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Where do you look when somebody says: “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.
“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.”
That was Prince Harry fulfilling his contractual obligation to spill his guts in his new book Spare. (“An heir and a spare”: he is fifth in line to the British throne.) And to my surprise, I was shocked by what he said. Not by what he did, but by the fact that he put a number on it.
War stories: Prince Harry, in full military uniform, reviewed a global armada of warships on Sydney Harbour in 2013.Credit:Saeed Khan/AFP
I have been in close contact with the military world for much of my life, as a naval officer, an academic, a journalist, and a documentary filmmaker. I have interviewed at least 100 veterans about their experiences in war – and none of them ever mentioned how many people they had killed. Well, almost none.
There is no formal ban on talking about your “kill count”, but it’s in extremely bad taste. As retired Colonel Tim Collins, formerly of the British Army, put it: “Harry has badly let the side down. We don’t do notches on the rifle butt.”
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Rear Admiral Chris Parry, ex-Royal Navy officer, said: “Over 35 years of service, I’ve never heard anybody in the armed forces say what their score is. I think it’s highly unusual and, I think, if we’re going to be kind, it must be the ghostwriter who has put these words into Harry’s mouth.”
Probably, but Harry must have had a final veto on the content.
I know what happened to him. He took $40 million from his publishers for four books, but this is the only one that matters and they wanted their money’s worth. They needed shocking material, and the contract Harry signed obliged him to produce it. So they deployed enough “friends”, editors (and maybe lawyers too) to get it all out of him – drug use, frostbitten penis, kill count, quickie behind the pub, punch-up with his brother, everything. By the end, he was probably too dazed even to notice that he was breaking a basic military taboo, and would not be forgiven.