Let’s just simmer down about Prince Harry, at least when it comes to his comments about the Taliban. In his memoir Spare, released this week, the Prince writes that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan and thought of ‘Taliban fighters not as people but as chess pieces.’
This wasn’t the best choice of words. He shouldn’t have given a precise tally of the enemy dead – it goes against the unwritten and fragile code of the battlefield. And it fell short of ‘showing decency and respect for the lives you have taken,’ as former army officer and MP Adam Holloway has noted.
The ‘othering’ that Harry talks about is the only way an enemy can be killed
But, at the same time, it’s worth pointing out that most of the people currently criticising Harry didn’t serve in Afghanistan. Most won’t have any idea about what happened in the hellhole that was Helmand province.
For me, it is refreshing to hear someone talking about what it was like in Afghanistan and being listened to for once. The British Army’s involvement in Afghanistan remains a blind spot in the national conscience. This is partly because there still hasn’t been an honest conversation about what happened there. Meanwhile, the chance for any sort of accountability appears to have evaporated. The generals responsible for the operation have been promoted or retired with fantastic pensions while the soldiers and young officers who served there – like Harry – have been left to shoulder the burden of the Afghanistan curse. For too many that weight has been too much and they have taken their lives.
‘I actually have a lot of respect and sympathy for him and his situation,’ says Oliver Church, a former army officer who, after experiencing a traumatic brain injury in Afghanistan, co-founded the Eleos Partnership, which focuses on boosting veterans’ mental wellbeing. ‘Instead of bragging or trying to shock, he’s really just stating fact in an attempt to fill the information vacuum that many others are trying to do on his behalf – often with an agenda’.
What Harry says about the number of Taliban he killed – ‘It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me’ – isn’t that weird or controversial. It’s likely the view held by the vast majority of service people who took lives. That is almost certainly the case for Apache crews and jet fighter pilots, most of whom were probably killing 25 Taliban in an average week (sorry if that comes as another shock, but it was war fighting, what do you expect?). You have to take that approach, or you’d crack under the weight of what you were doing.
Harry has made apparently controversial comments about viewing the Taliban as ‘chess pieces’ to be ‘removed from the board’ or as ‘bad people eliminated before they could kill good people’. While these are rather simplistic and basic metaphors, I suspect they align with the thinking of just about anyone who has pulled the trigger.
Yet this hasn’t stopped the likes of the Guardian and media pundits wading in with pontifications and concerns about ‘what the army was instilling in its personnel and how they were being educated to view others.’
What on earth do these people think the British military should be instilling in its troops before they engage with the enemy? The ‘othering’ that Harry talks about is the only way an enemy can be killed. You don’t – and you can’t – watch someone in the crosshairs of your gun and think: do I engage, might this person have lots of children or old parents to support? You shoot first. That’s how you defeat your enemy. Yes, it’s conditioning – and it’s exactly how I reacted when I saw men (or perhaps they were teens, who knows) holding RPGs in the crosshairs of my Challenger 2 tank in Iraq. That’s what months of military training achieves – and must achieve – if you want a capable military. Of course it’s not a free for all, which is why the British Army has important rules of engagement.
Harry says he felt no guilt about taking those 25 lives because he will never forget being at school watching news coverage of the 9/11 attacks, nor his subsequent visits to the US and meeting the families of victims of the attacks. That rationale may be too simplistic, but it’s interesting to finally hear someone being allowed to try and parse the guilt and shame that many veterans struggle with after participating in two disastrous wars in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died.
I don’t think putting Harry in the gunner’s chair of an Apache helicopter was a great idea from the start. But he was there, and an Apache gunner’s job is to pull the trigger. That’s what you have to do when responding to a call from a British Army patrol that is pinned down by the Taliban, as some poor squaddie ties a torniquet on an even poorer bugger who has just had his leg blown off.
The people who are opining on all this – including military veterans who did not serve in Afghanistan – would do well to take a moment to reflect on what was actually going down in Helmand. To help them, I’d recommend reading Rain, the war novel by former British Army officer Barney Campbell. Near the end of the book is a passage that is the most searing description of an IED explosion hitting a soldier that I have ever encountered. After reading it I felt nauseous and close to tears. I don’t think I was being soft. A good friend who served in the Special Forces had a similar reaction after reading the book.
I think Harry is being misled and manipulated by numerous people – and is unwittingly engaging in self-destructive behaviour. This is a common trait among veterans who struggle, both with PTSD and with what Church describes as ‘adjustment disorder’ when transitioning from the military to the civilian realm.
Harry has done the worst thing a veteran can do – he has entirely removed himself from his mates and ties to his service, while replacing that network with a bunch of psychiatry-loving Californians. I made a similar mistake after leaving the army. Though I headed to Texas, and just drank lots of tequila to numb the shame and anger and process the absence of the crosshairs rush, rather than being ‘counselled’ by idiots spouting psychobabble.
But on this one I’m standing with my fellow Afghanistan veteran. Clearly Harry is no Günter Grass when it comes to his war recollections – I won’t be buying his book. But, in stark contrast to the people who oversaw what happened in Afghanistan, he is being brutally honest about his military service. And that is desperately needed.
Comments