As a former soldier, I’ve followed Prince Harry’s career with a mix of ironic and genuine interest. We served at similar times and in the same war. Friends who worked alongside him in the Household Cavalry and Army Air Corps reflect that he was a decent, rather laddish officer who did his job – which is about the highest accolade available to anyone who went to Sandhurst.
I’m an avowed republican and make no secret of it. I was a republican when I took the oath to the monarch required to join the military and I’ve never wavered from that first political commitment. The army was a refuge from drudgery, not an expression of my politics. What I have gleaned from Harry over the years is that The Mob – the army he was preordained to join – may have ended up as a sort of refuge for him too: in his case as a shield from the withering press scrutiny that seems to have shaped his life, rather than from cycles of precarious work and poverty.
Yet it seems to me that when he talks about his experiences of war, Harry is, knowingly or not, expressing sensations common to many Afghanistan veterans. He does not regret killing the 25 Taliban soldiers he claims to have slain as an Apache gunner. Yet he seems to understand quite well the processes that have allowed him to remain relatively indifferent.
It is not possible to kill someone “if you see them as a person”, he says, but the army had “trained me to ‘other’ them and they had trained me well”.
Whether this is a brag, a lament or a statement of fact is unclear, though I suspect it is the last. I’m quite interested in whether his understanding of the concept of othering is a sign of his own political development, or a term picked up in therapy or from his liberal (yet Chomsky-reading) wife. But, in any event, it is a frank and correct commentary on how the lives of the enemy and the occupied are devalued long before a soldier reaches a battlefield. It is, quite literally, just how it is out there. We can, and many will, ask if some of those were civilians. And in a conflict like Afghanistan, it is a valid question.
Certainly, it is generally frowned upon to boast about killing people – but even then, there are caveats. It is particularly bad form to do so outside the company of your fellow veterans – for example, to civilians. The issue here is a cultural one. It breaches the acute separateness of the military and civilian worlds; the gulf that is essential to professional military identity but makes transition back to the real world so fraught after discharge.
People have attacked him for it, including the Taliban, though you suspect that much of the furore is dusty old media colonels using a stick with which to beat a mildly dissenting prince.
I found other parts of his testimony more revealing, of him and the distance between him and others like me who served in the same war. He watched the 9/11 attacks from “the television room at Eton”. I was fitting a carpet in a housing estate outside Norwich when news came over the radio. Stark, indeed.
He describes those responsible for the attacks and their sympathisers as “enemies of humanity” and says fighting them was an act of vengeance for one of the worst crimes in human history.
I have a slightly more sophisticated view of the origins of the “war on terror” these days, but his sense of reactionary outrage was fairly closely to mine at the time.
Harry is Prince Harry: an imperfect lens through which to divine the general psychology of Britain’s veterans. And yet he is a veteran, and being one clearly remains an animating force in his life. If he sounds callous about death, as he did when he previously compared his military duties to playing PlayStation, it is because he probably is. Just as many of us are. And doubly so in his case, because he went through a dehumanising Eton as well as military training.
I’m not entirely convinced there is some far-reaching truth to be gleaned from all of this. There is a churn of military worship, royalist sycophancy and Piers Morgan tantrums, set against Harry and Meghan’s grating brand of American cringe. I’ve been told he isn’t a bad lad, but it seems strange that he and his wife so correctly rail against the personalities and conduct of royals without ever addressing the real issue: that the whole parasitic enterprise of monarchy they describe has had its day and has to go.
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Joe Glenton was a British soldier for six years, serving in Afghanistan. His new book is Veteranhood: Rage and Hope in British Ex-Military Life
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