Spare (34 page)

We circled and circled. I was getting nervous.
Did he get away, mate?

There he is!

Fifty feet to the right of the motorbike: body on the ground.

Confirmed.

Away we flew.

Three times we were
called to this same forlorn place: a string of bunkers overlooking a busy highway. We had intel that Taliban fighters were routinely gathering there. They came in three cars, jalopies, carrying RPGs and machine guns, took up positions and waited for lorries to come down the road.

Controllers had seen them blow up at least one convoy.

There were sometimes half a dozen men, sometimes as many as thirty. Taliban, clear as day.

But three times we flew there to engage, and three times we failed to get permission to fire. We never knew why.

This time we were determined things would be different.

We got there fast, saw a lorry coming down the road, saw the men taking aim. Bad things were about to happen. That lorry’s doomed, we said, unless we do something.

We requested permission to engage.

Permission denied.

We asked again.
Ground Control, request permission to engage hostile target—!

Stand by…

Boom. A huge flash and an explosion on the road.

We screamed for permission.

Stand by…waiting for ground commander clearance.

We went screaming in, saw the lorry blown to pieces, saw the men jumping into their jalopies and onto motorbikes. We followed two motorbikes. We
begged for permission to fire. Now we were requesting a different kind of permission: not permission to stop an act, but permission to address an act just witnessed.

This kind of permission was called 429 Alpha.

Do we have Four Two Nine Alpha to engage?

Stand by…

We kept following the two motorbikes through several villages, while griping about the bureaucracy of war, the reluctance of higher-ups to let us do what we’d been trained to do. Maybe, in our griping, we were no different from soldiers in every war. We wanted to fight: we didn’t understand larger issues, underlying geopolitics. Big picture. Some commanders often said, publicly and privately, that they feared every Taliban killed would create three more, so they were extra cautious. At times we felt the commanders were right: we
were
creating more Taliban. But there had to be a better answer than floating nearby while innocents got slaughtered.

Five minutes became ten became twenty.

We never did get permission.

Every kill was on video.

The Apache saw all. The camera in its nose recorded all. So, after every mission, there would be a careful review of that video.

Returning to Bastion, we’d walk into the gun tape room, slide the video into a machine, which would project the kill onto wall-mounted plasma TVs. Our squadron commander would press his face against the screens, examining, murmuring—wrinkling his nose. He wasn’t merely looking for errors, this chap, he was hungry for them. He wanted to catch us in a mistake.

We called him awful names when he wasn’t around. We came close to calling him those names to his face.
Look, whose side are you on?

But that was what he wanted. He was trying to provoke us, to get us to say the unspeakable.

Why?

Jealousy, we decided.

It ate him up inside that he’d never pulled a trigger in battle. He’d never attacked the enemy.

So he attacked us.

Despite his best efforts, he never found anything irregular in any of our kills. I was part of six missions that ended in the taking of human life, and they were all deemed justified by a man who wanted to crucify us. I deemed them the same.

What made the squadron commander’s attitude so execrable was this: He was exploiting a real and legitimate fear. A fear we all shared. Afghanistan was a war of mistakes, a war of enormous collateral damage—thousands of innocents killed and maimed, and that always haunted us. So my goal from the day I arrived was never to go to bed doubting that I’d done the right thing, that my targets had been correct, that I was firing on Taliban and only Taliban, no civilians nearby. I wanted to return to Britain with all my limbs, but more, I wanted to go home with my conscience intact. Which meant being aware of what I was doing, and why I was doing it, at all times.

Most soldiers can’t tell you precisely how much death is on their ledger. 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 learned 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. Even for an occasional practitioner of magical thinking like me, however, some realities just can’t be changed.

While in the heat and fog of combat, I didn’t think of those twenty-five as people. You can’t kill people if you think of them as people. You can’t really harm people if you think of them as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods. I’d been trained to “other-ize” them, trained well. On some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering.

Another reality that couldn’t be changed.

Not to say that I was some kind of automaton. I never forgot being in that TV room at Eton, the one with the blue doors, watching the Twin Towers melt as people leaped from the roofs and high windows. I never forgot the parents and spouses and children I met in New York, clutching photos of the moms and dads who’d been crushed or vaporized or burned alive.
September 11 was vile, indelible, and all those responsible, along with their sympathizers and enablers, their allies and successors, were not just our enemies, but enemies of humanity. Fighting them meant avenging one of the most heinous crimes in world history, and preventing it from happening again.

As my tour neared its end, around Christmas 2012, I had questions and qualms about the war, but none of these was moral. I still believed in the Mission, and the only shots I thought twice about were the ones I hadn’t taken. For instance, the night we were called in to help some Gurkhas. They were pinned down by a nest of Taliban fighters, and when we arrived there was a breakdown in communications, so we simply weren’t able to help. It haunts me still: hearing my Gurkha brothers calling out on the radio, remembering every Gurkha I’d known and loved, being prevented from doing anything.

As I fastened my bags and said my goodbyes I was honest with myself: I acknowledged plenty of regrets. But they were the healthy kind. I regretted the things I
hadn’t
done, the Brits and Yanks I hadn’t been able to help.

I regretted the job not being finished.

Most of all, I regretted that it was time to leave.

I stuffed my Bergen full
of dusty clothes, plus two souvenirs: a rug bought in a bazaar, a 30-mm shell casing from the Apache.

The first week of 2013.

Before I could get onto the plane with my fellow soldiers I went into a tent and sat in the one empty chair.

The obligatory exit interview.

The chosen reporter asked what I’d done in Afghanistan.

I told him.

He asked if I’d fired on the enemy.

What? Yes.

His head went back. Surprised.

What did he think we were doing over here? Selling magazine subscriptions?

He asked if I’d killed anyone.

Yes…

Again, surprised.

I tried to explain:
It’s a war, mate, you know?

The conversation came around to the press. I told the reporter that I thought the British press was crap, particularly with regard to my brother and sister-in-law, who’d just announced that they were pregnant, and were subsequently being besieged.

They deserve to have their baby in peace,
I said.

I admitted that my father had begged me to stop thinking about the press, to not read the papers. I admitted that I felt guilty every time I did, because it made me complicit.
Everyone’s guilty for buying the newspapers. But hopefully no one actually believes what’s in them.

But of course they did. People did believe, and that was the whole problem. Britons, among the most literate people on the planet, were also the most credulous. Even if they didn’t believe every word, there was always that residue of wonder.
Hmm, where there’s smoke there must be fire…
Even if a falsehood was disproved, debunked beyond all doubt, that residue of initial belief remained.

Especially if the falsehood was negative. Of all human biases, “negativity bias” is the most indelible. It’s baked into our brains. Privilege the negative, prioritize the negative—that’s how our ancestors survived. That’s what the bloody papers count on, I wanted to say.

But didn’t. It wasn’t that kind of discussion. Wasn’t a discussion at all. The reporter was keen to move on, to ask about Vegas.

Naughty Harry, eh? Hooray Harry.

I felt a mix of complicated emotions about saying goodbye to Afghanistan, but I couldn’t wait to say goodbye to this chap.

First, I flew with my squadron to Cyprus, for what the Army called “decompression.” I hadn’t had any mandated decompression after my last tour, so I was excited, though not as much as my bodyguards.
Finally! We can have a bloody cold beer!

Everyone was issued exactly two cans. No more. I didn’t like beer, so I handed mine over to a soldier who looked like he needed it more than me. He reacted as if I’d given him a Rolex.

We were then taken to a comedy show. Attendance was quasi-mandatory. Whoever organized it had had good intentions: a bit of levity after a tour of hell. And, to be fair, some of us did laugh. But most didn’t. We were struggling and didn’t know we were struggling. We had memories to process, mental wounds to heal, existential questions to sort. (We’d been told that a padre was
available if we needed to talk, but I remember no one going near him.) So we just sat at the comedy show in the same way we’d sat in the VHR tent. In a state of suspended animation. Waiting.

I felt bad for those comedians. One tough gig.

Before we left Cyprus someone told me I was all over the papers.

Oh yeah?

The interview.

Shit. I’d completely forgotten.

Apparently I’d caused quite a stir by admitting that I’d killed people. In a war.

I was criticized up and down for being…a killer?

And being blithe about it.

I’d mentioned, in passing, that the Apache controls were reminiscent of video-game controls. And thus:

Harry compares killing to video game!

I threw down the paper. Where was that padre?

I texted Cress, told her
I was home.

She texted back, said she was relieved, which made me relieved.

I hadn’t been sure what to expect.

I wanted to see her. And yet we didn’t make a plan. Not in that first exchange. There was some distance there, some stiffness.

You sound different, Harry
.

Well, I don’t feel different.

I didn’t want her to think I was different.

A week later, some mates gave a dinner party. Welcome home, Spike! At my mate Arthur’s place. Cress turned up with my cousin Eugenie—a.k.a. Euge. I hugged them both, saw the shock on their faces.

They said I looked like a completely different person.

Stockier? Bigger? Older?

Yes, yes, all that. But also something else they couldn’t name.

Whatever it was, it seemed frightening or off-putting to Cressida.

We agreed, therefore, that this wasn’t a reunion. Couldn’t be. Can’t have a reunion with someone you don’t know. If we wanted to keep seeing each other—and I certainly did—we’d have to start again.

Hello, I’m Cress.

Hello, I’m Haz. Nice to meet you.

I got up each
day, went to the base, did my work, enjoyed none of it. It felt pointless.

And boring. I was bored to tears.

More, for the first time in years, I was without a purpose. A goal.

What’s next? I asked myself every night.

I begged my commanding officers to send me back.

Back where?

To the war.

Oh
, they said,
ha-ha, no
.

In March 2013 word came down that the Palace wanted to send me on another royal tour. My first since the Caribbean. This time: America.

I was glad for the break in the monotony. On the other hand I was also worried about returning to the scene of the crime. I imagined days and days of questions about Vegas.

No, Palace courtiers assured me. Impossible. Time and the war had eclipsed Vegas. This was strictly a goodwill tour, to promote the rehabilitation of wounded British and American soldiers.
No one is going to mention Vegas, sir.
Cut to May 2013, me touring the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy, alongside New Jersey governor Chris Christie. The governor gifted me a blue fleece, which the press spun…
as his way of keeping me clothed
. Actually, Christie spun it that way too. A reporter asked him what he thought of my time in Las Vegas, and Christie vowed that if I spent the whole day with him, “nobody’s going to get naked.” The line got a big laugh, because Christie is famously stout.

Before Jersey I’d gone to Washington, D.C., met with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, visited Arlington National Cemetery, laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I’d laid dozens of wreaths before, but the ritual was different in America. You didn’t place the wreath on the grave yourself; a white-gloved soldier placed it with you, and then you laid your hand singly, for one beat, upon the wreath. This extra step, this partnering with another living soldier, moved me. Holding my hand to the wreath for that extra second, I found myself a bit wobbly, my
mind flooding with images of all the men and women with whom I’d served. I thought about death, injury, grief, from Helmand Province to Hurricane Sandy to the Alma tunnel, and I wondered how other people just got on with their lives, whereas I felt such doubt and confusion—and something else.