When Tony Blair took his seat at the Chilcot inquiry insisting he had no regrets about taking Britain to war, Sergeant Gavin Harvey was having his downstairs loo refurbished.
He didn’t watch the former Prime Minister speak.
‘I don’t get involved in policy,’ he says. ‘If they’ve made wrong decisions, so be it. I’ve just done the job I’ve been told to do to the best of my ability.’
Gavin, who serves with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, survived a tour of duty in Iraq without injury. Not so in Afghanistan.
He was commanding a convoy in Helmand Province when his truck hit a roadside bomb, killing his driver, Craftsman Anthony Lombardi.
Gavin, 28, lost both legs, part of his pelvis and ruptured many of his internal organs.
He is the most severely wounded soldier to return from Afghanistan and survive. It’s a miracle he’s here talking to me at all.
He says he’s lucky, but it’s a rough sort of luck.
When we meet in the three-bedroom house Gavin shares with his wife Kerry, 25, and two young daughters, Ella, four, and one-year-old Millie, the workmen are here too, turning the downstairs bathroom into a disabled toilet.
Ella’s just celebrated her fourth birthday and it’s her party tomorrow, but there’s woefully little Gavin can do to help.
Needless to say, there won’t be any more children.‘There are complications from my injuries that I don’t want to go into,’ he says. ‘But let’s say we’ve had two now and that’s it. I’m lucky. I’m a family man. I love my kids to bits. Even if I was a vegetable but could still see my children, I’d be happy.
‘People turn round and say “you’re a hero”, but the real heroes are the people who are not here today.
'These are the guys who have paid the ultimate price. It’s awful, just awful.’
Gavin is sobbing now. Before the explosion, he wasn’t just a hands-on father, but a keen sportsman, a footballer, a basketball coach and a cross-country runner.
Today, little Millie has to toddle to her father’s wheelchair and reach up towards him for a cuddle.
Gavin says he still hasn’t come to terms with his horrendous injuries and emotionally he’s a mess. There’s anger, frustration, tears and a darkness around his eyes that speaks volumes about the mental hell that is his.
‘I was so bad that I died I don’t know how many times,’ he says. ‘I’m a different man now. I’m absolutely not afraid to take anything on now. I’m not even afraid to die.
‘I was crying the other night because I said to Kerry: “I’m not afraid to die.” It’s the most awful feeling not to be afraid of death. It’s incomprehensible. I’m not completely right upstairs because of that. I’m still trying to put my head back together at the moment. I’ve got these things going my head that I can’t cope with - like hearing people laughing and the noise of these toys.’
Ella has turned on one of her brightly-coloured plastic toys which is burbling out kiddie music.
‘Stupid things,’ he snaps. ‘Why do people buy those toys?’
Gavin is, by nature, a hugely private man, but has agreed to this interview to raise awareness for the Army Benevolent Fund, which tomorrow rebrands itself as ABF, The Soldiers’ Charity.
To date, 179 British soldiers have died in Iraq and 251 in Afghanistan, but the numbers of those injured stands many times higher.
Indeed, as Gavin says, when he was receiving treatment at the Army’s rehabilitation centre, Headley Court, near Leatherhead in Surrey: ‘You couldn’t move in the dining room for all the wheelchairs.’
Sadly though, the support given to men like Gavin and their families is woefully lacking.
The ABF has received a 30 per cent increase in requests for assistance from soldiers in the past year and needs to double its income to £14million - but the care given to those injured fighting for their country remains appallingly unjoined up.
Although Gavin and his family have been supported by his Battalion and the ABF, Kerry was not approached until four-and-a-half months after her husband suffered his life-threatening injuries. Furthermore, the Government review for compensation offered to wounded soldiers remains ongoing.
Under the MoD’s existing scheme, lump sum payments for the most serious injuries are capped at £570,000. The scheme is being reviewed by Admiral Lord Boyce, a former Chief of the Defence Staff, following appeals from numerous servicemen and women.
‘It’s disgusting,’ says Gavin. ‘I’m not going to put in a claim while they’re still squabbling over it. If people want to fight over compensation for a soldier who’s been wounded for being courageous for his country, let them do it.
‘They’ll compensate some idiot who’s spilled coffee over themselves or has repetitive strain injury, but they can’t compensate a soldier who’s lost his legs in Afghanistan. What sort of place are we living in?
‘In the American system, a wounded soldier gets posted to a rehabilitation unit with his family and they don’t even touch you for a year. They just leave you with your family,’ says Gavin.
But here, Headley Court doesn’t provide a service for the family. Our support service - Relate - looks after families but the problem is these organisations need to knit together.
‘When you get injured, it’s like a ripple in a pond. It affects everyone around you - your friends, your family. There needs to be a system whereby the family receives support.’
Gavin has checked himself out of Headley Court. He couldn’t bear to be apart from Kerry and the children.
‘I’m only as strong as my family are. It’s the biggest thing that’s pulled me through. My family is my rock,’ he says.
‘If that’s taken away from me, there’s nothing worth living for. Without them, I’m just an average man.’
But Gavin is not an average man. An inspirational leader, according to his commanding officer, he is a man of huge courage and extraordinary grit.
He’d been serving with the British Army for 11 years when he took command of the convoy on August 4 in Helmand to re-supply the Mercian Regiment with water and ammunitions.
The convoy was taking part in Operation Panther’s Claw, the British-led military operation in southern Afghanistan to secure various canal and river crossings and establish a lasting International Security Assistance Force presence in one of the main Taliban strongholds, ahead of the 2009 Afghan presidential election.
‘Basically, I struck an IED (improvised explosive device) that killed Anthony and left me like this,’ he says, gesturing to the place where his legs used to be.
Craftsman Anthony Lombardi’s death still troubles him deeply. He was a friend and had a son, Harvey, who is not yet one year old. Gavin was the sergeant in command of the convoy.
Unlike the politicians who have sought to cover their backs at the Chilcot inquiry, he assumes full responsibility and, yes, has regrets over that day.
‘I was devastated when I was told he was dead,’ he says. ‘It’s awful when you get close to someone and hear about their families if they’ve got kids - then they’re just gone. I did this to me.’
He doesn’t have to voice the fact that he clearly blames himself for Anthony’s death, too.
‘The thing is IEDs are so frequent in Panther’s Claw. It’s like playing Minesweeper without the numbers.
You’ve got no idea where they are. The explosion must have been quick. The blast knocked me out. I remember waking up and I had three teeth missing. I had blood in my mouth and thought I had internal injuries. I spat it out and tried to breath again.
‘There was blood everywhere. I thought: “Oh s***, not me.” The blast had blown ammunition and food all over the place. I was lying on top of it in the dirt. I tried to get up and that’s when I realised my legs had been blown to bits. There were bones and tendons showing.
‘I couldn’t feel them. It was all numb. I couldn’t feel any pain. It felt tight. Everything felt really tight, really strange.
‘I remember looking at myself. My internal organs had come out. They were everywhere. I could see them. I had a ruptured bladder, a ruptured stomach. It was pretty much as bad as you can get — pretty much like, “I’m dead.”
‘I made peace with myself. I talked to myself in my head. The only thing I could think about was: “How’s Kerry going to cope without me being there?”
‘I’ve always been a central figure in the family, the person people draw strength from. I just thought: “How are the kids going to grow up without a dad?” My life didn’t flash before my eyes - nothing like the Hollywood stuff. All I could think about was the things that were most important to me at the time - Kerry and the kids.’
He’s in tears now. ‘I’ve only ever told you this. I haven’t even told the commanding officer because I don’t like talking about it,’ he says. ‘It’s an awful, awful sensation - an awful thing to feel. I knew I was going to die.
'Nobody will ever know how I feel,’ Gavin is raging.
‘They will never feel what I feel because they haven’t done it. I’m willing to give up this [he nods to his youngest daughter on the sofa] because I love my country, then I come back to my country and see f****** yobs in the street, I see things going wrong, I see people being awful to other people and I think: “Is that what I’ve been protecting?” Sometimes it’s disgusting.’
Kerry, a gentle, stoic woman with tired eyes, stands to comfort Gavin. He composes himself and continues: ‘I remember one of the blokes opening the door to the truck, saying: “Oh f***.” I knew then that I was in a world of hurt — a dark horrible place
where my life was in the balance. I didn’t even know my pelvis had been completely smashed up then.‘I told them to go away - to go and save Anthony and my operator. I knew I was dead. It was horrible because I wanted to be saved, but I was convinced I wouldn’t make it.’
The man Gavin used to be didn’t survive that day. The tortured individual I see before me now did. A medic, who has since been applauded for his fast-thinking, stemmed the bleeding with blood-clotting powder and bandages.
‘He saved my life. I owe it to him,’ says Gavin.
But his life continued to hang in the balance for several weeks. Before flying him to Birmingham’s Selly Oak Hospital, medical staff at Camp Bastion put 50 units of blood in him to keep him alive and Gavin was put into an induced coma for three weeks.
Meanwhile, Kerry learned that her husband had been terribly injured.
‘There was the knock on the door and the immediate shock,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have a clue how serious it was. I knew he’d lost his legs but had no idea of the conditionhe was in until I walked into critical care at Selly Oak. That not knowing was the hardest thing.’
Gavin remembers dreadful nightmares, ‘stuff going through your head, mumbo-jumbo stuff’, dreadful stuff he doesn’t want to share.
‘Flipping hell,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I didn’t know if I was dreaming or it was happening. My head was a mess.’
It wasn’t until three weeks after he regained consciousness that he began to understand it all.
‘I just laughed when they told me in detail what was wrong with me,’ he says. ‘I just switched off, saying: “Yeah, whatever.” Every day is a new day for me. It’s horrendous. It’ll take me the rest of my life to cope with this now.
‘My mobility’s been taken away. My life’s not over, but there’s hundreds of things I can’t do - I can’t run and I used to love running. Frustrated is probably the best word. It’s difficult to do things for the kids and that frustrates me - that I can’t even look after my own children.’
And Kerry? How does she cope?
‘You do because you love each other and you’ve got a family,’ she says quietly. ‘They say you don’t know how much you can cope with until you’re forced to cope.’
Gavin, who wants only to return to his Battalion, has told the unvarnished truth to help raise funds for a support system for soldiers like himself and their families. The Army, he says, has taught him ‘respect, selfless commitment and courage’.
‘Every day I’ve got is a day I shouldn’t have had,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to pay back all the people who have helped me.’
It’s a selfless commitment that should humble each and every one of us.
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'Nobody will ever know how I feel,’ Gavin is raging.
‘They will never feel what I feel because they haven’t done it. I’m willing to give up this [he nods to his youngest daughter on the sofa] because I love my country, then I come back to my country and see f****** yobs in the street, I see things going wrong, I see people being awful to other people and I think: “Is that what I’ve been protecting?” Sometimes it’s disgusting.’
I would like anyone stumbling upon this blog to read this article, as you may just get a small glimpse of the price that our soldiers are paying, and the little thanks that they receive on their return.
