I have also noticed over the years how close they were to each other. I don’t believe they’ve had a fight in their lives. These two are true friends.
10
HIS OWN MAN
It was the Queen who, after a conclusive meeting with General Dannatt, had given Harry the news that he was going to Afghanistan. He could not have been more pleased. After a slight period of depression following the cancellation of his Iraq deployment, this was exactly what he wanted to hear. This time the MoD had done its homework and General Dannatt was sure that the deal he had struck with the media leaders would work, that they would honour their part of the compromise deal by not writing or saying anything until he had returned safely home, provided they were allowed access to the Prince in the war zone.
Having packed his kit into his Bergen rucksack, Harry slipped out of the UK on 14 December 2007. At RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, he joined surprised comrades aboard a C-17 transport carrier aircraft for the twelve-hour flight to Afghanistan. This was the real thing so, determined to follow the instructions he had been given, he slipped out of his sleeping bag as the plane approached Kandahar and put on his body armour and helmet in case the aircraft came under attack on landing.
After collecting his ammunition he joined special forces soldiers in a Chinook helicopter headed for what was then Forward Operating Base Dwyer in Helmand Province, the most dangerous place on earth. He had made it to the front line and he had his grandmother’s persistence to thank for it: without Her Majesty’s approval his deployment would never have happened
Even in the theatre of war he could not resist an opportunity to flirt and he chatted up Michelle Tompkins as she piloted a Harrier jet over snow-covered mountains. His commanding officer teased him that if he continued that line of conversation with the first woman he had come across since bidding farewell to Chelsy in London, he’d better get a room.
Talk about the opposite sex – members of which were clearly in short supply from this point on – was the favourite pastime during the limited breaks he and his fellow soldiers got. Girly magazines were passed around and one pilot focused his on-board camera to reveal a picture of a topless model taped to the outside of his aircraft, not knowing that it was an heir to the throne he was entertaining. But then, at that stage, few of the aircrews he communicated with were aware of his identity. To them he was just another voice, albeit, as one said later, ‘rather a plummy one. Although he was obviously trying to tone it down.’
‘It’s just me and him [the pilot] having good banter and obviously when the aircraft comes in you know you’ve got them on task for three hours and yet you’re looking for just one or two [enemy individuals] digging a trench. It can get quite tiring,’ Harry told one interviewer.
If you’re just saying ‘Yep, go to this point’ and putting the radio down and just staring at the screen it sends you insane. So I think it’s good to be relaxed on the net and have a good chat, but when things are pretty hairy then you need to obviously turn on your game face and do the job.
Dave Baxter, with whom he formed a close friendship said, ‘He’s a really down-to-earth person. To be honest I don’t think anyone here thinks of him as third in line to the throne. You just take him at face value.’
But for all the fun and camaraderie, this was real war, a bitter war and there was danger around every corner. A number of men came close to breakdown and Harry was always the first to comfort them: ‘Think of the folks back home,’ he said to one. ‘You will see them again; focus on what a wonderful moment that will be and don’t forget, they’re longing to see you too.’ The same could be said of Harry’s family, who had by now all been let in on the secret the Queen, Philip and Charles had kept to themselves at Sandringham on Christmas Day. His camp frequently came under attack from mortar shells and machine-gun fire. He was under no illusion that mortal danger snaked around every corner as he patrolled the bombed-out streets of Garmsir turning it from a lively community into a ghost town, with those inhabitants who had not fled constantly aware that any friendly contact with the British soldiers could bring the ultimate punishment if the Taliban spies in their midst spotted and reported it.
How he must have missed the chilled cocktails at Boujis when the daytime heat left him parched, for the bottled water specially flown in was strictly rationed and even a prince used to having just about everything he wanted had to make do with his meagre share – one bottle a day. Often the desperate men drank foul-tasting chlorinated water from the local supply, the Prince included. What fresh water could be spared, Harry and his men took to the locals, sharing what they could really have done with themselves. There was as much danger associated with such an action as there was generosity. Any one of those smiling Afghans could have been a suicide bomber. He was taught to watch for tell-tale signs – a man sweating profusely, wearing too many clothes in the heat, walking with leaden feet, or with something protruding from his body – all showed that he was a potential killer.
But the danger and the discomfort are what he had signed up for. Tired of the royal pampering that dominated his early life, he wanted adventure and was getting it in large measure. There were no privileges and he had to stand in line for his weekly thirty minutes’ use of a satellite phone to call home. This was the Harry Wales he had longed to be, not the ‘spoiled toff’ who got waited on hand and foot at home. His mother had said too that she longed for ‘normality’ but would she ever have accepted it to such an extreme? Perhaps serving as a nurse in a field hospital instead of visiting in a smart suit with a Gucci handbag tucked under her arm? No, Harry was his own man and no one – not even desperate Diana – had gone this far to secure the sanity that normality provides. Royals, as Prince Andrew had once said to him, could never be normal: ‘We live in a different world.’ Using the ‘thunder-boxes’ – metal containers to collect bodily waste which when dried out was burned with kerosene to provide some warmth when temperatures plunged at night to ten degrees below freezing – Harry was proving his uncle wrong.
There were times when the lives of his men as well as his own were in grave danger and, as such, it was imperative that Harry kept his wits about him at all times. When the Taliban launched one particularly relentless attack on FOB Delhi, he was ready; having monitored their movements with sophisticated surveillance equipment for the previous forty-eight hours he had the foresight to realise that their movements from bunker to bunker demonstrated preparation for a major attack on his base. He called in an American F-15E fighter plane whose pilot he had become familiar with during previous attacks on the garrison. First he despatched the aircraft to a point where its engines could not be heard by the enemy, who would therefore think they were safe to resume their attack. Alas, they had not allowed for Harry’s careful planning and determined concentration. As they emerged from cover to complete their attack, the Taliban fighters were surprised by the emergence of the lethal American jet Harry had kept waiting in the wings. His action saved many lives and wiped out a number of increasingly skilled enemy fighters. It was not until some time later that Captain Ben Donberg learned the identity of the man who had called him in to carry out such a successful sortie, but the compliments he heaped on the caller were the same as he would have lavished on any soldier who had carried out his work with such proficiency.
Harry repeated military buddy Bill Connor’s sentiments when he said in a subsequent interview:
It’s somewhat like I can imagine the Second World War [Connor had actually said the First World War] was like. They poke their heads up and that’s it. I call the air [aircraft] in and as soon as the air comes in they disappear down holes or into the bunkers. My job is to get air up. They check in on me when they come into the [restricted operation zone] and then I’m responsible for their aircraft making sure they don’t get taken out by the shelling… It’s a piece of piss really.
Whatever he wanted to call it, the Prince was in mortal danger every day of his life during his spell in Afghanistan. He had
two very narrow escapes: once when a drone aircraft spotted a Taliban landmine his convoy was only metres away from striking and on another occasion when the Taliban managed to land a 107mm Chinese-made rocket fifty metres from the spot where he had dug in following a warning only seconds before it exploded. But if he was ever scared, he never showed it. In all his ten weeks in combat he never displayed anger until he was eventually given the information that his recall was due to a leak by the Australian women’s magazine and a crazy blogger who had let the world know of his presence – and that included the Taliban, who were now certain to do all they could to catch and kill him. ‘He said you were a bitch and that Drudge was a bastard,’ wrote one sat next to him on the homeward flight to the magazine editor. He never got a reply.
General Dannatt had called the Queen and told her, ‘It’s time to pull him out.’ She agreed: ‘Please bring him home safely.’ Within minutes the order had been conveyed to Helmand.
Harry had his suspicions about the recall when he heard of the decision by chance as he monitored radio conversations that did not mention him by name but seemed to have been about him. His fears were confirmed when the six SAS guardian angels arrived from Helmand in the Chinook that had been kept on standby for just such an emergency. ‘Sir’, as he was called (such a welcome change from ‘Your Royal Highness’) was given less than an hour to pack his possessions and hand over his high-tech equipment to another JTAC. At that point still unaware of the reason for his recall, he was flown to the coalition airbase on the outskirts of Kandahar and transferred to an RAF TriStar passenger jet for the journey back to RAF Brize Norton where it had all started just ten weeks earlier. He was not given the details until the aircraft was safely out of Afghan airspace and even then his thoughts were with two seriously injured soldiers lying close to him, both sedated. ‘Those are the heroes, not me,’ he said. ‘The ones who have lost limbs and will never be able to live a normal life again.’ After a brief stop at Birmingham airport to take the badly injured to Selly Oak military hospital, the TriStar touched down at Brize Norton. There were no smiles on their faces when Charles and William welcomed him home. ‘Got your Christmas card the other day,’ he said to his father. Charles merely nodded. Harry was sullen as he stepped into the car for the short journey home to Highgrove, where he stayed in the bath for more than an hour before feeling able to interact with them.
It was from Highgrove that he telephoned Chelsy and told her he was on his way to Africa; would she be there for him? Would she! And then he was back in the air again, this time headed for Botswana. There, he and Chelsy picked up a rickety houseboat which took them along the Okavango Delta and the now happy pair set off into the sunset, cooking their own meals as they went rather than revert to the kind of royal service he at least was used to. The romance was back on; for a few days Helmand was a place in the past. They could not have been in a better setting: the area Chelsy had chosen spans more than 10,000 square miles of forests, flood plains and magical deserted islands. No Taliban in sight. It was a romance the people at the palace were beginning to take seriously: this was a woman who could comfort a much-depressed and angry prince. It had not escaped their attention that he was calling her ‘wifey’ and she him ‘hubby’.
Back home the third in line to the throne (at the time of writing) had been pilloried as a playboy who brawled with photographers after over-indulging in nightclubs and who chose to display himself in a Nazi uniform at a costume party, but he had returned from the Afghanistan front line as a hero, although he hated the description. WHEN HARRY MET TALI trumpeted the Daily Star, one of the tabloids that had made the most they could out of any previous misdemeanours. Like the men who served with him, he had risked his life in head-on clashes with the enemy; his behaviour had been faultless throughout and the British media were united in their praise. Now it was time to live up to the title he had been born with and he began to carry out official engagements, winning hearts in the process just as his mother had done.
Back from Africa, and after taking Chelsy to his cousin Peter Phillips’s wedding to Autumn Kelly – where she met the Queen for the first time – a mellowed prince travelled to Wales for a full day of official engagements. It was not the kind of work he wanted to do and he would certainly have preferred to be back with his regiment in Afghanistan, but no one would have guessed it from his friendly demeanour. For his first port of call he chose Cathays High School in Cardiff, which had raised thousands of pounds to help buy equipment and a herd of cows at £500 each to provide milk for the pupils at Molapo High School in Lesotho.
When the pupils lined up he picked out twelve-year-old red-haired Matthew Taylor to chat to. Matthew revealed afterwards: ‘He said to me, “I’m ginger – gingers love gingers.”’ Not an unusual remark for a man who had always been teased about the colour of his hair and could empathise with others who might have suffered similarly.
He went on to meet staff and patients at a children’s hospital and, as the day went on, he clearly warmed to royal duty, although he had made it clear when he started his army career that he did not envy his brother having to take it on as a full-time job one day. In the evening he was joined by his friend Prince Seeiso at what was billed as a Lesotho Links Conference.
‘I can’t wait to get back to your country,’ he told Seeiso. He didn’t have long to wait: less than a fortnight later he was once again Africa-bound and this time he took his brother with him to witness the work he had started with the poor and the sick in Lesotho through Sentebale, the charity he had set up in both their names (he was already patron of three UK-based charities: Dolen Cymru, which promotes activities that links health organisations in schools and villages in Wales; MapAction, which employs a team of skilled volunteers to monitor humanitarian disasters worldwide; and WellChild, which is dedicated to the needs of sick children).
Although it was serious business, fun was not excluded on the princes’ visit: one night Harry, having sampled the local rum, persuaded William to dance with him and William rarely refuses any request from his younger brother to let himself go. Harry encourages William to take risks, even engaging in some very non-royal banter in public: ‘But the banter gets a lot more fruity when we’re in private,’ admits William.
Harry was now back in the UK and ready to embark on the next stage of his military career. The news that he wished to follow his brother, father and uncle in flying military helicopters was revealed in October 2008 as Harry was made an honorary Air Commandant at RAF Honington. After passing the initial aptitude test, he undertook a month-long course and having passed that he proceeded to full flight training early in 2009.
He was based for a while at the Defence Helicopter School at RAF Shawbury on the Welsh borders where, coincidentally, William had also been sent after his training on fixed-wing aircraft. For several months the brothers shared a cottage close to the base. ‘For the first time and the last time, I can assure you of that,’ Harry said when they held a press conference. Harry, it appeared, had been constantly nagged by his brother for neglecting his clearing-up duties, although he did do most of the cooking. William also light-heartedly complained that he was kept awake at night by Harry’s snoring – a habit he seemed to have picked up from their father since Diana told him as a small boy that that was the reason she and Charles slept in separate rooms. At the same media gathering Harry also took great delight in pointing out that William was losing his hair: ‘That’s pretty rich coming from a ginger,’ William retorted. It was all in good fun and clear to those assembled that no offence was intended and the brothers remained the very best of friends.
Their special brand of humour led to the discovery of their mobile phones being bugged. William once left a jokey message on Harry’s cell phone using a high-pitched voice and a South African accent to pretend to be Chelsy giving him hell for visiting a lap-dancing club. The story appeared in reporter Clive Goodman’s column in the News of the World. That, and the reporting of other messages left on their phones,
convinced them that their messages were being hacked (Goodman subsequently went to prison for the offence) and the Royal Protection Service was informed. Because the messages also gave details of their movements, the police called on the services of the anti-terrorism squad who quickly established that their phones were being hacked and eventually led to the newspaper – the biggest-selling in the world – being closed down by its severely embarrassed owner, the outspoken Rupert Murdoch. The leak had been sealed and Harry was soon able to send his brother messages again without fear of them being published in a downmarket tabloid. But it was an uncomfortable time for all concerned, ‘especially because Harry was known to leave intimate details of his love life on trusted friends’ phones’, according to a member of the royal household. Diana had long been of the opinion that her calls were bugged and had adopted the codename ‘Julia’ as well as, none too artfully, encoding ‘Highgrove’ as ‘Low Wood’. It fooled no one at GCHQ, which monitored and recorded all her telephone conversations as part of its operation to guard national safety.
Harry Page 17
