1.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence told the world in February 2007 that I was deploying, that I would be commanding a group of light tanks along the Iraqi border, near Basra. It was official. I was off to war.
Public reaction was peculiar. Half of Britons were furious, calling it dreadful to risk the life of the Queen’s youngest grandson. Spare or not, they said, it’s unwise to send a royal into a war zone. (It was the first time in twenty-five years that such a thing had been done.)
Half, however, said bravo. Why should Harry get special treatment? What a waste of taxpayers’ money it would be to train the boy as a soldier and then not to use him.
If he dies, he dies, they said.
The enemy certainly felt that way. By all means, said the insurgents, who were trying to foment a civil war across Iraq, send us the boy.
One of the insurgent leaders extended a formal invitation worthy of high tea.
“We are awaiting the arrival of the young handsome spoiled prince with bated breath…”
There was a plan for me, the insurgent leader said. They were going to kidnap me, then decide what to do with me—torture, ransom, kill.
In seeming direct contradiction of this plan, he concluded by promising that the handsome prince would return to his grandmother “without ears.”
I remember hearing that and feeling the tips of my ears grow warm. I flashed back to childhood, when a friend suggested my ears be surgically pinned back, to prevent or correct the family curse. I said, flatly, no.
Days later, another insurgent leader invoked my mother. He said that I should learn from her example, break away from my family. Rebel against the imperialists, Harry.
Or else, he warned, a prince’s “blood will flow into our desert.”
I would’ve worried about Chels hearing any of this, but since we’d begun dating she’d been so harassed by the press that she’d completely unplugged. The papers didn’t exist for her. The internet was off-limits.
The British military, however, was very plugged in. Two months after announcing my deployment, the head of the Army, General Dannatt, abruptly called it off. Besides the public threats from insurgent leaders, British intelligence learned that my photo had been distributed among a group of Iraqi snipers, with instructions that I was the “mother of all targets.” These snipers were elite: they’d recently cut down six British soldiers. So the mission had simply become too dangerous, for me, for anyone who might have the bad luck to be standing next to me. I’d become, in the assessment of Dannatt and others, a “bullet magnet.” And the reason, he said, was the press. In his public statement canceling my deployment, he blasted journalists for their overwrought coverage, their wild speculations, which had “exacerbated” the threat level.
Pa’s staff also issued a public statement, saying I was “very disappointed,” which was untrue. I was crushed. When word first reached me I was at Windsor Barracks, sitting with my guys. I took a moment to collect myself, then told them the bad news. Though we’d just spent months traveling, training together, during which we’d become brothers in arms, they were now on their own.
It wasn’t simply that I felt sorry for myself. I worried about my team. Someone else would have to do my job, and I’d have to live forever with the wondering, the guilt. What if they were no good?
The following week, several papers reported that I was in deep depression. One or two, however, reported that the abrupt about-face in my deployment had been my own doing. The coward story, again. They said that, behind the scenes, I’d pressed my superiors to pull the plug.
2.
I pondered quitting the Army. What was the point of staying if I couldn’t actually be a soldier?
I talked it over with Chels. She was torn. On the one hand she couldn’t hide her relief. On the other she knew how much I wanted to be there for my team. She knew that I’d long felt persecuted by the press, and that the Army had been the one healthy outlet I’d found.
She also knew that I believed in the Mission.
I talked it over with Willy. He had complicated feelings as well. He sympathized, as a soldier. But as a sibling? A highly competitive older brother? He couldn’t bring himself to totally regret this turn of events.
Most of the time Willy and I didn’t have any truck with all that Heir-Spare nonsense. But now and then I’d be brought up short and realize that on some level it really did matter to him. Professionally, personally, he cared where I stood, what I was doing.
Not getting comfort from any quarter, I looked for it in vodka and Red Bull. And gin and tonic. I was photographed around this time going into or coming out of multiple pubs, clubs, house parties, at wee hours.
I didn’t love waking to find a photo of myself on the front page of a tabloid. But what I really couldn’t bear was the sound of the photo being taken in the first place. That click, that terrible noise, from over my shoulder or behind my back or within my peripheral vision, had always triggered me, had always made my heart race, but after Sandhurst it sounded like a gun cocking or a blade being notched open. And then, even a little worse, a little more traumatizing, came that blinding flash.
Great, I thought. The Army has made me more able to recognize threats, to feel threats, to become adrenalized in the face of those threats, and now it’s casting me aside.
I was in a bad, bad place.
Paps, somehow, knew. Around this time they began hitting me with their cameras, deliberately, trying to incite me. They’d brush, smack, jostle, or just straight wallop me, hoping to get a rise, hoping I’d retaliate, because that would create a better photo, and thus more money in their pockets. A snap of me in 2007 fetched about thirty thousand pounds. Down payment on a flat. But a snap of me doing something aggressive? That might be a down payment on a house in the countryside.
I got into one scrap that became big news. I came away with a swollen nose, and my bodyguard was livid. You made those paps rich, Harry! You happy?
Happy? No, I said. No, I’m not happy.
The paps had always been grotesque people, but as I reached maturity they were worse. You could see it in their eyes, their body language. They were more emboldened, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized. Their mullahs were editors, the same ones who’d vowed to do better after Mummy died. The editors promised publicly to never again send photographers chasing after people, and now, ten years later, they were back to their old ways. They justified it by no longer sending their own photographers, directly; instead they contracted with pap agencies, who sent the photographers, a distinction without a shred of difference. The editors were still inciting and handsomely rewarding thugs and losers to stalk the Royal Family, or anyone else unlucky enough to be deemed famous or newsworthy.
And no one seemed to give a shit. I remember leaving a club in London and being swarmed by twenty paps. They surrounded me, then surrounded the police car in which I was sitting, threw themselves across the bonnet, all wearing football scarves around their faces and hoods over their heads, the uniform of terrorists everywhere. It was one of the scariest moments of my life, and I knew no one cared. Price you pay, people would say, though I never understood what they meant.
Price for what?
I was particularly close to one of my bodyguards. Billy. I called him Billy the Rock, because he was so solid, so dependable. He once pounced on a grenade someone tossed at me from a crowd. Luckily, it turned out not to be a real one. I promised Billy I wouldn’t push any more paps. But neither could I just stroll into their ambushes. So, when we left a club, I said, You’re going to have to stuff me into the boot of the car, Billy.
He looked at me, wide-eyed. Really?
That’s the only way I won’t be tempted to have a go at them, and they won’t be able to make any money out of me.
Win-win.
I didn’t tell Billy that this was something my mother used to do.
Thus began a very strange routine between us. When leaving a pub or club in 2007, I’d have the car pull into a back alley or underground parking lot, climb into the boot and let Billy shut the lid, and I’d lie there in the dark, hands across my chest, while he and another bodyguard ferried me home. It felt like being in a coffin. I didn’t care.
3.
To mark the tenth anniversary of our mother’s death, Willy and I organized a concert in her honor. The proceeds would go to her favorite charities, and to a new charity I’d just launched—Sentebale. Its mission: the fight against HIV in Lesotho, particularly among children. (Sentebale is the Sesotho word for “forget-me-not,” Mummy’s favorite flower.)
While planning the concert Willy and I were emotionless. All business. It’s the anniversary, we need to do this, there are a million details, full stop. The venue had to be big enough (Wembley Stadium) and the tickets had to be priced right (forty-five pounds) and the entertainers had to be A-list (Elton John, Duran Duran, P. Diddy). But on the night of the event, standing backstage, looking out at all those faces, feeling that pulsing energy, that pent-up love and longing for our mother, we crumpled.
Then Elton walked onstage. He seated himself at a grand piano and the place went mad. I’d asked him to sing “Candle in the Wind,” but he said no, he didn’t want to be morbid. He chose instead: “Your Song.”
I hope you don’t mind
That I put down in words
How wonderful life is while you’re in the world
He sang it with a twinkle and a smile, aglow with good memories. Willy and I tried for that same energy, but then photos of Mummy began flashing on the screen. Each one more radiant. We went from being crumpled to being swept away.
As the song ended Elton jumped up, introduced us. Their Royal Highnesses, Prince William and Prince Harry! The applause was deafening, like nothing we’d ever heard. We’d been applauded in the streets, at polo games, parades, operas, but never in a place this cavernous, or in a context this charged. Willy walked out, I followed, each of us wearing a blazer and open shirt, as if going to a school dance. We were both frightfully nervous. On any topic, but especially on the topic of Mummy, we weren’t accustomed to public speaking. (In fact, we weren’t accustomed to private speaking about her.) But standing before 65,000 people, and another 500 million watching live in 140 countries, we were paralyzed.
Maybe that was the reason we didn’t actually…say anything? I look at the video now and it’s striking. Here was a moment, maybe the moment, for us to describe her, to dig down deep and find the words to remind the world of her sterling qualities, her once-a-millennium magic—her disappearance. But we didn’t. I’m not suggesting a full-blown homage was in order, but maybe some small personal tribute?
We offered no such thing.
It was still too much, too raw.
The only thing I said that was real, that came from my heart, was a shout-out to my team. I’d also like to take this opportunity to say hi to all the guys in A Squadron, Household Cavalry, who are serving out in Iraq at the moment! I wish I was there with you. I’m sorry I can’t be! But to you and everybody else on operations at the moment, we’d both like to say: Stay safe!
4.
Days later I was in Botswana, with Chels. We went to stay with Teej and Mike. Adi was there too. The first convergence of those four special people in my life. It felt like bringing Chels home to meet Mum and Dad and big bro. Major step, we all knew.
Luckily, Teej and Mike and Adi loved her. And she saw how special they were too.
One afternoon, as we were all getting ready to go for a walk, Teej started nagging me.
Bring a hat!
Yeah, yeah.
And sunscreen! Lots of sunscreen! Spike, you’re going to fry with that pale skin!
All right, all right.
Spike—
Okaaay, Mom.
It just flew out of my mouth. I heard it, and stopped. Teej heard it and stopped. But I didn’t correct myself. Teej looked shocked, but also moved. I was moved as well. Thereafter, I called her Mom all the time. It felt good. For both of us. Though I made a point, always, to call her Mom, rather than Mum.
There was only one Mum.
A happy visit, overall. And yet there was a constant subtext of stress. It was evident in how much I was drinking.
At one point Chels and I took a boat, drifted up and down the river, and the main thing I remember is Southern Comfort and Sambuca. (Sambuca Gold by day, Sambuca Black by night.) I remember waking in the morning with my face stuck to a pillow, my head not feeling like it was fastened to my neck. I was having fun, sure, but also dealing in my own way with unsorted anger, and guilt about not being at war—not leading my lads. And I wasn’t dealing well. Chels and Adi, Teej and Mike said nothing. Maybe they saw nothing. I was probably doing a pretty good job of covering it all up. From the outside my drinking probably looked like partying. And that was what I told myself it was. But deep down, on some level, I knew.
Something had to change. I knew I couldn’t go on like this.
So the moment I got back to Britain I asked for a meeting with my commanding officer, Colonel Ed Smyth-Osbourne.
I admired Colonel Ed. And I was fascinated by him. He wasn’t put together like other men. Come to mention it, he wasn’t put together like any other human I’d encountered. The basic ingredients were different. Scrap iron, steel wool, lion’s blood. He looked different too. His face was long, like a horse’s, but not equine smooth; he had a distinctive tuft of hair on each cheek. His eyes were large, calm, capable of wisdom and stoicism. My eyes, by contrast, were still bloodshot from my Okavango debauch, and darting all around as I delivered my pitch.
Colonel, I need to find a way of getting back onto operations, or else I’m going to have to quit the Army.
I’m not certain Colonel Ed believed my threat. I’m not certain I did. Still, politically, diplomatically, strategically, he couldn’t afford to discount it. A prince in the ranks was a big public-relations asset, a powerful recruiting tool. He couldn’t ignore the fact that, if I bolted, his superiors might blame him, and their superiors too, and up the chain it might go.
On the other hand, much of what I saw from him that day was genuine humanity. The guy got it. As a soldier, he felt for me. He shuddered at the thought of being kept from a scrap. He really did want to help.
Harry, there might be a way…
Iraq was permanently off the table, he said. Alas. No two ways about that, I’m afraid. But maybe, he added, Afghanistan was an option.
I squinted. Afghanistan?
He muttered something about it being “the safer option.”
Riiight…safer…
What on earth was he banging on about? Afghanistan was worlds more dangerous than Iraq. At that moment Britain had seven thousand soldiers in Afghanistan and each day found them engaged in some of the fiercest combat since the Second World War.
But who was I to argue? If Colonel Ed thought Afghanistan safer, and if he was willing to send me there, great.
What job would I do in Afghanistan, Colonel?
FAC. Forward air controller.
I blinked.
Highly sought-after job, he explained. FACs were tasked with orchestrating all air power, giving cover to lads on the ground, calling in raids—not to mention rescues, medevacs, the list went on. It wasn’t a new job, certainly, but it was newly vital in this new sort of warfare.
Why’s that, sir?
Because the bloody Taliban is everywhere! And nowhere!
You simply couldn’t find them, he explained. Terrain was too rugged, too remote. Mountains and deserts honeycombed with tunnels and caves—it was like hunting goats. Or ghosts. You had to get the bird’s-eye view.
Since the Taliban had no air force, not one plane, that was easy. We British, plus the Yanks, owned the air. But FACs helped us press that advantage. Say a squadron out on patrol needed to know about nearby threats. The FAC checked with drones, checked with fighter pilots, checked with helicopters, checked his high-tech laptop, created a 360-degree picture of the battlefield.
Say that same squadron suddenly came under fire. The FAC consulted a menu—Apache, Tornado, Mirage, F-15, F-16, A-10—and ordered up the aircraft best suited to the situation, or the best one available, then guided that aircraft onto the enemy. Using cutting-edge hardware, FACs didn’t simply rain fire on the enemy’s heads, they placed it there, like a crown.
Then he told me that all FACs get a chance to go up in a Hawk and experience being in the air.
By the time Colonel Ed stopped talking I was salivating. FAC it is, sir. When do I leave?
Not so fast.
FAC was a plum job. Everyone wanted it. So that would take some doing. Also, it was a complex job. All that technology and responsibility required loads of training.
First things first, he said. I’d have to go through a challenging certification process.
Where, sir?
At RAF Leeming.
In…the Yorkshire Dales?
5.
Early autumn. Drystone walls, patchwork fields, sheep snacking on grassy slopes. Dramatic limestone cliffs and crags and scree. In every direction, another beautiful purple moor. The landscape wasn’t quite so famous as the Lake District, just over to the west, but it was still breathtaking, and still inspired some of the great artists in British history. Wordsworth, for one. I’d managed to avoid reading that old gent’s stuff in school, but now I thought he must be pretty damn good if he spent time around these parts.
It felt like sacrilege to be standing on a cliff above this place and trying to obliterate it.
Of course it was pretend obliteration. I didn’t actually blow up one single dale. Still, at the end of each day I felt I had. I was studying the Art of Destruction, and the first thing I learned was that destruction is partially creative. It begins with imagination. Before destroying something you have to imagine it destroyed, and I was getting very good at imagining the dales as a smoking hellscape.
The drill each day was the same. Rise at dawn. Glass of orange juice, bowl of porridge, then a full English, then head into the fields. As first daylight poured over the horizon I’d begin speaking to an aircraft, usually a Hawk. The aircraft would reach its IP, initial point, five to eight nautical miles away, and then I’d give the target, signal the run. The aircraft would turn and commence. I’d talk it through the sky, over the countryside, using different landmarks. L-shaped wood. T-shaped dike. Silver barn. In selecting landmarks I’d been instructed to start big, move on to something medium, then pick something small. Picture the world, I was told, as a hierarchy.
Hierarchy, you say? Think I can handle that.
Each time I called out a landmark, the pilot would say back: Affirm.
Or else: I am visual. I liked that.
I enjoyed the rhythms, the poetry, the meditative chant of it all. And I found deeper meanings in the exercise. I’d often think: It’s the whole game, isn’t it? Getting people to see the world as you see it? And say it all back to you?
Typically the pilot would be flying low, five hundred feet off the deck, level with the rising sun, but sometimes I’d send him lower and put him into a pop-up. As he streaked towards me at the speed of sound, he’d pull back, shoot upwards at a forty-five-degree angle. Then I’d begin a new series of descriptions, new details. As he reached the top of his climb and rolled his wings, as he leveled and started to feel negative g-force, he’d see the world just as I’d painted it, then swoop down.
Suddenly he’d cry out: Tally target! Then: In dry!
Then I’d say: Clear dry.
Meaning, his bombs were but spirits melting into air.
Then I’d wait, listening keenly for the pretend explosions.
The weeks just flew by.
6.
Once I was a trained FAC, I had to become combat ready, which meant mastering twenty-eight different combat “controls.”
A control was basically an interaction with an aircraft. Each control was a scenario, a little play. For instance, imagine two aircraft come into your airspace. Good morning, this is Dude Zero One and Dude Zero Two. We’re a pair of F-15s with two PGMs on board, plus one JDAM, we’ve got a playtime of ninety minutes and we are currently two nautical miles east of your location at Flight Level 150, waiting for talk-on…
I needed to know precisely what they were saying, and how to respond to them precisely in their own jargon.
Sadly, I wouldn’t be able to do this in a normal training area. The normal areas, like Salisbury Plain, were too out in the open. Someone would see me, and tip off the press, and my cover would be blown; I’d be back where I started. Instead, Colonel Ed and I decided that I should learn the controls somewhere remote…somewhere like…
Sandringham.
We both smiled when the thought occurred. Then laughed.
The last place anyone would think of Prince Harry getting himself combat ready. Granny’s country estate.
I got a room at a small hotel near Sandringham—Knights Hill. I’d known the place all my life, driven past it a million times. Whenever we visited Granny at Christmas, our bodyguards would sleep there. Standard room: hundred quid.
In summers, Knights Hill tended to be full of bird-watchers, wedding parties. But now, in the autumn, it was empty.
The privacy was thrilling, and would’ve been total, if not for the older lady in the pub connected to the hotel. She watched me, goggle-eyed, every time I passed.
Alone, almost anonymous, my existence narrowed to one interesting task, I was delirious. I tried not to say so to Chelsy when I phoned her in the evenings, but it was the kind of happiness that’s hard to hide.
I recall one difficult chat. What were we doing? Where were we heading?
She knew I cared about her. But she felt unseen. I am not visual.
She knew how desperate I was to go to war. How could she not forgive my being a bit detached? I was taken aback.
I explained that this was what I needed to do, the thing I’d wanted to do all my life, and I needed to do it with all my heart and soul. If that meant there was less heart and soul left over for anything or anyone else, well…I was sorry.
7.
Pa knew I was living at Knights Hill, knew what I was up to. And he was just down the road at Sandringham on an extended visit. And yet he never dropped in. Giving me space, I guess.
Also, he was still very much in his newlywed phase, even though the wedding was more than two years prior.
Then one day he looked up in the sky and saw a Typhoon aircraft doing low passes along the seawall and he figured it must be me. So he got into his Audi and hurried over.
He found me in the marshes, on a quad bike, talking to a Typhoon some miles off. While I waited for the Typhoon to appear in the sky overhead we had a quick chat. He said he could see how good I was getting at this new job. Above all, he could see how hard I was working at it, and that delighted him.
Pa had always been a worker. He believed in work. Everyone must work, he often said. But his own work was also a kind of religion, because he was furiously trying to save the planet. He’d been fighting for decades to alert people to climate change, never flagging, despite being cruelly mocked by the press as a Henny Penny. Countless times, late at night, Willy and I would find him at his desk amid mountains of bulging blue postbags—his correspondence. More than once we discovered him, face on the desk, fast asleep. We’d shake his shoulders and up he’d bob, a piece of paper stuck to his forehead.
But along with the importance of work, he also believed in the magic of flight. He was a helicopter pilot, after all, so he particularly loved seeing me steer these jets over the marshy flats at ungodly speeds. I mentioned that the good citizens of Wolferton didn’t share his enthusiasm. A ten-thousand-kilo jet roaring just over their tiled roofs didn’t exactly cause jubilation. RAF Marham had received dozens of complaints. Sandringham was supposed to be a no-fly zone.
All complainants were told: Such is war.
I loved seeing Pa, loved feeling his pride, and I felt buoyed by his praise, but I had to get back to work. I was mid-control, couldn’t tell the Typhoon to please hold on a moment.
Yes, yes, darling boy, back to work.
He drove off. As he went down the track I told the Typhoon: New target. Gray Audi. Headed southeast from my position down track. Towards a big silver barn oriented east-west.
The Typhoon tracked Pa, did a low pass straight over him, almost shattering the windows of his Audi.
But ultimately spared him. On my orders.
It went on to blow a silver barn to smithereens.
8.
England was in the semifinal of the 2007 Rugby World Cup. No one had predicted that. No one had believed England was any good this time round, and now they were on the verge of winning it all. Millions of Britons were swept away with rugby fever, including me.
So when I was invited to attend the semifinal, that October, I didn’t hesitate. I said yes immediately.
Bonus: The semifinal was being held that year in Paris—a city I’d never visited.
The World Cup provided me with a driver, and on my first night in the City of Light I asked him if he knew the tunnel where my mother…
I watched his eyes in the rearview, growing large.
He was Irish, with a kindly, open face, and I could easily discern his thoughts: What the feck? I didn’t sign on for this.
The tunnel is called Pont de l’Alma, I told him.
Yes, yes. He knew it.
I want to go through it.
You want to go through the tunnel?
At sixty-five miles per hour—to be precise.
Sixty-five?
Yes.
The exact speed Mummy’s car had supposedly been driving, according to police, at the time of the crash. Not 120 miles per hour, as the press originally reported.
The driver looked over at the passenger seat. Billy the Rock nodded gravely. Let’s do it. Billy added that if the driver ever revealed to another human that we’d asked him to do this, we’d find him and there would be hell to pay.
The driver gave a solemn nod.
Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal, with her boyfriend, that August night. Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel. We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course.
But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it.
As the car entered the tunnel I leaned forward, watched the light change to a kind of watery orange, watched the concrete pillars flicker past. I counted them, counted my heartbeats, and in a few seconds we emerged from the other side.
I sat back. Quietly I said: Is that all of it? It’s…nothing. Just a straight tunnel.
I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel.
No reason anyone should ever die inside it.
The driver and Billy the Rock didn’t answer.
I looked out of the window: Again.
The driver stared at me in the rearview. Again?
Yes. Please.
We went through again.
That’s enough. Thank you.
It had been a very bad idea. I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived. I’d told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn’t really. Deep down, I’d hoped to feel in that tunnel what I’d felt when JLP gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away.
She’s dead, I thought. My God, she’s really gone for good.
I got the closure I was pretending to seek. I got it in spades. And now I’d never be able to get rid of it.
I’d thought driving the tunnel would bring an end, or brief cessation, to the pain, the decade of unrelenting pain. Instead it brought on the start of Pain, Part Deux.
It was close to one o’clock in the morning. The driver dropped me and Billy at a bar, where I drank and drank. Some mates were there, and I drank with them, and tried to pick fights with several. When the pub threw us out, when Billy the Rock escorted me back to the hotel, I tried to pick a fight with him too. I growled at him, swung on him, slapped his head.
He barely reacted. He just frowned like an ultra-patient parent.
I slapped him again. I loved him, but I was determined to hurt him.
He’d seen me like this before. Once, maybe twice. I heard him say to another bodyguard: He’s a handful tonight.
Oh, you want to see a handful? Here you go, here’s a handful.
Somehow Billy and the other bodyguard got me up to my room, poured me onto my bed. But after they left I popped right up again.
I looked around the room. The sun was just coming up. I stepped outside, into the hall. There was a bodyguard on a chair beside the door, but he was sound asleep. I tiptoed past, got into the lift, left the hotel.
Of all the rules in my life, this was considered the most inviolate. Never leave your bodyguards. Never wander off by yourself, anywhere, but especially not in a foreign city.
I walked along the Seine. I squinted at the Champs-Élysées in the distance. I stood next to some big Ferris wheel. I went past little book stalls, past people drinking coffee, eating croissants. I was smoking, keeping my gaze unfocused. I have a dim recollection of a few people recognizing me, and staring, but thankfully this was before the age of smartphones. No one stopped me to take a photo.
Later, after I’d had a sleep, I rang Willy, told him about my night.
None of it came as news to him. Turned out, he’d driven the tunnel too.
He was coming to Paris for the rugby final. We decided to do it together.
Afterwards, we talked about the crash, for the first time ever. We talked about the recent inquest. A joke, we both agreed. The final written report was an insult. Fanciful, riddled with basic factual errors and gaping logical holes. It raised more questions than it answered.
After all these years, we said, and all that money—how?
Above all, the summary conclusion, that Mummy’s driver was drunk and thereby the sole cause of the crash, was convenient and absurd. Even if the man had been drinking, even if he was shit-faced, he wouldn’t have had any trouble navigating that short tunnel.
Unless paps had chased and blinded him.
Why were those paps not more roundly blamed?
Why were they not in jail?
Who sent them? And why were they not in jail?
Why indeed—unless corruption and cover-ups were the order of the day?
We were united on all these points, and also on next steps. We’d issue a statement, jointly call for the inquiry to be reopened. Maybe hold a press conference.
We were talked out of it by the powers that be.
9.
One month later I went to RAF Brize Norton and boarded a C-17. There were dozens of other soldiers on the plane, but I was the only stowaway. With help from Colonel Ed and JLP, I boarded in secret, then crept into an alcove behind the cockpit.
The alcove had bunkbeds for the crew on overnight flights. As the big engines fired, as the plane roared down the runway, I lay down on a bottom bunk, my small rucksack as a pillow. Somewhere below, in the cargo hold, my Bergen was neatly packed with three pairs of camo trousers, three clean T-shirts, one pair of goggles, one air bed, one small notebook, one tube of sun cream. It felt like more than enough. I could honestly say that nothing I needed or wanted in life had been left behind, other than a few pieces of Mummy’s jewelry, and the lock of her hair in the little blue box, and the silver-framed photo of her that used to sit on my desk at Eton, all of which I’d stashed in a safe place. And, of course, my weapons. My 9-mm and SA80A had been surrendered to a stern-faced clerk, who’d locked them in a steel box that also went into the hold. I felt their absence most acutely, since, for the first time in my life, other than that wobbly morning stroll in Paris, I was about to venture forth into the wide world without armed bodyguards.
The flight was eternal. Seven hours? Nine? I can’t say. It felt like a week. I tried to sleep, but my head was too full. I spent most of the time staring. At the upper bunk. At my feet. I listened to the engines, listened to the other soldiers on board. I replayed my life. I thought about Pa and Willy. And Chels.
The papers reported that we’d broken up. (One headline: Hooray Harry’s Dumped.) The distance, the different life goals were too much. It was hard enough maintaining a relationship in the same country, but with me going off to war, it just didn’t seem feasible. Of course, none of this was true. We’d not broken up. She’d given me a touching, tender farewell, and promised to wait for me.
She knew, therefore, to disregard all the other stories in the papers, about how I’d reacted to the breakup. Reportedly, I’d gone on a pub crawl and guzzled a few dozen vodkas before staggering into a waiting car. One paper actually asked the mother of a soldier recently killed in action how she felt about my being publicly intoxicated.
(She was against it.)
If I die in Afghanistan, I thought, at least I’ll never have to see another fake headline, read another shameful lie about myself.
I thought a lot on that flight about dying. What would it mean? Did I care? I tried to picture my funeral. Would it be a state funeral? Private? I tried to imagine the headlines: Bye, Harry.
How would I be remembered by history? For the headlines? Or for who I actually was?
Would Willy walk behind my coffin? Would Grandpa and Pa?
Before I’d shipped out, JLP sat me down, told me I needed to update my will.
My will? Really?
If anything happened, he said, the Palace needed to know what I wanted to be done with my few belongings, and where I wished to be…buried. He asked so plainly, so calmly, as you’d ask somebody where they’d like to have lunch. But that was his gift. The truth was the truth, no sense leaning away from it.
I looked away. I couldn’t really think of a spot where I wanted to spend the hereafter. I couldn’t think of any spot that felt sacred, besides Althorp, maybe, and that was out of the question. So I said: Frogmore Gardens?
It was beautiful, and slightly removed from things. Peaceful.
JLP gave a nod. He’d see to it.
Amid these thoughts and recollections I managed to doze off for a few minutes, and when I opened my eyes we were swooping down to Kandahar Airfield.
Time to put on the body armor. Time to put on the Kevlar.
I waited for everyone else to disembark, then some Special Forces guys appeared in the alcove. They returned my weapons and handed me a vial of morphine, to keep on my person at all times. We were now in a place where pain, injuries, trauma were commonplace. They hurried me off the plane into a four-by-four with blacked windows and dusty seats. We drove to a different part of the base, then hurried into a Portakabin.
Empty. Not a soul.
Where is everybody? Bloody hell, was peace declared while I was in the air?
No, the whole base was out on a mission.
I looked around. Apparently they’d left in the middle of a meal. Tables were covered with half-empty pizza boxes. I tried to remember what I’d eaten on the flight. Nothing. I began shoving cold pizza into my mouth.
I took my in-theater test, one last barrier to entry, one last measure to prove that I knew how to do the job. Shortly after, I climbed into a Chinook and flew about fifty miles to a much smaller outpost. Forward Operating Base Dwyer. Long, unwieldy name for what was little more than a sandcastle made of sandbags.
I was met by a sand-covered soldier who said he’d been ordered to show me around.
Welcome to Dwyer.
Thanks.
I asked how the place got its name.
One of our lads. K-I-A. Vehicle hit a land mine.
The quick tour revealed Dwyer to be even more spartan than it looked from the Chinook. No heat, few lights, not much water. There was plumbing, of a sort, but the pipes were usually clogged or frozen. There was also a building that purported to be a “shower block,” but I was advised: use at your peril.
Basically, my tour guide told me, just give up being clean. Focus instead on staying warm.
It gets that cold here?
He chortled.
Dwyer was home to about fifty soldiers, mostly artillery and Household Cavalry. I met them in twos and threes. They were all sandy-haired, by which I mean their hair was matted with sand. Their faces and necks and eyelashes—also encrusted. They looked like fillets of fish that’d been breadcrumbed before frying.
Within one hour, I did too.
Everyone and everything at Dwyer was either caked with sand or sprinkled with sand or painted the color of sand. And out beyond the sand-colored tents and sandbags and sand walls was an infinite ocean of…sand. Fine, fine sand, like talcum powder. The lads spent much of their day gazing at all that sand. So, after completing my tour, getting my cot and some chow, I did too.
We told ourselves we were scanning for the enemy, and we were, I suppose. But you couldn’t stare at that many grains of sand without also thinking about eternity. All that shifting, swirling, whirling sand, you felt it saying something to you about your minuscule niche in the cosmos. Ashes to ashes. Sand to sand. Even when I retired, settled onto my metal cot, drifted off to sleep, sand was uppermost on my mind. I heard it out there, having whispery conversations with itself. I felt a grain on my tongue. On my eyeball. I dreamed of it.
And when I woke, there was a spoonful of it in my mouth.
10.
At the center of Dwyer was a towering spike, a kind of makeshift Nelson’s Column. Nailed to it were dozens of arrows, pointing every which way, each arrow painted with the name of a place some soldier at Dwyer called home.
Sydney Australia 7223 miles
Glasgow 3654 miles
Bridgwater Somerset 3610 miles
That first morning, walking past the spike, I had a thought. Maybe I should write my own home up there.
Clarence House 3456 miles
That’d get a laugh.
But no. Just as none of us was eager to draw the Taliban’s attention, I was eager not to draw the attention of my fellow squaddies. My main goal was to blend in.
One of the arrows pointed towards “The Cannons,” two enormous 105-mm guns at the back of the non-working shower block. Nearly every day, several times a day, Dwyer fired off those big guns, lobbed massive shells in a smoky parabola towards Taliban positions. The noise made your blood stop, fried your brains. (One day the guns were fired at least a hundred times.) For the rest of my life, I knew, I’d be hearing some vestige of that sound; it would echo forever in some part of my being. I would also never forget, when the guns finally stopped, that immense silence.
11.
Dwyer’s ops room was a box wrapped in desert camo. The floor was thick black plastic made of interlinked pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle. It made a weird noise when you walked across it. The focal point of the room, indeed the whole camp, was the main wall, which featured a giant map of Helmand Province, with pins (yellow, orange, green, blue) representing units of the battle group.
I was greeted by Corporal of Horse Baxter. Older than me, but my coloring. We exchanged a few wry cracks, a rueful smile about involuntary membership in the League of Redheaded Gentlemen. Also, the Balding Brotherhood. Like me, Baxter was fast losing coverage on top.
I asked where he was from.
County Antrim.
Irish, eh?
Sure.
His lilting accent made me think he could be kidded. I gave him a hard time about the Irish, and he returned fire, laughing, but his blue eyes looked unsure. Crikey, I’m taking the piss out of a prince.
We got down to work. He showed me several radios stacked along a desk under the map. He showed me the Rover terminal, a pudgy little laptop with compass points stenciled along the sides. These radios are your ears. This Rover is your eyes. Through them I’d make a picture of the battlefield, then try to control what happened in and above it. In one sense I’d be no different from the air-traffic controllers at Heathrow: I’d spend my time guiding jets to and fro. But often the job wouldn’t even be that glamorous: I’d be a security guard, blearily monitoring feeds from dozens of cameras, mounted on everything from recon aircraft to drones. The only fighting I’d be doing would be against the urge to sleep.
Jump in. Have a seat, Lieutenant Wales.
I cleared my throat, sat down. I watched the Rover. And watched.
Minutes passed. I turned up the volume on the radios. Turned it down.
Baxter chuckled. That’s the job. Welcome to the war.
12.
The Rover had an alternative name, because everything in the Army needed an alternative name.
Kill TV.
As in:
Whatcha doing?
Just watching a bit of Kill TV.
The name was meant to be ironic, I figured. Or else it was just blatantly fake advertising. Because the only thing getting killed was time.
You watched an abandoned compound thought to have been used by the Taliban.
Nothing happened.
You watched a tunnel system suspected to have been used by the Taliban.
Nothing happened.
You watched a sand dune. And another sand dune.
If there’s anything duller than watching paint dry, it’s watching desert…desert. I wondered how Baxter hadn’t gone mad.
So I asked him.
He said that after hours of nothing, there’d be something. The trick was staying alert for that.
If Kill TV was dull, Kill Radio was mad. All the handsets along the desk gave off a constant babble, in a dozen accents, British, American, Dutch, French, to say nothing of the various personalities.
I began trying to match the accents with the call signs. American pilots were Dude. Dutch pilots were Rammit. French were Mirage, or Rage. Brits were Vapor.
Apache helicopters were called Ugly.
My personal call sign was Widow Six Seven.
Baxter told me to grab a handset, say hello. Introduce yourself. When I did, the voices all perked up, turned their attention to me. They were like baby birds demanding to be fed. Their food was information.
Who are you? What’s happening down there? Where am I going?
Besides information, the thing they wanted most often was permission. To enter my air space or to leave it. Rules forbade pilots to pass overhead without assurance that it was safe, that a battle wasn’t raging, that Dwyer wasn’t blasting away its heavy guns. In other words, was it a hot ROZ (restricted operating zone)? Or cold? Everything about the war revolved around this binary question. Hostilities, weather, water, food—hot or cold?
I liked this role, keeper of the ROZ. I liked the idea of working closely with top guns, being the eyes and ears for such highly skilled men and women, their last link to terra firma, their alpha and omega. I was…Earth.
Their need for me, their dependency, created instant bonds. Strange emotions flowed, weird intimacies took shape.
Hey there, Widow Six Seven.
Hey, Dude.
How’s your day?
Quiet so far, Dude.
We were mates instantly. Comrades. You could feel it.
After they checked in with me, I’d hand them over to the FAC in Garmsir, a little river town nearby.
Thanks, Widow Six Seven. Goodnight.
Roger, Dude. Stay safe.
13.
After receiving permission to cross my airspace, a pilot wouldn’t always cruise on through, he’d arrow through, and sometimes his need to know conditions on the ground would be urgent. Every second mattered. Life and death were in my hands. I was calmly seated at a desk, holding a fizzy drink and a biro (Oh. A biro. Wow.) but I was also in the middle of the action. It was exhilarating, the thing I’d trained for, but terrifying. Shortly before my arrival an FAC got one number wrong when reading out the geo coordinates to an American F-15; the result was an errant bomb landing on British forces instead of the enemy. Three soldiers killed, two horribly maimed. So every word and digit I spoke would have consequences. We were “providing support,” that was the phrase used constantly, but I realized how euphemistic it was. No less than the pilots, we were sometimes delivering death, and when it came to death, more so than life, you had to be precise.
I confess: I was happy. This was important work, patriotic work. I was using skills honed in the Dales, and at Sandringham, and all the way back to boyhood. Even to Balmoral. There was a bright line connecting my stalking with Sandy and my work here now. I was a British soldier, on a battlefield, at last, a role for which I’d been preparing all my life.
I was also Widow Six Seven. I’d had plenty of nicknames in my life, but this was the first nickname that felt more like an alias. I could really and truly hide behind it. For the first time I was just a name, a random name, and a random number. No title. And no bodyguard. Is this what other people feel like every day? I savored the normality, wallowed in it, and also considered how far I’d journeyed to find it. Central Afghanistan, the dead of winter, the middle of the night, the midst of a war, while speaking to a man fifteen thousand feet above my head—how abnormal is your life if that’s the first place you ever feel normal?
After every action there would be a lull, which was sometimes harder to deal with psychologically. Boredom was the enemy and we fought it by playing rugby, our ball a heavily taped-up roll of loo paper, or by jogging on the spot. We also did a thousand press-ups, and built primitive weightlifting equipment, taping wooden crates to metal bars. We made punch bags out of duffels. We read books, organized marathon chess matches, slept like cats. I watched grown men log twelve hours a day in bed.
We also ate and ate. Dwyer had a full kitchen. Pasta. Chips. Beans. We were given thirty minutes each week on the sat phone. The phone card was called Paradigm, and it had a code on the back, which you punched into the keypad. Then a robot, a nice-sounding woman, told you how many minutes you had left. Next thing you knew…
Spike, that you?
Chels.
Your old life, down the line. The sound always made you catch your breath. To think of home was never easy, for a complex set of reasons. To hear home was a stab in the chest.
If I didn’t call Chels, I called Pa.
How are you, darling boy?
Not bad. You know.
But he asked me to write rather than call. He loved my letters.
He said he’d much prefer a letter.
14.
At times I worried that I was actually missing out on the real war. Was I perhaps sitting in the war’s waiting room? The real war, I feared, was just down the valley; I could see the thick puffs of smoke, the plumes from explosions, mostly in and around Garmsir. A place of tremendous strategic importance. Critical gateway, river port through which supplies, especially guns, flowed to the Taliban. Plus, an entry point for new fighters. They’d be issued an AK-47, a fistful of bullets, and told to head towards us through their maze of trenches. This was their initiation test, which the Taliban called their “blooding.”
Were Sandy and Tiggy working for the Taliban?
It happened often. A Taliban recruit would pop up, fire at us, and we’d return fire with twenty times the force. Any Taliban recruit who survived that barrage would then be promoted, sent to fight and die in one of the bigger cities, like Gereshk, or Lashkar Gah, which some called Lash Vegas. Most, however, didn’t survive. The Taliban left their bodies to rot. I watched dogs the size of wolves chew many a recruit off the battlefield.
I began pleading with my commanding officers: Get me out of here. A few guys made the same plea, but for different reasons. I was begging to go closer to the front. Send me to Garmsir.
Finally, on Christmas Eve 2007, my request was approved. I was to replace an outgoing FAC at Forward Operating Base Delhi, which was inside an abandoned Garmsir school.
Small gravel courtyard, corrugated tin roof. Someone said the school had been an agricultural university. Someone else said it had been a madrassa. For the moment, however, it was a part of the British Commonwealth. And my new home.
It was also home to a company of Gurkhas.
Recruited from Nepal, from the remotest villages along the foothills of the Himalayas, the Gurkhas had fought in every British war of the last two centuries, and distinguished themselves in each one. They scrapped like tigers, never gave up, and as a result they held a special place in the British Army—and in my heart. I’d been hearing about the Gurkhas since I was a boy: one of the first uniforms I’d ever worn was a Gurkha uniform. At Sandhurst the Gurkhas always played the enemy in military exercises, which always felt a bit ridiculous because they were beloved.
After the exercises a Gurkha would invariably walk up to me and offer me a cup of hot chocolate. They
