Prince Harry

by Penny Junor

  It was the first time Harry had met the boys. “We were all prim and proper,” says Jaco, “and Harry just said, ‘Guys, relax; relax around me,’ and he started telling jokes and we laughed and he just made us feel easy. David was, ‘Come on boys, have fun, tickle him on the ear, or grab his bum, and all of us were standing there thinking, what’s this guy on about?’ Harry’s face in black and white on the cover of the May issue was the bestselling copy of GQ in 2011, even outselling the boy band, One Direction. As the editor Dylan Jones, whose idea it had been to use Bailey, said, “I think it’s fair to say that Harry is his own one-man boy band. According to music industry lore, in order to succeed in the marketplace, a boy band needs a cute one, a funny one, a huggable one and a difficult one.”

  At a second press conference in January, it was announced that Harry was going to join the expedition for part of the way. “His brother’s wedding was the elephant in the room,” says Ed. “They wanted him back at least two weeks before, so we had to lift him off the ice after four days. He was disappointed. I think he would have given his eyeteeth to have walked with us to the Pole, but he has so many lives he has to live. But the one thing he said to me was he had always been worried that if he walked to the Pole the story would have been about him and not the wounded, and he felt that the story was about the four guys getting there.”

  The party flew into the Russian base, Svalbard, where they were held up for three days by bad weather, and were then helicoptered to their starting place. From there they skied 160 miles across difficult and dangerous terrain, dragging pulks—or sledges—packed with tents, food, cooking equipment, and everything else they needed for five weeks on the ice. There are pressure ridges that can be three or four meters high, and treacherous narrow linear cracks in the ice known as leads, where polar bears often hunt. “You come across leads, which are steaming and jet black because no light gets down there,” says Alexis, “so you’re looking at this fathomless, bottomless ocean which is at least four miles deep, and you have to work out ways to get across that, either ski a long way round it or swim across it, so at least that’s something that breaks up the monotony. Or you get pressure ridges where, instead of it being pulled apart, two plates get pushed together; it’s like a mini mountain range formed in a day, and the only way over that is to climb over and to drag all your stuff with you. It can be very boring when you wake up in the morning and look out and you’ve got a day’s worth of this rubble to get through, and frustrating if you’re a wounded serviceman with one leg and you fall over for the tenth time on ice that’s as hard as concrete, that’s no fun at all. And a couple of the guys, how they didn’t come back more damaged than they were when they set out is incredible.”

  “On the ice, Harry was bloody good; he worked hard,” says Ed. “He is no more and no less than one of the team. There isn’t time for airs and graces from anyone—not that there would ever be any from Harry. If you need something doing quickly, you do it quickly and you say it to him how you’d say it to anyone else. You could point and F and blind [swear], and he reacted brilliantly to that. There wasn’t even a heartbeat missed. There could be a threat of the ice opening up and you’ve got to do things quickly and soldiers being soldiers, the language gets quite blue. He was the eighth team member; the fact that he was at that time third in line to the throne was completely irrelevant—because then we were doing our job.

  “When we’re back in front of the media, the fact that he’s third in line to the throne is key and he was patron of the expedition, but out there we had the job to do which was getting from A to B safely and he fitted into that like a hand into a glove. He used to slightly, not take the piss, but he used to call me ‘Boss’ when I was saying we’ve got to do this. These sledges weighed eighty, ninety or a hundred kilos, they were bloody heavy, and when you’re getting them over broken rubble you take your skis off and it takes two of you to carry them over, and if a bloke with one leg is stuck there, I turn round to Harry and say, ‘H, you nip back and help him, and I’ll go and do this,’ and he’s off, he’s doing it. We only had him for four days on the ice and we had no close protection; they were sitting at the helicopter base but we had telephones—and guns in case polar bears come and had a munch—and if it had all gone tits-up they were on the helicopter.

  “There’s a very clear hierarchy on the ice with the guide as number one, and what he says goes, and there were one or two occasions when Inge turned round and was firm because things were getting a little bit hairy, as they do. We went through some very soft ice and there was water and Harry started sinking down a little bit, the back of his skis started going down, and there isn’t the time for the niceties—‘Oooh look, you’re beginning to slide down into the Arctic Ocean which is four kilometers deep and quite cold and if you go in there you’ll die.’ Things start happening pretty bloody quickly and Harry appreciated that they needed to happen pretty quickly so he took and takes orders very well because he got it. There’s not much different about him when you take out the Prince.

  “We missed him a lot when he left, not just as a teammate and as a friend but as a capable pair of hands too,” says Martin Hewitt, who had thirteen major operations in two years, the first of which saved his life. “When two of your team members are missing arms, that extra pair of hands comes in handy crossing a lot of the obstacles, the pressure ridges, and he’d get stuck in, he didn’t need any prompting. He was just one of the boys, one of the team, which was difficult for him because we’d been training as a team together for almost a year before he came in. So he had to insert himself into a group at fairly short notice, but it was a seamless transition because he’s very down to earth, very likable, easy to get on with—and he gets it. He’s a military officer, he’s spent time on tour, he’s spent plenty of time with the soldiers and with the officer core, so there’s a lot of common ground there, despite coming from very different backgrounds, very different lives.”

  “He loves being with those guys,” says Alexis. “Away from the cameras, they can be a bunch of guys together, soldiers who have trained and worked together. Bringing the publicity is obviously important, but being with the guys means more to him. You can just see it. It’s not ‘Sir,’ it’s not ‘Prince,’ or anything like that. It’s ‘H’ or “Hazza,’ or whatever nicknames they’ve got for each other and they all take the piss out of each other genuinely, and I know that several of them text with Harry regularly, send each other pictures that shouldn’t be sent; they get on, they have phone calls and all the rest of it.”

  “Prince Harry was never, ever shy of helping,” says Jaco. “If we were struggling over a ridge he would ski up and try to pull the pulk over. If you fell down he would reach up and hold your hand. There’s not a lazy hair on his body. He was such a great asset.” He was much loved by everyone—not least for surprising them all with a giant ice-cream cake that he had secretly bought in Svalbard and dragged across the ice hidden in his pulk. “It was about forty or fifty centimeters across and every night he would come around and give us a slice of cake for dessert.”

  They reached the Pole three days ahead of schedule, and Harry’s Arctic Heroes, a two-part documentary shown on BBC 1, did them proud. “I’m absolutely thrilled that the guys have made it—what an awesome achievement,” said Harry, who phoned them via satellite with his congratulations. “They should be incredibly proud of making this world record, as we are proud of them. I took part in only a small section of the trek, but know full well how physically demanding it was. The spirit and determination of these lads is second to none. They are true role models.” Then joked that they were “showing off” by arriving early.

  Bryn Parry remembers some of the team coming to talk to wounded colleagues at the Help for Heroes recovery center at Tedworth. “It was inspirational stuff,” he says. “I was sitting behind Toby. Toby is tetraplegic, shot through the neck, can’t move anything below his chin, so he’s on a breathing tube, twelve breaths a minute, he has two full-time ca
rers, he comes to us periodically to get away from just being cared for the whole time, and a bit of banter, and to be part of a wider community. He’s in his early thirties, an amazing man, absolutely amazing. And we’ve funded him, we’ve helped him buy a house, got him a computer that he works from a mouse on his head. The WWTW boys said, ‘We’ve walked to the North Pole and next year we’re going to climb up Everest,’ and I was sitting behind Toby thinking, I wonder how this sounds to someone who can’t even brush his teeth on his own to hear other people talking about climbing Everest, that’s quite tough. And what saved the evening was one of them said, ‘We understand that not everybody can climb Everest; but everybody has an Everest to climb.’

  “That was fantastic and I have quoted it so many times because there are some people who find it very hard to get through the day, let alone find a reason to live. There are other levels of success. We’ve got a girl called Charmaine who’s got crushed hips but her Everest has been in writing a poem, despite being profoundly dyspraxic and dyslexic. For her, seeing that poem describing her emotions, mounted on a canvas, was her achievement, and that was the first stage on her road to recovery.”

  TOP GUN

  During Harry’s time at Army Air Corps Middle Wallop, learning to fly Apaches, he made a lot of unexpected friends. Someone who knows the base well says that when he first arrived, the locals were quite belligerent. They were resentful that “a bloody royal” was being sent to them “and the mood was, sod this for a game of soldiers, there’s no way we’re giving him special treatment. By the time he had gone through the system two years later, there was not a single person that I heard or encountered who had anything to say about him that was less than bordering on worship. They said he was one of the best people they had ever taught in terms of his dedication and application and determination to get through, which is not something you would necessarily have associated with Harry up to that point in his life.

  “It’s a big deal to qualify as an Apache pilot; that is the best of the best, like the old Top Gun cliché; it’s the most sophisticated piece of kit the Army has. You don’t get to fly one unless you really can do the business and Harry really, really impressed them. But, more than that, all the cleaning staff loved him, all the waiters in the mess loved him. He was really startlingly universally popular and the Commander, as well as thinking he was a very good pilot, said to me many times that actually, he was the natural leader in the pack and people really deferred to him and it had nothing to do with his being a royal.”

  Much the same could be said of the impression he made at Wattisham Airfield, where he went at the beginning of 2011. Having spent eight months learning to fly the aircraft, a lot of it in a simulator, he moved to the largest operational Army Air Corps base in the UK, where he began to learn how to use the Apache in battle. He joined 662 Squadron of 3 Regiment, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Tom de la Rue, and Wattisham, an unprepossessing military base in the middle of the Suffolk countryside, became home, on and off, for the next two years.

  The Apache is a lethal machine. It has three different weapons systems: a thirty-millimeter cannon, which, according to Tom de la Rue, is “the workhorse in Afghanistan,” which fires 625 rounds a minute; two sorts of rockets—one with a small explosive payload and charge, the other firing tungsten steel darts which, usefully, don’t make a bang; and Hellfire air-to-surface missiles, which home in on a laser beam that is directed onto the target and has to remain on target until the missile impacts. The missiles and the rockets can both be used out to about eight kilometers, which is also the approximate radar range of the aircraft’s Longbow Fire Control Radar. The cannon is usually used at much closer range. Learning to use those weapons and, crucially, learning the rules about when to use them in combat, takes another eight months of intensive training.

  “The really important thing about this aircraft and what we do with it,” he says, “is that, although it is a tremendous weapons platform and has incredible capability, we use it as an absolute last resort and so our aircrews are trained to exercise restraint over and above anything else.”

  There are two cockpits in an Apache, one in front of the other, with a blast shield between them, which means, unusually for an aircraft, that the two-man crew can’t see each other. They rely entirely on voice to communicate; they are in constant radio contact with several other voices too during a mission. The pilot sits in the back, the co-pilot gunner, who is usually the more experienced of the two, sits in the front and is in control of the weapons, but can also fly the aircraft if necessary. Harry was trained for the front seat. It’s a cramped cockpit, which he would sit in for up to ten hours a day, with three computer screens feeding him information, and countless switches—each with a different texture so the operator can tell them apart by touch in the dark. On either side of the central screen are two optical relay tube (ORT) grips, and most of the real business is done with very quick thumb movements and two triggers—one to fire the laser, the other to fire the weapons.

  “Pilots and co-pilot gunners both wear helmet-mounted display monocles,” explains Tom, “which project all the information they need to fly or fight the aircraft, directly into their right eyes, in the form of digital information with an infra-red or television video underlay from the sights. It’s effectively a monocular black-and-white display with no depth perception and, importantly, the infra-red display isn’t a picture per se, it’s a dynamic image reflecting a scene’s heat differential. So the weather and external environmental conditions have a significant impact upon what can or cannot be seen.” In addition, the sights and weapons can be linked to the gunner’s helmet, so whichever way he turns his head, the sights and weapons can follow. “The most useful weapon to link to your helmet is the cannon, which traverses allowing the gunner to literally look at a target and shoot.”

  “You’ve got to get the right person,” says David Meyer, who chose Harry. “But once you’ve done that, it’s a very intuitive aircraft, in that you’re part of that computer generation who’s not afraid to press buttons and go backwards and all that sort of stuff and can assimilate information quickly. It’s absolutely purpose-built from the wheels up to the cockpit seat to the fact that everything’s at your fingertips, you don’t have to lean back or look behind you or down between your toes, it’s all in front of you.”

  “There are some things that can be done in a pretty automated fashion, but actually we take great pride in having the human mind in the loop to make sure that the right judgments are being made,” says Tom de la Rue. “We are paying our pilots to lead in battle but also to display the ability to make very, very fine judgments very quickly, which is tremendously important, particularly in a counter-insurgency campaign [like Afghanistan], where the enemy is unknown and is mixed in with the population. If soldiers on the ground in Helmand Province, for example, are in a tricky situation and require Apache support, you have to very quickly work out where the friendly forces are, where the enemy forces are, what the threats look like, what you think you can and can’t do about it, taking into consideration the rules of engagement, the law of armed conflict, the ground commander’s intent and the various munitions that might be available to you. Sometimes these judgments, particularly at night, when you can’t see anything apart from what is seen through the sights, are having to be made very, very quickly, in tremendously difficult circumstances, but you’ve got to get them right every time. And it’s invariably the co-pilot gunner who makes those critical decisions.

  “When it comes to inter-cockpit crew management, the Apache is uniquely all about voice, which is something that pilots in training sometimes find tremendously difficult. So you really have to understand each other, the two of you, so that when things start to go a bit wrong or somebody starts to experience capacity problems, you tune into it straight away. For example, you might have quite a talkative rear-seat pilot and suddenly he’s not talking very much. Why? Is he capacity saturated? You could fly a sortie by day a
nd find that the aircrew have lots of capacity because they can see what they’re doing, it’s a simple sortie and they therefore just get on and do it. By contrast you can be flying very complicated, demanding, and high-risk operations in Afghanistan at night with fifteen other aircraft with all sorts of mixed military and civilian activity on the ground, and four radios transmitting in your ear simultaneously. Then add the fact that what you’re seeing is a black-and-white infra-red picture with no depth perception—all in all, a very challenging set of dynamic circumstances. So it’s critical to understand where each other’s limits are, particularly at the most demanding end of the operational spectrum.”

  In November Harry finished off his training with two months in America, known as Exercise Crimson Eagle. As Tom explains, “We need to do that bit in Arizona just to hone the skills and do the slightly more dynamic stuff that we need to do. It’s not lost on a lot of people, particularly the ground forces, that some of this stuff is really quite challenging. You have a moving aircraft, a moving supersonic munition and maybe a moving target; three things moving simultaneously, which requires real skill in the aircraft if the desired outcome is to be achieved. The Americans have some wonderful ranges, the Barry M. Goldwater bombing range in Arizona is something like 2.7 million acres. It looks very similar to Afghanistan so it’s an excellent place to conduct Apache live fire training.”

  In February 2012, Harry became a fully operational Apache attack helicopter pilot, and went almost straight into pre-deployment training. By late summer he was back in Afghanistan. During a dinner to mark the end of the course, he was awarded the best co-pilot gunner trophy out of about twenty others on his course. Tom de la Rue has great admiration for him. “This is an incredible achievement, as most people are never remotely capable of even getting into the back seat and flying this aircraft, let alone doing what’s required in the front seat. He’s got a tremendous aptitude for this but, like his fellow Apache contemporaries, he also has tremendous empathy for those on the ground. The Apache capability resides in the Army for very good reason—we are all Army officers and soldiers and intimately understand what is happening on the ground. We are not in the business of bombing from 25,000 feet; we are part of the ground battle and employ the aircraft accordingly. Harry fits into this environment perfectly, he has talent in spades and is a master attack aviator—an amazing and most commendable achievement.”