Harry Read online

  There was probably more shooting going on at Sandringham on Boxing Day than in and around FOB Delhi. Following a sumptuous breakfast the royal party ventured out on to the estate where the men shot pheasants and the women – including the Queen – picked up the dead birds. It was yet another wet day: ‘Bloody rain,’ Prince Philip was heard to grumble. They could have done with some of it in Helmand Province where the shortage of water was always a problem.

  Unlike most of the similar bases, FOB Delhi did have the luxury of running water, provided by a tapped well which somehow managed to feed rustic outdoor showers although, because the water was still frozen, use of it was forbidden before 11 a.m. each day. Harry was to admit later that he hadn’t had a shower for four days or washed his clothes (including his underpants, he pointed out) for a week. He never lost sight of the fact that his home was no longer a palace with servants attending to every whim. Lance-Corporal Frankie O’Leary, a 21-year-old from Lewisham in south London, recalls:

  He’s one of those officers you can talk to, he’s laid back and chilled out. Once a job needs doing he doesn’t shout and scream at you, he just asks you to do it. It just makes you want to work for the man so you get the job done. That’s the way he worked.

  However, I noticed he had a nasty habit of leaving something just outside the bivvy [tent] when he got into his bed at night time and he would call someone over to say ‘Can you pass me that?’ But he always added ‘please’.

  Bill Connor, who is a lawyer and has since returned to practice in South Carolina, recalls the social side of his days alongside Harry in the war-ravaged territory:

  He talked to me about London, the pubs he liked going to, his girlfriend and funny moments during his training or with his platoon. He was very proud of his Regiment, the Household Cavalry, and specifically his company. The Blues and Royals have hundreds of years of lineage and he wanted to uphold the traditions he felt were eroding. Like most junior officers Harry had his opinions on what his superiors could be doing differently.

  We stayed off tabloid issues and rumours relating to the Royal Family. There was plenty of good-natured banter going on: once when we were discussing nationalities and Harry had said something, the company commander of the Gurkhas – a normally soft-spoken, intellectual English major, as I recall – yelled out to him, ‘Shut up, you’re a German anyway.’ Harry took it in good part, in fact he laughed.

  As indeed he should have: had the Queen’s grandfather, King George V, not changed the family name to Windsor he would be Harry Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

  What he did not talk about was how troubled his romance was. For three years Harry had been seeing Chelsy Davy, the daughter of wealthy South African safari operator Charles Davy. He had met the feisty blonde, just a year younger than him, when he was working on a farm in Zimbabwe during his double gap year after leaving Eton. When their relationship ran into trouble because of the 6,000-mile gap between their homes, Chelsy agreed to move to the UK and enrolled on a law course at Leeds University.

  Although barely 200 miles from London, the Yorkshire city might have been a continent away for all the good it did their romance. In two months, she complained, Harry ventured north to see her just twice and on the weekend she celebrated her twenty-second birthday, he chose to go to France to cheer on England in their Rugby World Cup semi-final. One graduate told a newspaper reporter that she had had difficulty making genuine friends and, used to the better things in life, was not impressed by the digs she shared with three others in a shabby red-brick terrace house where old mattresses were stacked in neighbouring gardens. Just eight weeks into the course and shortly before Harry left for Afghanistan, Chelsy’s talkative fellow student reported, she had packed her bags declaring she could not stand the bitterly cold northern weather and was going home to Cape Town. It was said to have led to yet another blazing row with her royal beau. A war zone, Harry had decided however, was no place to display a broken heart.

  As forward air controller, Harry’s job in no man’s land was to call in air support to bomb the Taliban attempting to attack forward positions. He had the momentous task of preventing friendly fire deaths as well as setting coordinates for the bomb drops that were to kill thirty members of the Taliban. On New Year’s Eve – as the Bishop of Norwich, the Rt Revd Graham Jones, was chastising his royal congregation at St Mary Magdalene, during his twelve-minute sermon (he was allowed not a minute longer), about the ecological extravagance of Christmas lights – three 500lb bombs were dropped on Taliban bunkers by two US F15 jets, the first on Harry’s say-so. The pilots Harry communicated with had no idea that the man they spoke to for hours each day was in fact the son of the heir to the British throne. Though news of the activity was relayed back to his seniors in London, his father was not informed; Charles was already north of the border preparing to celebrate Hogmanay with Camilla at his Scottish home, Birkhall, and had no great desire to know details of the war his son was fighting.

  Passionate about his role in the war, he was frequently spotted by Connor studying air-support books ‘even at meal times’. But he did not spend his entire period of service in Helmand poring over books or his laptop (watching a programme known as Kill TV). On New Year’s Day he fired his first shots in combat from JTAC Hill, pumping rounds from a .50 machine gun in the direction of around twenty Taliban who had been spotted approaching the British position. A shredded piece of sackcloth hanging in front of him provided the only cover.

  Would men have died as the result of his machine-gun fire? ‘It was extremely difficult to confirm Taliban “kills”,’ says Connor.

  We knew we were killing and wounding Taliban, usually at a distance of 0.5 to 1 kilometre away. However, we didn’t walk up and see those we killed. We did see some places where the Taliban had not yet retrieved their dead but we could not go there. I say this because I am sure Harry and his men killed/wounded Taliban, but it would be extremely unlikely to have been able to confirm how many were killed.

  Although during interviews at the time he was to remain tight-lipped about killing Taliban fighters, during his second tour of Afghanistan he made no bones about it: ‘You do what you have to do – what’s necessary to save your own guys. If you need to drop a bomb – worst-case scenario – then you will, but that’s just the way it is. It’s not nice to drop bombs. But, to save lives, that’s what happens.’

  His comrade-in-arms Bill Connor recounts his first experience of potentially fatal contact with the enemy:

  I can’t speak for all the soldiers I commanded, and I’m sure they had varying emotions. Though I had been on prior operational deployments before Afghanistan, I didn’t have to deal with the ‘killing’ aspect of war until then. I wasn’t sure how I’d react when I had to point my weapon with the intent to kill another human being. However, in my first major firefight (in Kandahar, before I went to Helmand) I remember the surreal feeling of being shot at when my small convoy was ambushed. I remember thinking, ‘They’re trying to kill me, and this may be my last day on earth.’ That thought was extremely brief, because my training kicked in immediately and I gave orders directing fire at those who were attacking us.

  Connor describes the fatal act in these chilling words, which perhaps offers a parallel of Harry’s own feelings when confronted with a similar situation:

  When I saw some of them killed in the fight … I honestly didn’t have any guilt as they were trying to kill all of us. Harry never showed any emotions when he was doing his job. Part of war is suppressing emotions and he showed everyone he could do that… The bigger problem with guilt comes with those fights – and thank God we were not in them – in which the enemy used civilians as shields. I can imagine the times a soldier may have done everything ‘right’ by the rules of engagement and yet accidentally killed a civilian. Those would be the times someone would have a hard time putting the kill behind them. Again, through God’s grace, I did not have to deal with any of those types of kills and, to the best of my knowledge, neither did Harry
.

  A serving soldier who was there with Harry puts it more bluntly: ‘I don’t believe he would have lost a moment’s sleep over it. He’s a professional, this is war and these men were coming to kill us. He used that gun in exactly the manner intended.’ Harry, who handed his camera to a Gurkha soldier to film his introduction to live action, simply said: ‘They poke their heads up and that’s it.’

  To think, just a few weeks earlier, he had been questioned by the police about the shooting of two birds of prey – a pair of rare hen harriers – on the Sandringham estate, an incident which made it necessary for the Crown Prosecution Service to announce later that it had found insufficient evidence to bring criminal proceedings against him.

  In the village of Garmsir, Harry was back in the line of enemy fire again as he took part in routine patrols of the deserted, bombed-out streets just 500 yards from Taliban bunkers, nodding at locals as he walked through what had once been a busy bazaar: ‘[The locals] haven’t a clue who I am, they wouldn’t know,’ he said, adding ‘but I’m still a little bit conscious not to show my face too much.’

  During long shifts in the battle group operating room he shared jokes and good-natured banter with a fellow redhead, Corporal Dave Baxter. ‘He fixed my radio so he’s a good guy to have on board despite he being ginger and me Irish.’ Harry overheard the comment and joked, ‘It’s a lethal mix.’

  Happy to be ‘just one of the boys’, Harry did much to boost his comrades’ morale. Each day, after their pre-packed breakfast packs (while at Sandringham, meanwhile, they feasted on kedgeree), he organised a football kickabout using toilet roll wrapped in black gaffer tape as the ball. And when his unit found an old motorcycle in the desert during one patrol, he jumped on it and took it for a spluttering ride calling out, ‘No brakes, no brakes.’

  And despite the tension of ever-present danger he never complained – certainly not about being absent from home during the festive season: ‘What am I missing the most?’ he said in reply to one questioner,

  Nothing really. I honestly don’t know what I miss at all: music, we’ve got music, we’ve got light, we’ve got food, we’ve got non-alcoholic drink. No, I don’t miss booze. It’s nice just to be here with all the guys and just mucking about as one of the lads.

  It’s good fun to be with just a normal bunch of guys, listening to their problems, listening to what they think. And especially getting through every day, it’s not painful to be here, but you are doing a job and to be with such fantastic people, the Gurkhas and the guys I’m sharing a room with, makes it all worthwhile. It’s very nice to be a normal person for once.

  He used some of the limited telephone allowance to call his grandmother, reassuring her of his safety despite the acute danger he and the fluid contingent of Royal Artillery soldiers he shared his quarters with were in. Other precious minutes were used talking to Chelsy, for whom he pined despite cooling off their relationship and his present location in the Afghan desert. It was hard to get mail to him but when one letter arrived he was particularly thrilled: it was from his brother. In it, William told him that their mother would have been ‘so proud’ of him. A Christmas card from his father did not arrive until early February – supplies had to take priority over mailbags and even the heir to the throne had no way of getting around that one.

  His superiors’ foremost concern was not that he would stop a bullet but that he might be captured. There could be no greater prize for the enemy than having not Harry Wales but His Royal Highness the Prince Henry Charles Albert David Windsor in their hands. Harry had some idea what to expect if the Afghans took him. Six years earlier, at the age of seventeen, he had volunteered to be the hostage when the Eton College Combined Cadet Force conducted an escape and evasion exercise. He had been ‘captured’ by five regular soldiers of the Royal Green Jackets, dressed as Taliban fighters complete with Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, and taken to a barn in the Thames-side hamlet of Boveney. While other schoolboy cadets attempted to find and rescue him, he was hooded and submitted to twelve hours of intense interrogation and mind games. His captors moved him around to disorientate him, forced him to stand for long periods leaning on his finger tips against a wall, and made him kneel before them. While they shouted incessantly at him, ‘mentally beating him to the ground’, Harry would tell them only his name, date and place of birth. The rescue party was unsuccessful and he was released at 5 a.m. the next day.

  The exercise prepared him for the cruel reality of capture, especially at the hands of al Qaeda, giving the young royal a small taste of what could lie ahead…

  2nd Lieutenant Wales and his new friend Major Bill Connor were briefly parted early in January but reunited the following month for an operation in northern Helmand. ‘The operations in northern Helmand, in between Musa Qala and the Kajaki Dam, were a different type of danger from Garmsir,’ said Connor.

  In these operations the UK forces [to which Harry was attached] were given the mission of isolating various small villages. The US forces [Bill was the senior American] had the mission of clearing the villages of Taliban. It’s quite dangerous going compound to compound to clear Taliban. I recall that in the first compound we entered, an enemy fighter sprayed his AK-47 at us. Can’t believe no one in our small group was hit. I can recall my heart racing as we cleared the other rooms while keeping watch over the hole that the Taliban fighter had crawled back into. We threw a grenade in the hole so I assume he was killed.

  The sheer danger of this operation is emphasised further by Harry’s American friend:

  As I said, Prince Harry was with the UK forces with the mission of calling in air strikes and artillery. Considering all the restrictions due to the fact we were clearing Taliban from an Afghan village, he did an outstanding job. I remember, after the first day of fighting, he and I met up and he seemed pumped about the fact that we were taking the fight to the Taliban. His conversation led me to believe he wished he could join the Americans going through [all] the villages. Like me, Harry hadn’t taken a shower in a week or more and had the dirty combat look. Harry was around Musa Qala in January 2008 and Taliban were still all over northern Helmand. Additionally during the fighting in the karez water system Harry was under constant threat of ambush as he moved from place to place.

  By then, however, Harry had become a victim of his celebrity. He was later to discover that an Australian women’s magazine, New Idea, had broken an agreed embargo and leaked news of his Afghan posting on its website. Harry was not told but his SAS guardian angels were alerted to the increased danger to which the celebrity magazine had exposed him. Miraculously, the news went ignored by the rest of the world’s media (even CNN, not a party to the media agreement, knew he was there but suppressed the story after a call from the Palace press office) until it was picked up by one Matt Drudge and posted on his widely read news aggregate website, the Drudge Report. Drudge, a former shop assistant and the only child of Reform Jewish Democrats (his mother worked for Ted Kennedy) had previously undergone psychiatric treatment. He claimed to have been the man who broke the story of President Clinton’s scandalous association with Monica Lewinsky, but he lacked both education and media experience, boasting that he had failed his bar mitzvah and achieved such a feeble high school graduation result that he reckoned it qualified him for ‘no more than a post at 7-Eleven’. As a result of Drudge’s website post, the Prince was recalled to Britain.

  In general, Harry had a reasonable relationship with the media. He remembers being in his parents’ limousine and hearing his father chastise his mother for waving to ‘friendly’ journalist James Whitaker as their car passed the ever-present bunch of media men. ‘Oh, it’s OK,’ she said, ‘James is friendly to us,’ to which Charles replied sarcastically (according to royal protection officer Ken Wharfe, who was also in the car), ‘That’s all right then. At least they remind people we still exist.’

  When Harry found out that his recall was down to Drudge’s disclosure, he was furious. ‘He was p****d off when
he heard the [expletive deleted] Australian magazine had blown his cover on its pathetic website,’ says one who sat next to him on the plane home.

  It had put not just him but those of us around him in even greater danger than we already were. Then, when this man Drudge – ‘Drudge with a Grudge’ Harry called him – exploited a confidence which the rest [of the world’s media] respected, we then saw that Harry had a temper to match his red hair. He’d kept his cool throughout but at this moment things went flying. And we understood it. He’d been doing such a great job and getting tremendous satisfaction from doing it.

  To be honest, though, by the time this prat had blown his cover, hundreds of people already knew Harry was out there – he’d even done television interviews to be shown after he’d finished his tour.

  Jon Snow touched on this when he declared on his blog:

  I never thought I’d find myself saying Thank God for Drudge. The infamous US blogger has broken the best-kept editorial secret of recent times. One wonders whether viewers, readers and listeners will ever want to trust media bosses again.

  Military bosses, however, do not like being disobeyed – even if it is an agreement with civilians rather than an order given to their soldiers. As Harry was being flown home the army’s Chief of General Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, said in a somewhat reserved statement:

  I am very disappointed that foreign websites have decided to run this story without consulting us. This is in stark contrast to the highly responsible attitude that the whole of the UK print and broadcast media, along with a small number of overseas outlets, who have entered into an understanding with us over the coverage of Prince Harry on operations.