Harry had signed up to join the Blues and Royals, the second oldest regiment in the British army and part of the Household Cavalry. As the graduates removed the velvet strip from their sleeves to reveal their pips—their new officer’s rank insignias—Second Lieutenant Wales learned he would now be a cornet in the Household Cavalry.
LATER THAT MONTH, Harry returned to Lesotho. He had never forgotten those who had been affected by AIDS in this “forgotten kingdom.” A true son of Diana, Harry did something about it.
“I’m not going to be some person in the royal family who just finds a lame excuse to go abroad and do all sorts of sunny holidays. I’ve always been like this; this is my side that no one gets to see. I believe I’ve got a lot of my mother in me . . . and I just think she would want us to do this, me and my brother. Obviously, it’s not as easy for William as it is for me. I think I’ve got more time on my hands to be able to help. I’ve always wanted to go to an AIDS country to carry on my mother’s legacy.”
With Lesotho’s Prince Seeiso, still a dear friend, they founded Sentebale, the Princes’ Foundation for Children in Africa. Sentebale offers long-term support to Lesotho’s community organizations that assist young people, especially children, whose lives have been impacted by the AIDS epidemic. In Lesotho, people use the word sentebale to say goodbye to each other. The word means “forget me not.” That sentiment perfectly blended Harry’s and Seeiso’s intention of never forgetting their mothers and the charitable work they did during their lifetimes, or the children who are too often forgotten—not only by their own nation, but by so-called First World countries.
On his return to England, Harry began his twelve-week troop leader’s training program at the Household Cavalry’s Bovington Camp in Dorset, where he’d start to learn the necessary skills to lead a team of a dozen soldiers into a war zone. There his role would be to scout enemy positions from Scimitar armored vehicles—which meant that Harry also had to learn how to operate tanks.
While the Household Cavalry has a ceremonial presence at state occasions—a perfect way for Harry, and later William, to combine their military duties with their royal obligations—Harry had chosen this regiment for its foreign brief as well. The Household Cavalry is also charged with executing front-line recon. By the time he completed the course, Harry would be an armored reconnaissance troop leader.
Yet the party animal had not been drummed out of him, and the summer of 2006 was a particularly sodden one. William had been by his side for so much of it that the press had tagged them “The Booze Brothers,” a reputation they could ill afford.
Harry spent the long summer nights of 2006 at just about every trendy venue, sometimes with William and his then-girlfriend Catherine Middleton, and sometimes with Chelsy, who was supposed to be Harry’s steady girl; but on occasion, the paparazzi would catch “the spare” with his hands and/or lips where they shouldn’t be, on women he wasn’t seriously dating at the time. As chronicled by Harry’s biographer Katie Nicholl, when the inevitable photos hit the morning papers, Harry would find himself placing an awkward long-distance call to Chelsy to explain his behavior.
To Prince Charles’s relief, Chelsy was a calming influence on Harry when she was in London, but she was also enabling him: by his side in the violet lights of Boujis, a posh Kensington nightclub (and only one of Harry’s usual pre-hangover hangouts), downing the famously potent Crackbaby cocktails—Chambord, vodka, and fresh passion fruit juice, topped with champagne, and served in a test tube. One night, after running up a $4,200 bar tab, Harry was photographed stumbling bleary-eyed into the night. The Queen was not amused.
Confiding in her friends in South Africa, Chelsy told them that she’d assured Harry she was in their relationship for the long haul, although she worried about her beau’s roving eye. It was difficult for her to keep her word when she saw Harry in the tabloids canoodling with another woman. His infidelity was both humiliating and infuriating. Yet she also made it clear to the prince that she had no interest in becoming a member of “The Firm.” According to Katie Nicholl, one of Chelsy’s female friends recalled that Chelsy loved being Harry’s girlfriend but “came to resent” all the outside attention that came with it. “She’s actually a very private person and she hated the cameras following her all the time.” She gave the relationship her best for years, but in the long run, spending the rest of her life perpetually in the public eye or constrained by centuries of protocol was not for her. Chelsy’s free-spirited nature—one of the reasons Harry was so entranced by her in the first place—was also one of the reasons their relationship would go only so far.
IN MID-AUGUST, THE Ministry of Defence confirmed that the following spring Harry would join the next regiment of Blues and Royals being shipped out to Afghanistan.
But a lot can happen in three quarters of a year.
Despite Harry’s patriotism, resolve, and determination to serve, sending him to the front lines was proving to be a logistical nightmare for the MOD. For starters, corralling the media would be problematic. Even if they were not privy to sensitive information, their progress reports and updates on where the prince and his regiment would be posted compromised the troops’ safety. Precious little in the world remains a secret; regardless of efforts to keep Harry’s location confidential, word would eventually leak out. Because of who he was, Harry was already a target of Taliban insurgents who’d been offering bounties for his head. Centuries ago, kings and princes did lead their own troops into battle, but those days are long gone.
On the other hand, Harry had attended Sandhurst on the backs of the taxpayers at an expense of hundreds of thousands of pounds. What was it all for if he was to remain at home and never use the training he received?
Harry’s uncle Andrew had felt the same way back in 1982 when he was a fighter pilot during the Falklands War—a conflict between Great Britain and Argentina over possession of two British overseas territories in the South Atlantic. At the time, Andrew was next in the line of succession behind Prince Charles.
Ultimately, the head of the British armed forces—the Queen herself—weighed in. Her Majesty supported Harry’s desire for deployment to the front lines, agreeing that his military training, education, and skills should not be squandered. “She was very pro my going,” Harry later said.
He arrived at his new barracks in Windsor in September 2006. Although some of his fellow officers were awed by who he was, the rank and file was made up of cooler chaps. Harry, clearly his mother’s son, employed his natural empathy to put his men at ease by talking to them about their own lives and interests. They were impressed when he remembered those details.
James Wharton, who was under Harry’s command then, noticed how the prince almost stripped himself of his royal position when he donned the uniform. “He becomes—even more than he should really—one of the lads,” citing the way Harry would spend hours talking or playing Xbox with the guys. He really had the common touch, as Wharton observed up close. “At the time he was third in line to the throne—you can’t get more aristocratic than that—but he was the most down-to-earth.”
As Harry continued to train for what he hoped would be an eventual posting to the front, either in Iraq or Afghanistan, painful wounds were reopened. On December 14, 2006, the investigation into his mother’s death released an 832-page document titled The Operation Paget Inquiry Report into the Allegation of Conspiracy to Murder, which concluded the accident was due to the negligence of a drunk driver behind the wheel. There had been no conspiracy to assassinate Diana or Dodi. In other words, it didn’t have to happen. But Harry didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on the events of the past or mourning what might have been. He had to focus on both the present and the future.
On the assumption that all systems would eventually be go, Harry was sent to the Castlemartin Training Area, the Ministry of Defence’s 2,400-acre firing range in South Pembrokeshire, where he participated in pre-deployment exercises. He kept his nerve during simulated detonations of the IE
Ds, the improvised explosive devices that he would no doubt experience in country. Harry’s favorite part of the pre-deployment training was known as minor agro, in which he had to get his men out of a hostile situation and fight their way out of an ambush.
An officer who trained with Harry attested to the prince’s leadership skills, his competence and confidence, and his strong and easy rapport with the soldiers. Harry also did well in cultural training, in which he was briefed on the local language and tribal customs where he might be deployed.
On February 21, 2007, Harry was informed he would be sent to Iraq that June, joining the Household Cavalry’s A Squadron. The prince would carry out a normal troop commander’s role, leading twelve men in four armored Scimitars.
But, Harry being Harry, there had to be a hiccup before he shipped out. A month before his send-off bash, at which he was on his best behavior, the prince had spent an evening swilling Crackbabies at Boujis with sportscaster friend and sometime flirtation Natalie Pinkham. He stepped into the night and made a lunge at an offending paparazzo, but lost his footing, ending up doing a humiliating face-plant in the gutter instead.
Unfortunately, Harry’s send-off party was premature. On May 16, 2007, the Ministry of Defence slammed the brakes on Harry’s deployment to Iraq. Two of the Queen’s Royal Lancers had been killed there two weeks earlier. And there had been credible threats against Harry, some of which referenced plots to kidnap him and smuggle him to Iran, where it would be extremely difficult to rescue him. Sending Harry to Iraq now would expose not only the prince but those around him—a risk that had become unacceptable to the MOD. It was far too dangerous to deploy him.
Harry got it, but he was angry. However, like a well-trained royal, he stuffed his emotions in public. “I would never want to put someone else’s life in danger when they have to sit next to the bullet magnet,” the prince conceded after being told he wasn’t going overseas after all. Friends familiar with Harry’s state of mind at the time said he was emotionally gutted, devastated to the point of depression as he watched his men head off to war without him. He’d trained with them, felt responsible for them, should have been with them. He had zero interest in being a pencil pusher in some office somewhere; and as far as he was concerned, all of his training had been a colossal waste of time, reiterating, “If I am not allowed to join my unit in a war zone, I will hand in my uniform.”
The ministry got the message, although they had the final say. In May 2007, they sent Harry to Alberta, Canada, to be retrained as a battlefield air controller, learning live-fire exercises, with future plans to get him—covertly—to the front lines in that role, after the media furor over his initial plans for deployment had subsided.
The shiny object distracting them was the upcoming memorial service and charity concert that Harry and William were coproducing to commemorate the tenth anniversary of their mother’s death. Assisting the princes were a number of pros from the palace, as well as from the business and theater communities.
The concert, to be held on July 1—what would have been Diana’s forty-sixth birthday—and the memorial service, on August 31, the date of her passing, were intended to be upbeat; to celebrate the achievements of her young life, rather than to dwell on the tragedy of her death.
Diana’s public face was only one side of her, a very small side, Harry remarked at the time, adding that he and William enjoyed their own memories of her as “just Mummy”—the blithe-spirited, music-loving mother who cracked them up with her naughty jokes and danced barefoot in their Kensington Palace drawing room to Michael Jackson’s greatest hits.
As originally conceived, the July 1, 2007, concert would be a celebration for the younger generation of royals, although the twenty-three acts would include dancers from the English National Ballet, which had been one of the princess’s patronages, along with pop stars from her generation—Rod Stewart and Elton John, who had so memorably performed at her funeral—as well as icons of Charles’s era (such as Tom Jones). The BBC would also broadcast the concert around the world.
To promote the Concert for Diana, which would raise money for the royals’ charities, Harry and William granted their first-ever interview for American television, which aired on NBC’s popular morning show Today. Filmed at Clarence House, where they lived with their father, the princes, casually dressed in chinos and button-down Oxford cloth shirts (Harry in pink, William in blue) were articulate, funny, approachable, and charming, completing each other’s sentences.
Asked about their mother, Harry, then twenty-two, admitted that not a day went by that they didn’t think of her—or what happened on the final night of her life. “For me, personally, whatever happened that night . . . in that tunnel . . . no one will ever know. I’m sure people will always think about that the whole time. I’ll never stop wondering about that.”
Ever since her death, Harry remained haunted by images of his mum. It was a chapter he felt would never close because “I think when she passed away . . . there was never that sort of peace and quiet for any of us. Her face was always splattered on the paper [sic] the whole time. Over the last ten years I personally feel as though she has been—she’s always there. She’s always been a constant reminder to both of us and everyone else . . . when you’re being reminded about it, [it] does take a lot longer and it’s a lot slower.”
Because they’d never been given the time and space to breathe and grieve, ten years on, the pain of losing their mother was still palpable. Both Harry and William admitted that they knew from birth what duties were expected of them in their public lives, which is why they were always so eager for their private lives to be as normal as possible—and yet they also recognized that this ambition was a pipe dream, because there was nothing remotely normal about being a prince of the House of Windsor.
The July 1 concert was a massive success. Chelsy was there, seated in the front row beside Harry; and another 63,000 souls packed Wembley Stadium to view the event live, as it was beamed to a TV audience of nearly one billion people in 120 countries worldwide. The net proceeds of £2.5 million were distributed among Diana’s favorite charities as well as to eight of the princes’ charities, including Sentebale and Centrepoint—where Diana had taken them as boys to meet and chat with the young at-risk residents at the London hostel.
Harry delivered the eulogy at the memorial service for Diana, held at the Wellington Barracks on August 31, 2007. A tall, strapping man of nearly twenty-three, he seemed so far from the preadolescent boy who’d been a foot shorter a decade earlier, so somberly keeping pace alongside his longer-limbed grandfather, father, brother, and uncle Spencer—and so clearly a child then that every heart broke as he passed, his head bowed, grimly fixed on the last sight of his beloved mum, lying beneath a bier of lilies.
Time had marched on as well. There was Harry at the service proudly wearing the uniform of his Blues and Royals regiment. A slightly quivering lip was the only tell of the deep emotion he held in check as he reminded the guests of Diana’s “unrivaled love of life, laughter, fun and folly,” and of her importance to her sons: “She was our guardian, friend, and protector . . . quite simply the best mother in the world.”
One had only to silently pause in the moment to consider some of Harry’s own behavior of the past decade to recognize how sorely their protector was missed every day.
At the end of the eulogy Harry—his mother’s redheaded Spencer—sat with her side of the family. The gesture was clear: Harry was every bit as much a Spencer as he was a Windsor. This memorial service marked the first time both sides of Harry’s family had been in one place since they mourned his mother in Westminster Abbey a decade earlier—when his uncle Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, eulogized Diana in a passionate indictment of the royal family, accusing them of callous insensitivity toward his sister and her unique gifts.
To everything there is a season; and now it was time to embrace.
Uniforms
You’re in the Army Now
In sho
rt order, Harry’s greatest wish was about to be granted: he was going off to war. The Ministry of Defence’s Chief of the General Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, met with representatives of both the print and broadcast media at Clarence House—off the record—to issue a D-notice, a blanket ban on media coverage until Harry was safely back on British soil. The press agreed to comply, but they had their own conditions: Fleet Street requested pre- and post-deployment interviews with the prince and access to Harry while he was in country. It was a small price to pay in exchange for his own ambitions. Harry acquiesced.
To train for his mission as a forward air controller, he spent a month at the RAF base in Leeming, North Yorkshire. In civilian terms, Harry’s role would be the army’s equivalent of an air traffic controller, guiding various types of aircraft, from high-speed bombers to surveillance planes to troop transport jets to supply drop carriers, to their specific targets.
On the frosty morning of December 14, 2007, Cornet Wales departed from Brize Norton air base in Oxfordshire aboard an RAF C-17 Globemaster transport jet. Coincidentally, it was the same airfield where his mother’s body had arrived a decade earlier. Harry hardly traveled first class—webbing suspended from the interior sides of the plane would serve as seating for the long, bumpy flight to Kandahar. Inside his fifty-five-pound pack were an inflatable air mattress, a sleeping bag, a radio, protective goggles, sunscreen, and his favorite sweet—Haribo gummies. His weapons would be returned to him when he arrived in Afghanistan. On his wrist, Harry sported a red-and-blue Help for Heroes band. Chelsy, there to see him off and one of the few who knew where he was headed, wore an identical bracelet.
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