by Penny Junor
BROTHERS IN ARMS
“Spending time on tour is the single greatest bonding experience anybody could ever have,” says Martin Hewitt, the wounded ex-Para, who walked to the North Pole. “It’s only when you’re in a position where there’s no easy way out that your true character comes out—and there’s no easy way out of an operational tour. You’ve all got to pull through as a team to achieve what you need to achieve, whatever that may be—and our forces are now working in some of the most adverse environments in the world. I now work in the commercial sector and if you make a mistake there, if you’re unlucky or someone gets something wrong, they might get a pay cut, or the sack or lose a client. You get things wrong out there, you’re dead or, worse still, your men are dead. There’s pressure and there’s pressure, and there’s bonding experiences.”
Harry’s passion for servicemen and -women and their families—especially, but not exclusively, the wounded ones—is almost certainly born out of that shared experience. One of the most moving speeches he has made so far was in May 2012, when he flew to Washington to receive a humanitarian award from the Atlantic Council for his work with veterans. He made it clear he was accepting it on behalf of his brother, their Foundation, all those who worked to support the wounded, and “particularly the guys. This is their award.
“It would be wrong of me to speak for these heroes, but not presumptuous of me to pay tribute to them: so many of our servicemen and -women have made the ultimate sacrifice; so many lives have been lost and so many changed forever by the wounds that they have suffered in the course of their duties. They have paid a terrible price to keep us safe and free.
“The very least we owe them is to make sure that they and their brave families have everything they need through the darkest days—and, in time, regain the hope and confidence to flourish again. For these selfless people, it is after the guns have fallen silent, the din of battle quietened, that the real fight begins—a fight that may last for the rest of their lives.
“We will all continue to support our Armed Forces in defense of freedom at home and abroad, but sooner or later the coverage of them in the media will diminish or cease as coalition forces withdraw from Afghanistan. They will no longer be at the forefront of our minds. But the injuries left from a 7.62 round, an IED, watching a fellow comrade injured or killed—these are experiences that remain with you for life, both physically and mentally.
“We must be there for our servicemen and -women, and their families, standing shoulder to shoulder with them. British and American forces train together, fight together and, tragically, some are wounded and some die together. It makes perfect sense to me, therefore, that we should—wherever possible and appropriate—work together, by pooling our expertise and experience, to heal and support the wounded veterans of both our Nations—truly, brothers- and sisters-in-arms.
“Last year, I struggled to keep up with the four British soldiers whom I joined for part of their expedition to walk to the North Pole. Each of these men had recently been gravely wounded on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Theirs was the fastest team to reach the Pole that season.
“At this very moment, another team of our wounded are returning from Mount Everest. Sadly, I understand that they have been frustrated from reaching the summit by the unusually warm weather, which brings particularly dangerous conditions. However, the mere fact that they are up there on that fearsome peak, I find totally amazing.”
Harry was in Washington for no more than twenty-four hours, but an important part of the trip for him was meeting a British team of disabled servicemen and -women who were in America to compete in a Paralympic-style event called the Warrior Games. The Games have been going every year since 2010 at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado, but this was the first year that a British team had been invited to take part—and Help for Heroes was funding them. Harry couldn’t go to the Games himself, but Nick Booth from the Royal Foundation went instead, and found the experience incredibly moving. “It was really extraordinary to see quite severely injured servicemen and -women compete against each other in a very competitive but also extraordinarily supportive environment. Matt Webb, an English triple amputee, took off both his legs, one of his arms and swam two lengths of the pool that Michael Phelps trains in; one-armed, roared on by 250 other amputees and wounded servicemen. Even though he was going to be last by at least a length in a two-length race, it didn’t matter. It was about him proving to himself and everybody else that he was still capable of doing it.
“And to see Private Pa Njie enter the 1,500 meters a few weeks after getting his prosthetic legs. He was really still learning to walk. There were two British guys in that race: Simon Maxwell, who’s a great athlete, a single leg amputee, who got the gold medal. Pa Njie came last and, by the time everyone else had finished, he still had two laps to go and he was not going to be beaten. He kept going and kept going, roared on by a stadium full of people who all stood for two laps for him. I’ve worked in the child abuse field for twenty years, so you see some stuff you remember, but they remain two of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had. I was like, ‘I just need to step outside for a moment.’ ”
It was Nick’s description that made Harry determined to see the Games for himself, and to bring them to a wider audience. So a six-day trip to America was duly organized in May 2013. He arrived in Washington, as always, killing several birds with one stone.
He started on Capitol Hill where he opened an exhibition for the HALO Trust (the mine clearance charity with which Princess Diana was memorably associated), having become patron of its Twenty-fifth Anniversary Appeal. Then he attended a reception at the White House for the military and their families, standing on a receiving line alongside the First Lady, Michelle Obama. The room was full of children and, although he was only supposed to dip in for half an hour, he stayed for the whole event. Next he went to the Arlington National Cemetery, where more than 400,000 military casualties—dating back to the American Civil War—are buried. He laid a wreath in Section 60, which is for casualties since 2001, and laid a second wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which has been guarded continuously since 1937. And he visited the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, America’s equivalent of Headley Court, where he marveled at the advances in prosthetic technology and met wounded servicemen undergoing rehab.
But the most important part of the visit was to the Warrior Games in Colorado Springs, where he spent two days. He helped launch the competition by igniting a large symbolic flame, with Olympic swimmer Missy Franklin and blind U.S. Navy Lieutenant Brad Snyder. When the formalities were over, he was in his element, mixing with fellow servicemen and -women and playing sport—volleyball on his bottom—dressed in one of the British team’s Union Jack T-shirts, emblazoned with the Help for Heroes logo. Afterwards there was a private reception where he met the competitors, including the American team with whom he would walk to the South Pole at the end of the year. “We had a room in a hotel where we just said to the guys, ‘We’ll keep out’—and we left them to it,” says Help for Heroes co-founder Bryn Parry. “Harry went along and they had a few beers. They told him jokes, he told them jokes, they showed him photographs of their wounds etc, etc. He’s a soldier—and he’s a soldier who talks like a soldier and acts like a soldier and understands soldiers and they love him for it. And when Harry is sitting in that room with his beer in his hand, he is a young captain talking to other young captains and corporals. The only difference is, Nick has got no legs and Harry has.”
The Games are surprisingly small; there are only two hundred or so competitors. They play seven sports—archery, cycling, shooting, sitting-volleyball, swimming, track and field and wheelchair basketball. And the spectators are mostly friends and family. They are run by the U.S. Olympic Committee on behalf of the U.S. government and had previously been very low key. Harry’s presence changed all that, but for once he was pleased to see his media shadow. Before sounding a horn for the start of the t
en-kilometer hand-cycle race, at the U.S. Air Force Training Academy in Colorado Springs, he said, “You’ve got the Olympics, you’ve got the Paralympics and you’ve got the Warrior Games; there’s no reason why the Warrior Games shouldn’t be recognized worldwide, with the same amount of attention as the Olympics and Paralympics.” Then, gesturing to the bank of broadcasters, photographers and journalists, he added, “You’ve got all these guys here—it’s not always great having them around—but today it’s fantastic to get the message across to every other country that has eyes on here at the moment.”
The day before, ahead of the opening, he had caught everyone off guard. Embellishing a speech that had been prepared for him by Nick Booth, he said, “I only hope in the future, the near future, we can bring the Warrior Games to Britain and continue to enlarge this fantastic cause.”
Privately, and not so privately, he made it clear that the near future meant 2014. He wasn’t the only one who wanted to see the Warrior Games replicated in London and opened up to the world. Bryn Parry and his colleagues at Help for Heroes had been thinking along the very same lines. They know only too well that when UK intervention in Afghanistan comes to an end, it will become less newsworthy, the support will start to dry up and the public will forget today’s heroes. But it took Harry to make progress on the plans happen.
From the Games Prince Harry went to New Jersey, to see the damage done by Superstorm Sandy, which had destroyed the home of a U.S. soldier he had met in Afghanistan. Then on to New York, where he traveled on a red London double-decker bus with the Prime Minister, David Cameron, to Manhattan’s trendy Meatpacking District for an event with British entrepreneurs to promote the government’s GREAT Britain campaign. And he launched the first charity outside the UK that the Royal Foundation has ever funded.
The Foundation already had an American offshoot called American Friends of the Royal Foundation, which was set up for William and Kate’s visit to California in 2011. It was the beneficiary of one sunny afternoon of polo in Santa Barbara, which raised $1.6 million. This time, rather than asking American donors to raise money for British causes, they wanted it to stay in America, and looked for a project that sat comfortably within the remit of the Foundation. What they found was Harlem RBI (which stands for the baseball expression “Runs Batted In”—alternatively, Returning Baseball to the Inner Cities). It’s a charity that takes young people from a challenging part of Spanish Harlem and uses baseball to engage them in health, fitness and education. The Foundation has a similar program called Coach Core, which William, Kate and Harry jointly launched in London the day before the Olympics. In a nutshell, Coach Core takes vulnerable adolescents off the streets and trains them to be sports coaches; and those coaches, in turn, become mentors to the next generation of vulnerable adolescents. It has been hugely successful, and a second scheme opened in Glasgow last year. This one in New York couldn’t be called Coach Core for legal reasons, so it’s known as Project Coach, but it is effectively the same and it is funded by the Foundation.
It was a given that if Harry was launching anything to do with a sport he would gamely pick up a bat, which is how he came to risk annihilation at the hands of New York’s top baseball star, Mark Teixeira. “The Prince had been to visit the young people privately in their offices,” says Nick, “but, of course, there was a huge media pack following the tour. So we set up the more public moment in the diamond, which is bang in the middle of New York, and there were a lot of media there. The kids were out doing their baseball drills and Harry threw some balls and did some ground fielding and then they wanted him to hit, partly for the press and partly for fun. They got Mark Teixeira to pitch, and they got one of the kids to be the catcher, who was a small girl of about ten. You imagine being a small ten-year-old from East Harlem and you’re about to stand, not only behind the Prince, but with the ball being chucked at you by baseball’s equivalent of David Beckham and the world’s press are looking at you. You could just tell in her face, it was like, this is not an everyday occurrence. And Prince Harry strolled out and the first thing he did was squat down and just check she was okay. They had this lovely interaction where he went, ‘Are you all right in there? This is a big deal going on here.’ She was like, ‘Yeah, all right.’ It was one of my favorite moments of the whole tour. Then he stood up, picked up the bat and smacked all three balls for a home run. Unbelievable.”
A fundraising dinner followed at which celebrities were not the focus, but three of the young people from Coach Core in London and Glasgow. They spoke about what a difference the program had made to their lives. “Prince Harry spoke as well, so we raised quite a nice sum of money that night and it stayed behind in Harlem which was fabulous.”
The next day Prince Harry swapped a baseball bat for a polo stick in Connecticut to raise over $1 million for Sentebale. “It was the most we’ve ever raised with one event like that,” says Chief Executive Cathy Ferrier. “It was just fantastic. We got an incredible amount of support, lots of coverage for the charity. The U.S. is a big market for us; he is very, very popular there, and people genuinely seem to be interested in what the charity is doing. They warm to him, they like him. And in terms of sponsorship, people were literally beating a path to our door to try and get involved.”
Nick agrees, “The American reaction to him was extraordinary. He’s a very big star over there—he did a range of different activities and each one was really well received.”
But he didn’t please everyone. The headline in the Washington Post ran: “Prince Harry’s 2013 U.S. tour: Painfully well-behaved this time… What have they done with our Harry?!?!? Sigh. Maybe he’s just growing up.”
ALL CHANGE
HRH Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge was born at 4:24 in the afternoon of 22 July 2013, in the middle of a heat wave. Harry was one of the first people William phoned with the news; Harry saw the baby the following day when the family was back at home. When asked about his nephew, Harry extended his hands and said, “He’s about this long and this wide. It’s fantastic to have an addition to the family. I only hope my brother knows how expensive my baby-sitting charges are.”
Harry is clearly very taken by George, although not so taken that he’s volunteered to change many nappies, but while his birth and William’s marriage to Kate brought very real joy, they also marked the end of an era. The brothers are best friends and enormously close in every sense—their charitable work overlaps; they share an office and they live within the same complex at Kensington Palace; they shared the same childhood—and that bond will never diminish. But the relationship has inevitably changed as William’s focus has changed. He is no longer in the military, no longer up for partying till dawn, or tripping over guy-ropes in the early hours at Glastonbury. He is more interested in getting an unbroken night of sleep and listening to George’s growing vocabulary. It is what happens with most siblings when one of them starts a family of their own.
They have always been very different characters and, as they have matured and their choice of careers has exposed them to separate challenges and experiences, those differences have become distilled. William’s instincts and enthusiasms are pure middle England, cautious and conservative. He craves normality, and in another life would happily live as 90 percent of the population does. When Harry says he would like to be normal, Main Street is not at all what he has in mind. He is what someone who knows them both well describes as “an absolutely thorough-going, full-fat eighteenth-century aristocrat. He’s a Rupert of the Rhine, a torrid figure, and I use the eighteenth century absolutely intentionally, where along with privilege went responsibility—which was lost in the Victorian era and certainly in the last century. Yes, absolutely, he lives life to the full and he has lots of money and he has friends, in the sort of Prince Hal way. He is much more altruistic and philanthropic than they were in the eighteenth century, but he does have that split which they had—this sort of hell-raising, Cavalry commander, using somebody as a mounting block type of thing;
but with it, that real connectivity which they had, because the people were their power base. Harry is as English as English can be.”
They still share the same passions, which are reflected in the three distinct causes that the Foundation supports (conservation, disadvantaged children and veterans), but they are no different from brothers working in any family firm; as they are becoming more experienced, more confident, more opinionated and engaged with the subjects, there are differences of opinion, clashes, tensions and jealousies between them. For example, Harry is every bit as passionate about conservation as William, but at the moment it is his brother who is seen to be its champion. It was his brother who led the launch of United for Wildlife, a major initiative that has brought together the seven largest wildlife charities to try and stop the illegal poaching of endangered species. And because of his expeditions to the Poles, it is Harry who is seen as the Prince of veterans; while the reality is that William is also very engaged in the welfare of veterans, but from a different aspect. And Harry’s indisputable affinity to children doesn’t mean that William is indifferent to their well-being—and each of them has a view about how best to tackle the problems.
“Thank heavens to date the strains have only been the natural thing between brothers,” says one of their team, “and unlike quite a lot of brothers, they can then go and have a beer together and say, ‘Okay, you do the conservation, I’ll do the veterans.’ That’s literally how it sorted itself out. Jealousy is not a word in Prince Harry’s lexicon: he doesn’t get jealous, he’s remarkable like that.
