Damien Thomlinson is a former Special Forces soldier who lost both of his legs to an IED in Afghanistan in 2009.
When Damien joined the Australian Army, it was a deliberate move to embrace an environment completely detached from his prior life. Reflecting on that transition, he noted:
“To me, it was the antithesis of who I was prior to joining. So I’d worked really hard to get there, but I had this, like, really rose colored view that once you got through all the training that you had to do and you were qualified, that then you were just kind of doing the job, but you’re not. You’re always upskilling and moving forward to be able to do something else.”
This relentless drive to smash through the next bar became his psychological armour. In the Special Forces, excellence is not just encouraged—it is standard. When his world shattered at 11:30 pm on an Afghan hillside in 2009, Damien was 27 years old.
Before deployment, his girlfriend Leticia, a microbiologist, voiced the universal fears of a partner left behind. Thomlinson casually brushed them aside:
“At the end of the day, it’s a gunfight. We’ve worked harder for it. I can trust everyone that’s around me… We’re absolutely ready.”
The Blast and the Missing Memory
Today, Damien has no vivid, cinematic recollection of the explosion. “I haven’t got a memory of getting hit,” he admits. He tried everything—from standard medical therapies to “heaps of woowoo stuff”—to recover the memory. Eventually, he simply had to ask the mates who saved him. He recalls asking the soldier sitting next to him:
“I just got to know this. What happened? Like, was I a bitch?”
The reply was a testament to his grit:
“No, to be honest… you actually reacted pretty well. Everyone got a fair bit of respect for you out of like the way that you carried yourself.”
The reality on the ground was a terrifying race against the clock. Bleeding out in the pitch black of an 11:30 pm explosion, Damien was on the ground for just under an hour. When the rescue team switched to white light to save his life, his disoriented mind went into survival mode. Thinking he was moving toward safety, he tried to run off:
“It was like a just freaking out, trying to wiggle, wiggle away.”
Rebuilding from Scratch
Hospitalisation was a blur of rapid physical recovery and surreal cognitive processing. His body, conditioned to sleep deprivation and extreme physical tolls, bounced back fast:
“Your body’s already used to going, ‘I don’t have an eight-hour sleep window to recover.’ You know, I’ve just got to. I got to be as good as I can be and then just go.”
Yet, his mind was racing ahead of medical reality. He recalls conversations with his ex-girlfriend about programming stem cells, wondering if they could grow another version of him and work out a way to put consciousness into it.
When he transitioned to prosthetics, Damien brought the uncompromising standards of the Special Forces to his rehab. He notes that the basics of building a socket come down to a precise triad:
“If you’re building a socket it’s about the sockets, volume, sockets, volume, alignment and trim lines. That’s the basics of building a socket.”
Refusing to let doctors or physical trainers manage his expectations down, he set his boundaries early with his medical team:
“I expect a really, really high standard… All I expect in return for that is the top of the range and pinnacle of every option that you can give me.”
Defying the Naysayers
That defiance was tested when he decided to take up snowboarding. A prosthetist explicitly told him that he was just going to have to deal with the fact that he was not going to be able to snowboard again. Later, an army physical training instructor repeated the sentiment. Damien’s response was characteristically blunt:
“So just let me know, what’s your role again? I’m a PT, I’m a physical training instructor down in there. Oh, cool. So you can count people’s push ups and time their runs. That doesn’t really sound like anyone who’s got any leverage in the winter sports world.”
Within five days of hitting the slopes in Jindabyne with American coach Pete Higgins, Damien was riding and turning. He went on to train for the Sochi Winter Paralympics, overcoming a broken back along the way. He notes with a laugh that the positive thing about being an amputee is that no one expects much:
“You can just walk and everyone gets excited… They’re like, oh my God, you’re doing so well, aren’t you? You’re just like, yeah, I’m just kind of getting coffee.”
Ownership and Agency
Now, looking back on his journey, Damien passes on three core pillars of wisdom for anyone facing a similar battle:
- Seek Peer Validation: Find a clique of people who have walked the path. For Damien, playing amputee golf provided a sounding board of people with immense emotional intelligence who communicate without being condescending.
- Acknowledge Good Intentions: Understand that the medical professionals around you are genuinely trying their best to give you the best outcome, even if errors happen. As Damien puts of his socket fitting experience: “If someone has something that’s close to perfect, but the wall still isn’t straight, there’s—they’re doing the best that they can and they’ve got good intentions.”
- Maintain Radical Agency: You have to take complete ownership of your circumstances. Summarising his hard-earned lesson, Damien advises:
“If something doesn’t look right, doesn’t feel right, but someone tells you it is, you’re right. It’s not right. So you just got to be very bullish in that type of situation… It’s better to be to go, I was wrong than go, for eight months I walked around on something that physically hurt my body that someone else was telling me was right.”
