William and Harry (26 page)

Just two journalists, one print and one broadcast, were invited to Clarence House for the secret press conference. Harry revealed his grandmother had informed him that he was finally going to war. The Queen and Charles had had a two-hour meeting with General Dannatt ahead of the decision and both had given the operation their blessing. ‘She told me I’m off to Afghanistan, so
that was the way it was supposed to be,’ said Harry, who was in civilian clothes. He was due to fly to Kandahar the following day and had been briefed on the questions beforehand. He seemed confident and surprisingly relaxed about the task ahead of him.

He had spent one month in the summer training at RAF Leeming near Northallerton in north Yorkshire as a forward air controller. This involved guiding close air support on to enemy targets. He wasn’t entirely sure what he would be doing when he arrived in Afghanistan. ‘It’s still slightly unclear,’ he said. ‘Anyone who goes out to Afghanistan on operations is multitasking. Essentially I’m going to be TACP, which is tactical air control party, which is linked in with the RAF and fast jets and supply drops and all these bits and pieces. I’ve still yet to find out all the details of what I’ll actually be doing.’ Put most simply, it was air traffic control: it would be Harry’s job to guide aircraft, from fast jets carrying bombs and surveillance planes to regular troop transports and supply drops. He was working to Household Cavalry commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Edward Smyth-Osbourne, who had liaised closely with General Dannatt to get Harry to the front line. It was different to the reconnaissance work he had been trained to do, but Harry had been well prepared. ‘I never thought I would see myself doing [this] in the army. I have been trained for it. I haven’t spent a day at Heathrow or anything like that, but to the extent that the army can train you for air traffic controlling, I have been trained for it.’

There was no hiding his delight that he was finally going to war, and he admitted that he felt a huge sense of relief: ‘a bit of excitement, a bit of, phew, finally get the chance to actually do the soldiering that I wanted to do ever since I joined’. For the
first time he publicly acknowledged his frustration at not being sent to war with his men in April. ‘It was very hard and I did think, well, clearly one of the main reasons that I’m not likely to be going was the fact of who I am.’ He was candid when he was asked if he wished he wasn’t a prince. ‘I wish that quite a lot, actually.’ He had, he admitted, at one point considered reassessing his future in the army. ‘I wouldn’t use the word
quitting
. It was a case of I very much feel like if I’m going to cause this much chaos to a lot of people, then maybe I should bow out, and not just for my own sake, for everyone else’s sake … It was something that I thought about, but at the same time I was very keen to make this happen – or hope for the opportunity to arise and luckily it has.’

Harry knew that Afghanistan would be ‘no great holiday resort’. ‘I just want to put it into practice and do the job … and essentially help everybody else … and do my bit,’ he insisted. He was also continuing a long line of royal tradition of military service. The last British sovereign to see action was the Queen’s father, King George VI, who fought in the Battle of Jutland in May 1916 as a twenty-year-old sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy. The Queen joined the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service towards the end of the Second World War and became the first female member of the royal family to be a full-time active member of the forces. Her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, served in the Royal Navy from 1939 to 1952 and fought in the Second World War in the battle of Matapan aboard HMS
Valiant
, where he directed the battleship’s searchlights while under fire. And in 1982 Prince Andrew, who served in the Royal Navy for over twenty years, flew as a second pilot in Sea King helicopters on
anti-submarine and transport duties during the Falklands War. Charles had been commander of the minesweeper
Bronnington
and successfully shadowed a Soviet submarine that had strayed into the Channel. In fact of the recent royals only the Earl of Wessex had had a less than succesful military career after failing the Royal Marine Commando training course. Now it was Harry’s turn to prove he could fight for Queen and Country.

It was 14 December 2007 and bitterly cold at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, the very airfield where ten years earlier Harry’s mother had arrived on her final journey home. Wrapped up against the bracing wind in his warmest kit, Harry quick-marched up the steps of the C-17 RAF Globemaster III transport aircraft. His Bergen was stuffed to the brim and weighed twenty-five kilos. In it he had supplies for the next four months including a small radio, his all-weather sleeping bag, an inflatable air bed, protective goggles, sun cream, a paintbrush to clean the sand from his weapons and a supply of his favourite Haribo jelly sweets. His pistol and SA80 A2 rifle had been separately packed in a weapons bundle and would be given to him as soon as they landed. Round his wrist he wore a red and blue Help For Heroes band, as did Chelsy, who was one of the few people who knew Harry was going to war.

This was no ordinary flight: the aircraft was big enough to transport tanks and helicopters, and there were no seats. Instead webbing hung from the sides, in which the soldiers could sit during the eleven-hour flight to Kandahar. It was bumpy and uncomfortable, and once they had taken off, Harry spread his sleeping bag on the floor and tried to get some sleep. He had been
instructed to wear his helmet and Osprey body armour upon landing. His uniform, which bore the Blues and Royals’ eagle badge, also carried his army number WA 4673 A. Once they had safely landed he was given forty-eight hours to acclimatise before he was flown by Chinook to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Dwyer, a dusty outpost in the middle of Helmand Province, considered by many one of the most dangerous places on earth. The base, the size of four football pitches, was uncomfortable and austere. It had been fortified with HESCO bastions, collapsible wire-mesh containers filled with gravel. Harry was just seven miles from Garmsir, a deserted front-line town, and would soon discover that there was little left of the burned-out and looted high street, once the centre of a bustling commercial town.

Cornet Wales had been well briefed. He was now one of the 30,000 British military personnel to have served in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion in 2001. Initially British forces helped secure the capital, Kabul, before moving into Helmand Province in the south of Afghanistan in 2006. It was hoped that the Americans and British could extend government control into this Taliban heartland; instead the coalition has faced stiff resistance and years of bloody fighting. By the time Harry went to war eighty-nine British soldiers had been killed, sixty-three of them in action against the Taliban, while hundreds more had been injured.

It was on the sandy battlefields of Afghanistan that Harry finally got to put his training to the test. To the pilots in the sky he was Widow Six Seven, a radio call sign keeping a close eye on them and an even closer watch on the enemy. Harry was
assigned his own restricted operating zone, which was several square kilometres around FOB Dwyer. It was his job to identify Taliban forces on the ground, verify their coordinates and clear them as targets for attack. He would spend hours poring over maps, surveillance images and video footage of enemy positions, and had to log every detail identifying, confirming and pinpointing the Taliban. Crucially, coalition air assets needed his permission to enter his air space, and within weeks he would be coordinating his first-ever air raid.

In the FOB operations room Harry monitored every movement on a sophisticated live airborne video feed linked up to a computer, which was dubbed Taliban TV or Kill TV. ‘Terry Taliban and his mates, as soon as they hear air, they go to ground, which makes life a little bit tricky,’ Harry explained. ‘So having something that gives you a visual feedback from way up means that they can carry on with their normal pattern of life and we can follow them. My job is to get air up, whether I have been tasked it a day before or on the day or when troops are in contact.’ He was working alongside Corporal David Baxter, a twenty-eight-year-old former tank driver from Bendooragh near Coleraine in Northern Ireland, who had trained with him in the Household Cavalry. Harry quickly earned the respect of the corporal.

Harry’s easy nature and sense of humour quickly won him the friendship and trust of his comrades. When there was no threat of attack he chatted over the radio with the pilots about their homes and families. ‘It’s good to be relaxed and have a good chat. When you know things are hairy, then you need to obviously turn your game face on and do the job.’ He particularly liked Michelle Tompkins, a Harrier pilot who would describe the breathtaking views from her cockpit. She had a bird’s-eye views of the snowcapped mountains and laughed when Harry joked that conditions were perfect for skiing. Of course none of the pilots had the slightest inkling that Widow Six Seven was in fact Prince Harry, even though his clipped English meant he was a hit with all the female pilots. ‘We said, “Flirt with her any longer and you have to get a room”,’ joked Harry’s commanding officer, battery commander Major Andy Dimmock. ‘He said, “Does that count as the Mile-High Club?’”

Incredibly Harry’s troop leader on desert manoeuvres in Helmand turned out to be Captain Dickon Leigh-Wood, a twenty-seven-year-old from Fakenham in Norfolk who had gone to Ludgrove with William and Harry. ‘It was a massive surprise,’ said the captain of his chance encounter with the prince. ‘I think he is loving it. He loves the privacy – there’s no paparazzi chasing him. He hasn’t got his bodyguard team in the field. He’s with the boys, who he gets on with incredibly well. He’s always
playing rugby or football or sitting around the fire telling stupid stories.’

On Christmas Eve Harry asked to be posted to the Gurkhas at FOB Delhi in the perilous Garmsir area close to the border with Pakistan. Delhi consists of shattered buildings and the remnants of a once respected but now bombed-out agricultural college. The town’s high street was the British front line, and between Harry and the enemy was 500 metres of no-man’s-land consisting of abandoned trenches and the remains of what used to be working farms. The base was under daily attack and the nearest hospital a thirty-minute helicopter ride away, but despite the basic conditions, Harry could not have been happier. ‘What it’s all about is being here with the guys rather than being in a room with a bunch of officers … It’s good fun to be with just a normal bunch of guys, listening to their problems, listening to what they think.’

In the ghost town of Garmsir Harry could not have felt further from home. In his US Stars and Stripes baseball cap with its slogan
WE
DO
BAD
THINGS
TO
BAD
PEOPLE
, which he had traded with another officer for his fleece scarf, he was barely recognisable. He was sunburned and his red hair matted with sand. He slept in a mortar-proof billet which contained a narrow camp bed with a mosquito net, a locker made from an old mortar shell box and a rug embroidered with pictures of tanks and hand grenades. Like everyone else he was rationed to one bottle of drinking water a day, and once he had drunk that, the vile-tasting chlorinated water had to suffice. Food consisted of boil-in-the-bag chicken tikka masala and corned beef hash. Harry missed his favourite Big Macs, and the only luxuries were his Haribo
sweets and a few bags of South African biltong, which would arrive in the post from Chelsy. There were no hot showers, and when the fine dust that collected in every crevice became unbearable, only freezing-cold water was available. Shaving was restricted to once every three days and the rounded ends of missile cases were used as shaving bowls. Harry revelled in the simplicity and anonymity of this life. ‘Delhi is fantastic. I asked the commanding officer if I could come down here and spend Christmas with the Gurkhas because I had spent some time with them in England on exercise in Salisbury. Everyone is really looked after here … The food is fantastic – goat curries, chicken curries.’

Harry spent Christmas Day patrolling the bombed-out town and enjoying a game of touch rugby with his new friends. ‘Not your typical Christmas,’ he remarked. ‘But Christmas is overrated anyway.’ Back at home the press kept their word and little was made of the fact that Harry was absent from the family’s traditional lunch at Sandringham. When the Queen delivered her traditional Christmas Day speech, she poignantly prayed for the safe return of every soldier in Afghanistan. Few knew she and the rest of the royals were feeling the same fear and worry as every other family who had a son or daughter on the front line that Christmas. As the royal family raised their glasses to absent friends they were reminded of Harry, who had organised a sweepstake before his departure in which everyone had had to guess the name of Edward and Sophie Wessex’s baby boy born on 20 December. The winner was to be presented with the prize, a substantial amount of cash, at Christmas Day lunch. Harry had his money on Albert Archibald. The money, it was decided, would stay in the pot until both boys were home.

As he patrolled the derelict streets in his wraparound shades, an Afghan scarf and his army-issue helmet, a nine-millimetre pistol strapped to his body armour, Prince Harry was unidentifiable. A boy on a donkey trotted past and didn’t give Cornet Wales a second glance. Out on patrol, home was a Spartan armoured vehicle containing everything the soldiers would need to survive for days on end. It was unimaginably uncomfortable. The men heated drinking water in a boiler built into the back door powered by the Spartan’s engine. Tea and coffee tasted identical, but when the temperatures dropped to minus ten at night they were grateful for a hot drink. At night Harry and his men slept in shell scrapes – make-do shelters made by attaching tarpaulins to the vehicle, which kept the elements out, but there was no padding and his bones dug into the Spartan, leaving him black and blue. ‘I can’t wait to get back and just sit on a sofa. It’s going to be ridiculous after bouncing around in a turret. My hips are bruised, my arse is bruised,’ he complained. Nevertheless he loved the routine of army life and seemed more comfortable being a soldier than a prince. ‘Just walking around [with] some of the locals or the Afghan National Police – they haven’t got a clue who I am. They wouldn’t know. It’s fantastic,’ he told John Bingham, the journalist who accompanied him to the front line for the Press Association. ‘I’m still a little bit conscious [not to] show my face too much in and around the area. Luckily there’s no civilians around here … It’s sort of a little no-man’s-land.’