Sophia Michaels
Prince Harry has been inescapable over the past couple of weeks, as the quasi-royal makes the press rounds promoting his new memoir Spare.
One of the more disturbing details the Duke of Sussex shared in his book concerned his time as a soldier in Afghanistan. Prince Harry served ten years during the war in Afghanistan, starting in 2007, and eventually attained the rank of captain in the British Army. During his second deployment, he flew Apache helicopters.
In Spare, Prince Harry revealed that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan — all members of the Taliban, he claimed. He called his victims “chess pieces taken off a board, bad guys eliminated before they kill the good guys,” and said that he did not feel “ashamed” for his actions because he’d been conditioned by the military to not feel anything.
“You can’t kill people if you see them as people,” he wrote. “They trained me to ‘other’ them, and they trained me well.”
During a much-hyped Tuesday night appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the host clumsily asked Harry about the controversial passage.
“Another odd thing about it is that this is nothing new. Here’s an article from — I believe this is from Reuters — from ten years ago describing that you had killed Afghan insurgents, the Taliban, in sorties,” offered Colbert.
“Almost ten years to the day my face was splattered all over the front pages because someone asked me the question, while I was still in Afghanistan, if I had killed anybody from an attack helicopter. And I said ‘yes,’” Harry explained to the comic.
As to why he chose to share these troubling details in his memoir, Prince Harry, who’s dedicated a great deal of time to helping wounded veterans manage PTSD — and invited veterans to the Late Show taping — said it was all part of his mission to help struggling vets.
“I made a choice to share it because having spent nearly two decades working with veterans all around the world, I think the most important thing is to be honest and to be able to give space to others to be able to share their experiences without any shame,” said Prince Harry. “And my whole goal and my attempt with sharing that detail is to reduce the number of suicides.”
Prince Harry’s admission in his memoir that he killed 25 Afghan insurgents, and his describing them as “chess pieces,” has sparked a series of protests in Afghanistan — including at a local university in Helmand, reported the AP.
“The cruelties which have been committed by Prince Harry, his friends or by anyone else in Helmand or anywhere in Afghanistan is unacceptable, cruel. These acts will be remembered by history,” Sayed Ahmad Sayed, a professor at the university, told AP during the protest.
