Prince Harry was willing to be captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan on his first Apache helicopter mission, he writes in his memoir Spare.
The Duke of Sussex wrote that he had been prepared to ignore a “land now” warning light in his helicopter cockpit, which meant an operation during his second front line tour in 2012 had to be abandoned.
A more experienced flyer turned them back to Camp Bastion in Helmand province, leaving the prince to feel cheated.
His admission in Spare that he killed 25 Taliban members during the war sparked criticism from former military figures and protests in Helmand last weekend.
The prince was sent to Afghanistan in 2007, when the military posting was accompanied by a media blackout, and again in 2012.
“I wanted to go, go, go. I was willing to risk crashing, being taken prisoner — whatever,” he said of the 2012 Apache mission that was aborted.
He has written at length about his military experience, describing how he narrowly escaped being hit by a huge explosion during his first stint in the country in 2007-08.
“I felt it in my brain. I looked around. Everyone was on their stomachs,” he said.
On his second tour, for which he had retrained as an Apache helicopter pilot, the prince wrote: “I was the first in my squadron to pull the trigger in anger.”
Prince Harry said he had killed before but it was “my most direct contact with the enemy ever” as he fired on Taliban fighters riding motorbikes.
In the book he said the thumb stick he fired was “remarkably similar” to the controls for the PlayStation game he played at camp.
“We swooped back to camp, critiqued the video. Perfect kill. We played some more PlayStation,” the prince wrote.
But later in the memoir he said he threw down a newspaper in disgust when he saw the headline “Harry compares killing to video game” after mentioning the similarity in a media interview.
The duke recounts how he realised his secret tour of duty had been exposed in 2008 when he overheard coded messages that suggested “Red Fox” was about to be murdered.
“I blinked at the radio and knew with total certainty that Red Fox was me,” he said.
Harry had his cover blown when an Australian magazine leaked the news that he was serving on the ground in the conflict. He was pulled out of the country.
But he also opens up about the impact the war had on him.
When he returned home in 2012 to meet then-girlfriend Cressida Bonas, he says she and his cousin Princess Eugenie told him he looked in some way like a different person, which he described as frightening and off-putting for Ms Bonas.
Source: The National
Image: Reuters
