Harry (2 page)

Although he found himself in dangerous and extremely uncomfortable circumstances, Harry is unlikely to have felt disappointed about missing out on the royals' splendid
occasion
. He is as lukewarm as his mother about spending the
holiday
at the royal Norfolk estate: ‘Diana told me she absolutely loathed being at Sandringham for Christmas,' said her friend ‘Kanga' Tryon; ‘“So much stuff and nonsense,” she would say.'

Certainly Harry's surroundings would have sent
shivers
through those closeted in one of the grandest houses in the land he called home. In addition to the buildings once occupied by the Afghan theology students, additional
stone-floored quarters had been constructed with walls of earth-filled HESCO barriers, blast-proof wire cages filled with rubble and topped with corrugated iron and sandbags. Pear-sized stones were used to temper the ever-present desert dust but they proved to be of little use when the helicopters – like the one that had brought Harry in – descended. In one building where the brave Gurkhas (motto: ‘Better to die than be a coward') slept, Harry was shown a hole in the ceiling where a Taliban missile had come through. ‘Thank God the Gurkhas were up on JTAC when it came in,' says Connor.

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:

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:

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.

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:

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:

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,

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.