A few months ago, I had the privilege of speaking with Damien Thomlinson about his life and experiences as an amputee for an upcoming podcast I am working on called The Limb Shift. The series is set to launch this October, perfectly aligning with Amputee Awareness Week to help shine a light on the raw, unfiltered realities of limb loss.
Damien’s story is not one of passive recovery, but of radical agency and defiance. A former Special Forces soldier who lost both of his legs to an IED in Afghanistan in 2009, he brings the uncompromising, elite mindset of his military background to his life as a double amputee. In our conversation, he opens up with incredible candour about the terrifying hour on the ground following the blast, the surreal mental battle of early hospitalisation, and how he continuously pushes back against the medical professionals and naysayers who try to dictate his limitations. What follows is an insight into a man who refuses to let anyone else draw the boundaries of his life.
Damien Thornlinson
When Damien Thomlinson joined the Australian Army, it was a deliberate move to embrace an environment completely detached from his prior life. “To me, it was the antithesis of who I was prior to joining,” he reflects. Yet, what he found inside the Special Forces wasn’t a static peak, but a continuous loop of evolution. “You’re always upskilling and moving forward to be able to do something else… excellence is considered standard.”
This relentless drive to smash through the next bar became his psychological armor when his world shattered at 11:30 pm on an Afghan hillside in 2009. Thomlinson, then 27, lost both of his legs to an improvised explosive device (IED).
Before the 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… 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, Damien was on the ground for just under an hour. If someone fired into the village, the chopper wouldn’t have come in and he would be dead. When the rescue team switched to white light to save his life, his disoriented mind went into survival mode. He thought he was going towards the lights and tried to run off, but with no legs, he was just freaking out and trying to 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 toll, bounced back fast. “Your body’s already used to going, ‘I don’t have an eight-hour sleep window to recover.'”
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, Thomlinson 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 of volume, alignment, and trim lines. Volume ensures the residual limb fits securely without shifting. Alignment involves adjusting the base pyramid via four distinct screws to alter the foot-to-body relationship. Trim lines manage the borders of the prosthetic for optimal movement and comfort.
He refused to let doctors or physical trainers manage his expectations down. “I expect a really, really high standard… All I expect in return for that is the top of the range in 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. Thomlinson’s response was characteristically blunt, telling the instructor that since his job was just counting push-ups and timing runs, he didn’t have any leverage in the winter sports world.
Within five days of hitting the slopes in Jindabyne with American coach Pete Higgins, Thomlinson 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, even if you are just going to get a coffee.
Ownership and Agency
Now, looking back on his journey, Thomlinson passes on three core pillars of wisdom for anyone facing a similar battle.
First, seek peer validation by finding a clique of people who have walked the path. For Thomlinson, playing amputee golf provided a sounding board of people with immense emotional intelligence.
Second, acknowledge good intentions by understanding that the medical professionals around you are genuinely trying their best, even if they don’t always get it right.
Third, maintain radical agency. He emphasizes that you have to have complete agency over your circumstance. If something doesn’t look or feel right, but someone tells you it is, you need to trust yourself. He notes that it is better to risk being wrong occasionally than to walk around for eight months on something that physically hurts because you listened to someone else.
Ultimately, Thomlinson’s story isn’t just about surviving a blast; it’s about a man refusing to let anyone else draw the boundaries of his life.