Spare (27 page)

Poor Nige…He pressed on.

He was, I realize now, one of the most truthful people I’ve ever known, and he knew a secret about truth that many people are unwilling to accept: it’s
usually
painful. He wanted me to believe in myself, but that belief could never be based on false promises or fake compliments. The royal road to mastery was paved with facts.

Not that he was categorically opposed to compliments. One day, almost in passing, he said that I appeared to lack any…fear.
You’re not terribly concerned, if I may say, Lieutenant Wales, with dying.

That’s true.

I explained that I hadn’t been afraid of death since the age of twelve.

He nodded once. He got it. We moved on.

Nige eventually released me,
set me free like a wounded bird restored to health, and with his certification the Army pronounced me ready to fly Apaches.

But nope—it was a trick. I wasn’t going to fly Apaches. I was going to sit in a windowless classroom and
read
about Apaches.

I thought: Could anything be crueler? Promise me a helicopter, hand me a stack of homework?

The course lasted three months, during which I nearly went insane. Every night I’d slump back to my cell-like room in the officers’ mess and vent to a mate on the phone, or else to my bodyguard. I considered leaving the course altogether. I’d never even wanted to fly Apaches, I said to everyone, petulantly. I wanted to fly the Lynx. It was simpler to learn, and I’d get back to the war faster. But my commanding officer, Colonel David Meyer, quashed that idea.
Not a chance, Harry.

Why, Colonel?

Because you’ve had operational ground experience in reconnaissance, you were a very fine FAC, and you’re a bloody good pilot. You’re going to fly Apaches.

But—

I can tell from the way you fly, the way you read the ground, this is what you were meant to do.

Meant to do? The course was torture!

And yet I was on time every day. I showed up with my three-ring binders full of info about the Apache engines, and listened to the lectures, and fought like crazy to keep up. I tried to draw on everything I’d learned from my flight instructors, from Booley to Nige, and treated the classroom as an aircraft going down. My job was to regain control.

And then one day…it was over. They said I’d be permitted at long last to strap myself into an honest-to-God Apache.

For…ground taxiing.

Are you joking?

Four lessons, they said.

Four lessons…on taxiing?

As it turned out, four lessons was barely enough to absorb all there was to know about ground taxiing that massive bird. I felt, while taxiing, as if the aircraft was on stilts, set on a bed of jelly. There were moments when I truly
wondered if I’d ever be able to do it, if this whole journey might be at an end here, before it had even begun.

I blamed part of my struggle on the seating arrangement. In the Firefly, in the Squirrel, the instructor was always right next to me. He could reach over, fix my mistakes straightaway, or else model the correct way. Booley would put his hand on the controls, or Nige would do the pedals, and I’d do the same. I realized that much of what I’d learned in life had come through this sort of modeling. More than most people I needed a guide, a guru—a partner.

But in the Apache the instructor was either way up front or way in the back—unseen.

I was all alone.

The seating arrangement
eventually became less of an issue. Day by day the Apache felt less alien, and some days it even felt good.

I learned to be alone in there, to think alone, function alone. I learned to communicate with this big, fast, nasty, beautiful beast, to speak its language, to listen when it talked. I learned to perform one set of skills with my hands, while doing another with my feet. I learned to appreciate how phenomenal this machine was: unthinkably heavy, yet capable of ballet-like suppleness. The most technologically complex helicopter in the world, and also the most nimble. I could see why only a handful of people on earth knew how to fly Apaches, and why it cost millions of dollars to train each of those people.

And then…it was time to do it all at night.

We started with an exercise called “the bag,” which was just what it sounded like. The Apache’s windows were covered and you felt as if you were inside a brown-paper bag. You had to take all data about conditions outside the aircraft through instruments and gauges. Eerie, unnerving—but effective. You were forced to develop a kind of second sight.

Then we took the Apache up into the actual night sky, made our way around the base, slowly expanded beyond. I was a bit trembly the first time we sailed across Salisbury Plain, over those desolate valleys and woods where I’d crawled and dragged my arse through those first exercises. Then I was flying over more populated areas. Then: London. The Thames glistening in the darkness. The Millennium Wheel winking at the stars. The Houses of
Parliament, and Big Ben, and the palaces. I wondered if Granny was in, and if she was awake. Were the corgis settling down while I did these graceful whirls over their fuzzy heads?

Was the flag up?

In darkness I became fully proficient with the monocle, the most astonishing and iconic part of the Apache’s technology. A sensor in the Apache’s nose transmitted images through a cable, up to the cockpit, where it fed into the monocle, which was clipped to my helmet, in front of my right eyeball. Through that monocle I got all my knowledge of the outside world. All my senses were reduced to that one small portal. It felt at first like writing with my toe or breathing through my ear, and then it became second nature. And then it became mystical.

Circling London one night, I was suddenly blinded, and thought for half a second that I might drop into the Thames. I saw bright colors, mostly emerald green, and after a few seconds I realized: someone on the ground had hit us with a laser pen. I was disoriented. And furious. But I told myself to be grateful for the experience, for the practice. I was also perversely grateful for the stray memory it knocked loose. Mohamed Al Fayed, giving Willy and me laser pens from Harrods, which he owned. He was the father of Mummy’s boyfriend, so maybe he was trying to win us over. If so, job done. We thought those lasers were genius.

We whipped them around like light sabers.

Near the tail end of
my Apache training, at Wattisham Airfield in Suffolk, I got one more instructor.

It was his job to put on the finishing touches.

Upon meeting, shaking hands, he gave me a knowing smile.

I smiled back.

He kept smiling.

I smiled back, but started to wonder: What?

I thought he was about to pay me a compliment. Or ask a favor.

Instead he asked if I recognized his voice.

No.

He was part of the team that extracted me, he said.

Oh, back in 2008?

Yes.

We’d talked briefly over the radio that night, I recalled.

I remember how gutted you were.

Yeah.

I could hear it in your voice.

Yeah.
I was devastated.

He smiled wider.
Now look at you.

I was turning twenty-five
in a few days, and it felt like more than just another birthday. Mates told me twenty-five was the Watershed Age, the moment when many young men and women come to a fork in their personal road. At twenty-five you take a concrete step forward…or else begin to slide backwards. I was ready to move forward. I felt, in many ways, that I’d been bag-flying for years.

I reminded myself that it ran in the family, that twenty-five had been a big year for many of us. Granny, to name one. At twenty-five she’d become the sixty-first monarch in the history of England.

So I decided to mark this milestone birthday with a trip.

Botswana again.

The whole gang was there, and in between cake and cocktails they said how different I seemed—again. I had seemed older, harder, after my first combat tour. But now, they said, I seemed more…grounded.

Odd, I thought. Through flight training…I’ve become more grounded?

No one gave me more praise or love than Teej and Mike. Late one night, however, Mike sat me down for a somber heart-to-heart. At their kitchen table he spoke at length about my relationship with Africa. The time’s come, he said, for that relationship to change. Until then the relationship had been all take, take, take—a fairly typical dynamic for Brits in Africa. But now I needed to give back. For years I’d heard him and Teej and others lamenting the crises facing this place. Climate change. Poaching. Drought. Fires. I was the only person they knew who had any kind of influence, any kind of global megaphone—the only person who might actually be able to do something.

What can I do, Mike?

Shine a light.

A group of us
piled into flat-bottomed boats and steered upriver.

We camped for a few days, explored some remote islands. No one for miles and miles around.

One afternoon we stopped off on Kingfisher Island, and mixed up some drinks, and watched the sunset. Rain was falling, which made the light look pink. We listened to music, everything mellow, dreamy, and lost all track of time. As we were pushing off, getting back onto the river, we suddenly ran into two big problems.

Darkness.

And a major storm.

Each was a problem you never wanted to encounter on the Okavango. But both at the same time? We were in trouble.

Now came the wind.

In the dark, in the maelstrom, the river was impossible to navigate. The water pitched and rolled. Plus the driver on our boat was wasted. We kept plowing into sandbars.

I thought: We might end up in this river tonight.

I shouted that I was taking the wheel.

I recall brilliant flashes of lightning, seismic claps of thunder. There were twelve of us on two boats and no one was saying a word. Even the most experienced Africa hands were tight-faced, though we tried to pretend we were in control by continuing to blast the music.

Suddenly the river narrowed. Then bent sharply. We were desperate to get back, but we had to be patient. Obey the river. Go where it led us.

Just then, a massive flash. Everything bright as noon for about two seconds, long enough to see, standing directly before us, in the middle of the river, a group of enormous elephants.

In the flare-up I locked eyes with one. I saw her snow-white tusks swooping up, I saw every wrinkle in her dark wet skin, the hard water line above her shoulders. I saw her giant ears, shaped like an angel’s wings.

Someone whispered:
Holy shit.

Someone cut the music.

Both drivers killed the engines.

In total silence we floated on the swollen river, waiting for the next lightning flash. When it came, there they were again, those majestic creatures. This time, when I stared at the elephant closest to me, when I looked deep
into her eyeball, when she looked back into mine, I thought of the all-seeing eye of the Apache, and I thought of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and I thought of a camera’s lens, convex and glassy like the elephant’s eye, except that a camera lens always made me nervous and this eye made me feel safe. This eye wasn’t judging, wasn’t taking—it just
was
. If anything, the eye was slightly…tearful? Was that possible?

Elephants have been known to weep. They hold funerals for loved ones, and when they come upon an elephant lying dead in the bush they stop and pay their respects. Were our boats intruding on some such ceremony? Some sort of gathering? Or maybe we’d interrupted some kind of rehearsal. From antiquity comes a story of one elephant who was observed privately practicing complicated dance steps he’d need to perform in an upcoming parade.

The storm was getting worse. We had to go. We restarted the boats, cruised away. Goodbye, we whispered to the elephants. I eased into the middle of the current, lit a cigarette, told my memory to hold on to this encounter, this unreal moment when the line between me and the external world grew blurry or disappeared outright.

Everything, for one half second, was one. Everything made sense.

Try to remember, I thought, how it felt to be that close to the truth, the real truth:

That life isn’t all good, but it isn’t all bad either.

Try to remember how it felt, finally, to understand what Mike had been trying to say.

Shine a light.

I got my wings.
Pa, as Army Air Corps Colonel-in-Chief, pinned them to my chest.

May 2010.

Happy day. Pa, wearing his blue beret, officially presented me with mine. I put it on and we saluted each other. It felt almost more intimate than a hug.

Camilla was on hand. And Mummy’s sisters. And Chels. We were back together.

Then broke up soon after.

We had no choice—yet again. We had all the same old problems, nothing
had been solved. Also, Chels wanted to travel, have fun, be young, but I was once again on a path to war. I’d soon be shipping off. If we stayed together, we’d be lucky to see each other a handful of times over the next two years, and that was no kind of relationship. Neither of us was surprised when we found ourselves in the same old emotional cul-de-sac.

Goodbye, Chels.

Goodbye, Hazza.

The day I got my wings, I figured she got hers.

We went to Botswana one last time. One last trip upriver, we said. One last visit to Teej and Mike.

We had great fun, and naturally wavered about our decision. I tried now and then, and talked now and then, of different ways this might still work. Chels played along. We were being so obviously, willfully delusional, that Teej felt the need to step in.

It’s over, kids. You’re postponing the inevitable. And making yourselves crazy in the process.