Think

Press latches onto Prince Harry’s comments on tour in Afghanistan

11 January 2023252 views0

Ahead of the release of Spare, Prince Harry’s anticipated autobiography, extracts have been circulating that include sections of his time in Afghanistan.

It reads,

In battle conditions, there’s often a great deal of indiscriminate firing. But in the age of Apaches and laptops, everything I did in the course of two combat tours was recorded, time-stamped…

I could always say precisely how many enemy combatants I’d killed.

And I felt it vital never to shy away from that number. Among the many things I learnt in the army, accountability was near the top of the list.

So my number: Twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed.

Naturally, I’d have preferred not to have that number on my military CV, on my mind, but by the same token I’d have preferred to live in a world in which there was no Taliban, a world without war.

When I found myself plunged in the heat and confusion of combat I didn’t think of those 25 as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bad people eliminated before they could kill Good people.

On some level I recognised this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering.

Following the disclosure, a senior officer in the British Army told the National, “Bragging about how many enemy soldiers you can have killed is simply not what British soldiers do.”

Others were concerned about the security risk as the information may act as a reminder and rekindle threats against his life.

Media response was mixed, with some criticising the inclusion of this information as a display of bragging or boasting. Others provided more observational coverage and context for the full excerpt.