helping her find her way back from a very dark place following two deployments to Afghanistan.
She is not alone. From October 20 to 27 Sydney will welcome 500 competitors and more than 1,000 of their family members from 18 nations, many of them countries Australia has served alongside in Afghanistan and Iraq, including New Zealand, Jordan, Poland, Georgia, the US and Canada. The Sydney Opera House will host the opening ceremony before athletes will begin competing in 10 adaptive sports, including wheelchair rugby and basketball, athletics, indoor rowing and swimming.
In making the announcement about the selection for the 2018 host city, the Duke of Sussex, himself a veteran of the British Army who served in Afghanistan and was even seconded to the Australian Defence Force (ADF) in 2015, had this to say: “We had three key criteria. First, it had to be an iconic city – somewhere known the world over. Second, it needed to be a city with a proud military heritage, which would welcome competitors from all over the world with open arms. And finally, we wanted to go somewhere where they are absolutely sports mad and would really get behind our competitors. It was an easy decision really – the 2018 Invictus Games are coming to Sydney.” A patron of the Games, Prince Harry will visit Sydney for the competition.
“The Games are a celebration of the human spirit, of ability over disability, showing it doesn’t matter what tough cards you’ve been dealt in life, there is always something somebody can do, always a positive contribution people can make,” says the Australian international Invictus Games CEO Patrick Kidd, OBE, himself a career soldier in the British and later Australian armies. “It’s absolutely not a sporting competition. The sport is great and amazing things happen, but really, what the Games are is a combination of people from all walks of life coming together around a common purpose: realising they’re not on their own but part of a much bigger community of people who have been physically or mentally injured in service and who are all of a sudden just normal people sharing stories and drawing strength from each other.”
There was a time when sport was a key part of Lines’s life. A keen runner, she played AFL for the air force in Darwin after she joined in 2003 aged 25, working in operations management and ‘supplier movement’ with the RAAF. She also ran her unit’s physical training classes. But life in the armed forces takes a toll on your body, no matter what your role. Military are required to be fit and ready for active service through regular physical training sessions, pack marches with a one-size-fits-all pack; and for Lines, the daily hauling of huge loads on and off aircraft, some of it weighing 50 kilograms. Lines relates her injuries like a shopping list: lower back and ankle injuries from over-use, a subsequent ankle reconstruction, an impinged right ankle, and bulging discs in her neck from an accident during training that also caused injury to her right shoulder and wrist. “I used to do a lot of running, that was my thing, it was like my meditation,” Lines says. “But because of my injuries I lost that. Then when I went through treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder the medication made me lose my motivation, which was very unlike me.”
Lines worked on various peacekeeping and humanitarian operations following natural disasters in Papua New Guinea, Thailand and Malaysia, before doing two stints in Afghanistan. It was here that her mental health began to suffer. “Afghanistan makes you appreciate your country, that’s for sure,” Lines says. “We used to call it the dust bowl. There are stunning mountains and on a really clear day it’s actually quite nice, but most of the time it’s blowing a dust storm, and very primitive.”
Her main role was to move troops, special forces and their equipment. The worst part of the job was the so-called ‘ramp ceremonies’ that followed the funeral of a soldier killed in action, when her role was to secure the coffin to the aircraft after it had been carried up the ramp. “My second trip we lost four boys, straight up, the first week I was there. Four ramp ceremonies,” Lines says in disbelief. “That was after the incident on the first trip.”
The incident she is referring to occurred after she ended up at the wrong ramp – she diplomatically declines to say why – leaving her vulnerable on an exposed tarmac as dusk fell. “It was getting dark, which is when you get rocketed, and we knew this so we wanted to get in and out,” she
“It doesn’t matter what tough cards you’ve been dealt in life, there is always something somebody can do”
says. “The next minute you hear …” – she whistles, mimicking a bomb. “I counted at least nine mortars aiming for the aircraft. There was no protection so I was told to get down on the ground and stay low. We just laid down on the tarmac hoping they were really bad with their accuracy, which, thankfully, they were. It doesn’t sound like a big deal. I was in work mode, so once it cleared I just got up and went on my merry way.”
You could be mistaken for thinking Lines was recounting something mundane, so offhand is her tone. She laughs frequently, but it’s a small, hollow sound, particularly when the story turns ugly. Like the time she was told to secure a bag containing an Afghani soldier’s remains, and demanded she be given something resembling a coffin to pay him respect, only to be told to fall into line and get on with the job; or the number of times during a ramp ceremony when she found herself crying as the coffins were brought up, pleading with the pastor not to show her kindness as she tried to maintain her composure.
“Every time I’d be sitting there in tears as they played the music,” she says, laughing softly. “I’d be trying so hard to fight it. But that’s what it is. It’s war. You’re just in work mode and you don’t really think about it too much. You try not to, anyway.”
She returned to Australia in 2010, angry and volatile. “All these things kept adding up until my little body went ‘kaboom’. Can’t handle it anymore. And everyone just thought: ‘Why are you so angry?’ Desperate for change, in 2011 she became the first female in the RAAF to train as an electrician. It took another four years to be diagnosed with PTSD. She was discharged two years later and found she no longer knew who she was or where she was going.
Finally, through Mates4Mates, an organisation that assists injured or ill former or serving ADF personnel, she saw a psychologist and, just as importantly, an exercise physiologist who helped her rediscover suitable exercise. It didn’t take long before she was asked to consider the Invictus Games. “I didn’t think my injuries would [entitle me] but they explained how it worked. And here we are,” she says brightly. “It has really helped because I’d lost the desire to get out of bed for a while. It’s amazing, to be honest … definitely what I needed because I’m not really sure where I was going.” She laughs again, only this time she sounds more hopeful. Today, Lines’s life involves learning to use a wheelchair for rugby and tennis – “I love a challenge” she says delightedly – while studying for an engineering diploma. “I’m so grateful to Prince Harry,” Lines says. “If he hadn’t created the Invictus Games quite possibly there would be people who may not be with us.”
On a warm spring day the 18-strong Australian female Invictus Games team gathered on Sydney’s northern beaches for a challenge of a different nature: a photo shoot with Vogue. A magnificent group of strong, articulate, proud yet modest women, their reasons for joining the military are as diverse as the injuries and illnesses they suffer – anxiety and depression, chronic foot pain, degenerative joint disease and PTSD – all as a result of their service. They are inextricably bound together by the profound effect the Invictus Games has had on their lives.
Ruth Hunt is a legal officer in the Australian Army. Like Lines, her grandfather fought in World War II; and she commissioned in early 2016 after completing a post-graduate law degree at the University of Western Australia. Sixteen months later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was 34. “The first person I called was my chief of staff, before I called my partner Andy [Andrew Love, a lieutenant colonel in the army]. I wasn’t going back to work that day and wanted to make sure [that was okay] and warn him everything was going to change. He was brilliant, the whole brigade was,” the Canberra-based officer recalls.
Determined to continue working, Hunt nevertheless underwent a double mastectomy, 16 rounds of chemotherapy and 28 rounds of radiation. A keen surf lifesaver and patrol captain at her local North Cottesloe beach, Hunt became particularly frustrated throughout her treatment because her ability to exercise as before was taken away. “I’ve always done sport and getting a cancer diagnosis took that away to a degree, because I couldn’t do physical training.” Instead she adapted her training, replacing running with swimming and tailoring a gym program that enabled her to continue training alongside her colleagues.
Having assumed her particular injuries precluded her from joining the Invictus Games team she was overjoyed to discover she was not only eligible but met and competed against other young women who had been through the same thing. “Sport has been critical to my rehabilitation,” she says. “Being able to find other young women who are military who swam and had breast cancer was awesome. To be able to go: ‘this sucks’ together!”
For Hunt, the Invictus Games have had multiple benefits. “Keeping on doing sport was the one thing that remained normal for me. It’s allowed me to show people cancer hasn’t changed me too much: I’m still the same girl who goes to swimming training and loves to race,” she says. “And as an officer it’s helped me understand mental health issues. Being around people with PTSD, anxiety and depression has helped me identify the symptoms, which will help in future. It’s shown me that just because they have a mental health issue doesn’t mean they can’t do things; they might just need a little more support or understanding.”
Hunt is quick to acknowledge the incredible support her partner has given her during rehabilitation and training for Invictus; and Kidd says recognition of family and friends is a key message of the Games. “Recovery and rehabilitation is a team sport. The families are often not spoken about – the importance of the role they play in supporting that person but also the sacrifice they make each day when they’re part of a service family. It’s about recognising that role and the challenges they face, which is why the Games makes the point of bringing the families as well as the competitors, so we can celebrate what they do.”
Kidd has had the privilege of attending all three Invictus Games, in London, Orlando and Toronto, and never tires of their ability to not only make people more aware of veterans’ issues and their need for ongoing support; but the Games’ transformative healing power.
“It’s a very humbling experience. You really do get the sense that for some people their lives really are changing in the right direction and this is the start, not the end.”
The Invictus Games Sydney 2018 runs October 20-27. Go to www. invictusgames2018.org. #ThanksForServing is a movement to acknowledge the service of Australian veterans past and present.
“It has really helped because I’d lost the desire to get out of bed for a while. It’s amazing, to be honest … definitely what I needed”