New biography reveals bravery of Prince Harry

New biography reveals bravery of Prince Harry



The bleak villages and arid landscape of war-torn Helmand province might seem like a strange kind of ‘normal’, but for Prince Harry, the desert skies offered the greatest freedom he has ever known.



Deployed to southern Afghanistan with the Household Cavalry in late 2007, he found for the first time in his life that he could be almost completely anonymous, unrecognised in a world still without television.



The Prince could sit down to drink chai with village elders in the certain knowledge that they had no idea at all who he might be.



‘It’s very nice to be out of touch from everything. That is probably the nicest bit about this place,’ he said at the time.



‘OK, you’re walking around in two inches of sand, but you’re miles away from everybody, miles away from everything. It’s very nice to be a normal person for once.’



Yet his presence in Afghanistan brought terrible risks.



Home for Harry was an isolated forward operating base in the perilous Garmsir area, close to the Pakistani border which was, according to his commanding officer Major Mark Millford, ‘about as dangerous as it can get’ – as the Prince would soon discover for himself.



Harry was employed as a forward air controller and his task was to study what the troops knew as ‘Taliban TV’.



This was a live video feed from high-resolution cameras mounted on aircraft and unmanned drones.



Studying the images beamed to his laptop, Harry would hunt for troop movements or even signs of body heat that could betray the position of the Taliban.



The task was a delicate one, and Harry spent endless hours consulting detailed ‘pattern of life’ studies to identify places such as schools, mosques and marketplaces with innocent civilian traffic to ensure they were not targeted.





His first taste of action came as New Year’s Eve approached. Harry had stayed at his post in the operations room – a prefabricated hut lined with detailed maps – until well after midnight to make sure that his co-ordinates were accurate and that his intended targets were legitimate military objectives.



When a camera on a Desert Hawk drone picked out the shape of Taliban fighters moving between bunkers, he was watching.



Just before 10am, an enemy force attacked a group of Gurkhas at a small British observation post.



The first response came from three Royal Artillery guns at another British base seven miles away.





This helped force the Taliban back. From his operations room, Harry plotted their retreat and scrambled two American F-15 fighters, ordering them to a holding position six miles away.



There, downwind and out of sight and earshot, the planes were a hidden de*th sentence for the Taliban fighters who by now had fled to a base codenamed Purple.



A period of deceptive calm followed, and a group of some 15 Taliban cautiously emerged in the false belief they were safe and undetected.



But the F-15s were waiting. And that was when Harry knew his moment had come.



Double-checking the co-ordinates, he called in the jets. The pilots signalled that they were in position with the words ‘In Hot’.



'After further checks, Harry delivered the command to attack, with the words ‘Cleared Hot’.



The jets screamed towards their target and dropped a single 500 lb bomb with devastating consequences.



The Taliban bunker – one Harry had been watching for days – simply disappeared amid the debris and dust of a ground-shuddering explosion.





Then there was a pause. To be sure, Harry called the jets back just minutes later with a second bomb. He could see no sign of life on Taliban TV.



The Prince’s first mission had been a success.



For Harry, however, the risks would only increase. Shortly afterwards he was moved to an even more isolated position at Forward Operating Base Edinburgh, close to the Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala.



Just weeks before, fundamentalist forces had been driven out of the town following a fierce three-day battle.



The mission for Harry’s C Squadron was to carry out reconnaissance on Taliban villages in Scimitar armoured cars and Spartan armoured personnel carriers.





They were also responsible for making routes safe for British and Nato troops in an area heavily mined with crude but devastatingly effective improvised explosive devices (IEDs).



These were a clear and ever-present danger. This time, his contact with the enemy was rather more direct.



Out on reconnaissance, Harry and his comrades were frequently shot at in their Spartan.



Indeed, on just the second day of his posting with C Squadron, they found they were sitting ducks.



‘We were approaching a tiny bridge over a dry wadi [water channel] and we immediately slowed down,’ recalled Captain Dickon Leigh-Wood, who had known Harry since their days at Ludgrove prep school and who had trained with him at Combermere Barracks, near Windsor.