Forty-eight hours later, Harry reached FOB (forward operating base) Dwyer in the southern province of Helmand—still a Taliban stronghold, and considered one of the most dangerous regions on the planet. At the time of his arrival in December 2007, eighty-nine British soldiers had been killed in action in Afghanistan. Hundreds more had been wounded. The man who was then third in line to Britain’s throne was one of 30,000 UK military personnel to have been deployed there since the start of the war in 2001.
Harry’s army ID number was WA 4673A, but to the other pilots he’d be known as Window Six Seven, the radio call sign monitoring their movements. His role was to study maps and surveillance and video footage of the enemy from FOB Dwyer’s operations room, in order to identify Taliban forces on the ground and verify their coordinates, so as to clear them for attack. Harry also had to coordinate with coalition air forces, because they would require his permission to enter his airspace.
No one knew who Window Six Seven was, but his posh accent made him a hit with the female pilots. He’d chat easily with them when the pressure was off and was all business when things got “hairy.”
As things turned out, Harry had flown halfway across the world only to reconnect with a former grammar school classmate. His troop leader on desert sorties was an old Ludgrove mate, Captain Leigh Dickon-Wood. The twenty-seven-year-old captain took note of Harry’s easy camaraderie with “the boys,” as well as the prince’s ability to enjoy the rare privilege of privacy, with no paparazzi chasing him everywhere he went and no civilian protection detail shadowing his every move. Harry was in his element on the front lines, “always playing rugby or football or sitting around the fire telling stupid stories” and was a strong and competent leader when the time came.
On Christmas Eve 2007, Harry requested a particularly dangerous posting—to the Gurkhas at FOB Delhi near the Pakistan border in the town of Garmsir. The Gurkhas, or Royal Gurkha Rifles, are a unique regiment. Recruited from Nepal into the British army, the unit is particularly successful in Afghanistan because of the soldiers’ ability to comprehend the nuances of the local cultures.
There was nothing left of Garmsir. Feral cats roamed its bombed-out main street. A five-hundred-yard stretch of abandoned farms, disused trenches, and the rubble from constant shelling constituted the no-man’s-land that separated it from Taliban territory. FOB Delhi was subject to daily mortar attacks; it was a thirty-minute helicopter ride to medevac any wounded soldier to the closest field hospital.
In short, Harry wasn’t receiving the royal treatment during his deployment. And he couldn’t have been more delighted. His assignment with the Gurkhas was everything Harry wished for from a posting, everything he’d trained for. “What it’s all about is being here with the guys rather than being in a room with a bunch of officers . . . it’s good fun to be with a normal bunch of guys, listening to their problems, listening to what they think.”
Harry spent the holiday playing touch rugby with the Gurkhas. “Not your typical Christmas. But Christmas is overrated anyway.”
Whatever would his granny, whose Christmas holiday at Sandringham is considered sacred, have made of that remark?
That year, as the Queen delivered her annual Christmas Day address, which included a prayer for the safe return of every soldier on the Afghan front, only a handful of people were aware that her own grandson was among them.
Harry conceded that he had everything he could wish for: food, drink (even if the coffee and tea tasted identical), music, light, and shelter (such as it was). He and his men slept in a makeshift lean-to, made by affixing their tarps to their Spartan armored vehicle. Harry didn’t even miss alcohol, he told the embedded journalist John Bingham. Or the inability to go clubbing.
“It’s bizarre. I’m out here, haven’t really had a shower for four days, haven’t washed my clothes for a week, and everything seems completely normal. I think this is about as normal as I’m ever going to get.”
When his thoughts inevitably strayed to his mother, “Hopefully she’ll be proud,” Harry told Bingham. “She would be looking down having a giggle about the stupid things that I’ve been doing, like going left when I should have gone right . . . William sent me a letter saying how proud he reckons that she would be.”
Permitted only thirty minutes a week to speak with loved ones on the phone, Harry would call his family, as well as Chelsy, on the FOB’s satellite phone, with its invariably spotty signal. Chelsy tried to hide her fear for his safety during their calls, keeping her end of the conversation light and upbeat, joking about how she burned yet another lasagne. Only after she hung up did she permit herself to cry.
Harry and Chelsy also Facebooked each other using aliases; and he carried her photo in his pocket, proudly telling the guys about “Chedda,” his gorgeous South African girlfriend.
On New Year’s Day, Harry successfully called in his first air strike after Taliban forces opened fire on a British observation post. Two F-15 fighter jets armed with 500-pound bombs were assigned to Window Six Seven within seconds. Harry guided them from six miles out to their target.
The prince would experience his first firefight on January 2, 2008. Having been dispatched with the Gurkhas for a weeklong mission to an elevated nineteenth-century fort near FOB Delhi, Harry found himself five hundred yards from enemy trenches when twenty Taliban were spotted advancing toward his location. After a Javelin missile failed to stop them, Harry took command of a .50-caliber machine gun and aimed, using the distant plumes of smoke to guide him toward his targets. Thirty exhausting minutes later, the Gurkhas emerged victorious.
But his taste of exaltation would be brief.
Unbeknownst to the warrior prince, the Commonwealth press was not being so nice when it came to obeying the MOD’s D-notice on Harry’s whereabouts. New Idea, an Australian magazine, spilled the beans in January 2008. And neither the Ministry of Defence nor Clarence House issued a denial, which was tantamount to an admission.
As a measure of damage control, during the second week of January, the six SAS (Special Air Service) soldiers who’d accompanied Harry to Afghanistan were transferred to another forward operating base, FOB Edinburgh. Meanwhile, Harry experienced his ugliest taste of war yet when a Taliban rocket intended for his vehicle struck a civilian home instead. According to one of the prince’s colleagues, Deane Smith, “Harry was comforting a soldier as the charred remains of young children were removed from the battlefield to a military hospital.”
Unfortunately, the MOD’s efforts at containment had been unsuccessful. Ultraconservative American blogger Matt Drudge had piggybacked the New Idea’s article, repeating it on his website the Drudge Report. With the news of Harry’s Afghan deployment all over the Internet, it wouldn’t be long before he would become a deliberate target himself.
Harry was on radio duty on the morning of Leap Day, February 29, 2008, when the MOD began to receive the first reports that the prince’s cover had been blown. By midday London time, General Dannatt and the Chief of the Defence Staff, a man with the Monty Pythonesque name of Sir Jock Stirrup, decided to pull the plug on Harry’s deployment. It was too risky, particularly in light of his current location deep in the heart of Taliban territory.
Harry was given no advance notice of his premature departure. No explanation was provided for it. He was instructed to pack his bags immediately and say goodbye to his fellow soldiers.
On March 1, Harry arrived back at Brize Norton air base on an RAF TriStar passenger jet along with 160 troops, including three seriously wounded Royal Marines. One had lost his right leg and left arm. Another had taken shrapnel to his neck. “Those are the real heroes,” Harry insisted.
And he made no secret of his desire to return to the front as soon as possible. “I don’t want to sit around in Windsor. I generally don’t like England much, and you know it’s nice to be away from the papers and all the general shit they write.”
It says a lot about Harry’s thorny relationship with the press that he’d rat
her be a target of the Taliban than of Fleet Street and the paparazzi.
His aunt, Princess Anne, the Colonel of the Blues and Royals, awarded him a service medal on May 7, 2008. Chelsy sat proudly beside Prince Charles in a place of honor. It was her first official royal engagement. Owing to Harry’s military and charitable commitments, they had seen little of each other over the past several months; and when they did reconnect, things did not always go smoothly. However, Chelsy still seemed willing to make the investment in their relationship, remaining in the UK after her law school graduation instead of returning to Africa. To that end, she had accepted a position as a trainee solicitor with the prestigious firm of Allen & Overy.
Harry was keeping several plates in the air. In the royal family, the older you get, the more demands are made on you. He and William participated in the Enduro Africa ’08 motorcycle rally—an eight-day, one-thousand-mile journey in 104-degree heat to raise money for children’s charities in Africa, including Sentebale, UNICEF, and the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.
Harry was also training for his second deployment to a war zone—this time as a helicopter pilot. It would require an entirely new set of skills and rigorous exams, both physical and academic. Math had never been Harry’s forte. But if he wanted to achieve his ultimate goal of flying the fixed-wing beast of his dreams, the four-blade twin-engine Apache all-weather attack helicopter, he’d have to overcome his math anxiety and manage (as some biographers have reported) his dyslexia.
Meanwhile, Chelsy was reading the handwriting on the wall and reaching her own conclusions. She had no interest in being compared to William’s longtime girlfriend Catherine Middleton, whom the press had nicknamed “Waity Katie.” Chelsy needed to be her own person first and foremost, and was sick of the endless loop that she and Harry were in. Everything would be wildly romantic between them; but when they were apart, whether he was in London or away at a training camp, he would flirt and canoodle with other women. She returned a blue topaz ring Harry had given her and changed her Facebook relationship status to single—a cruel, and very public, blow.
But in February 2009, when Chelsy received a copy of Crocodile Dundee as an anonymous Valentine’s Day gift, she suspected Harry. He had always been jealous of a handsome male friend of hers from back home in Africa who literally hunted crocodiles, and he had always feared that Chelsy might hook up with him whenever things went sour. Harry denied sending the gift when Chelsy phoned to ask him (“He would say that, wouldn’t he?” Chelsy told her friends); but she and the prince had such a giggle about it over the phone that it reignited their spark.
That May, having mastered the academic rigors of “heli” flying and the motor skills to pilot the smaller craft, winning the Horsa Trophy, an honor bestowed on “the man you would most want on your squadron,” Harry joined his older brother at the Defence Helicopter Flying School at RAF Shawbury near Shrewsbury. The Firm should have been proud that the youngest generation was proving itself in the military. Better fly-boys than playboys. But tradition and modernity were at odds. In fact, Buckingham Palace felt the princes should be doing more. It was time for William and Harry to assume a larger role within the royal family, expanding their public activities.
Moving On and Moving Out
Suits and Charities Abroad
USA is the number one non-news cable network in America, and Suits soon rocketed to number one on its prime-time roster. Meghan’s career had taken off. In 2012, during the show’s second season, the character of Rachel’s father, a high-powered attorney embodied by the formidable African American actor Wendell Pierce, entered the show.
Meghan believed her role on Suits was crucial because “some households may never have had a black person in their house as a guest or someone biracial. Well, now there are a lot of us on your TV screen and in your home with you.”
However, America in particular has a fraught—and sadly, ongoing—history of racism. Some were incapable of accepting the country’s biracial president at the time, and seeing a mixed race character on their television sets sparked an outcry. Internet trolls crawled out from under their boulders to tweet reactions that ranged from surprised (“Rachel is black?”) to confused (“Why would they make her dad black? She’s not black”) to repulsed (“Ew, Rachel is black? I used to think she was hot”). That last comment was reported for violating the terms of use and eventually blocked, but Twitter permitted equally hurtful and racist remarks to be posted.
Meghan wrote that the comments were unexpected—yet they captured something of the zeitgeist of the times in the wake of the racial unrest of the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri. “As a biracial woman I watch in horror as both sides of a culture I define as my own become victims of spin in the media, perpetuating stereotypes and reminding us that the States has perhaps only placed bandages over the problems that never healed at the root.”
When the five-seven Meghan started booking print modeling assignments, it would frustrate her to see her freckles removed and/or her skin tone lightened by magazine editors with a heavy hand on Photoshop. The practice remained a pet peeve even after she became a star because it airbrushes her ethnicity. It was Thomas Markle who had taught his daughter to be proud of every one of her features, telling her that “a face without freckles is a night without stars,” and Meghan has encouraged other young women of every race and color to embrace their natural beauty; and if they want to show it, fight for it.
Ironically, Meghan would eventually star in two television movies, When Sparks Fly (in 2014) and Dater’s Handbook (in 2016) for the Hallmark Channel, the most Wonder Bread, lily-white television storyteller, playing white characters, young women with two white parents and no mention of their ethnicity in the script. But because her real mother has dreadlocks and looks black, while Meghan looks pale enough to convincingly portray Caucasian characters, she frequently heard hurtful comments about whether Doria was in fact her biological parent.
Meghan wrote in an Elle magazine article in 2015, “to describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined. Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. In fact, it creates a gray area . . . a blurred line that is equal parts staggering and illuminating.” She admitted being more comfortable discussing fluffier topics, such as her go-to makeup brands, her favorite scene, or her pre-Pilates rituals.
It’s important to note that in her own words, Meghan Markle has “defined” herself as both black and white, refusing to deny the heritage of one parent or the other, each of whom not only gave her their genetics, but their life lessons and their unconditional love and support. From seventh grade, when she refused to check only one box for “ethnicity,” this is proudly, fiercely, who she is. With reference to that “gray area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence, I have come to embrace that. To say who I am, to share where I’m from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident mixed-race woman.”
From now on, if Meghan had another census questionnaire to fill out, she would not do as she had done as a middle schooler. She would not even check that amorphous “other” box. “I am enough exactly as I am.” Meghan’s advice to her readers: Cultivate your life with friends who don’t label people by their color when they describe them but rather by who they are. Denise in the casting department—not that Asian girl Denise who works in casting. Introduce yourselves as who you are, not by the color of your parents’ skin. It was always so tempting when people asked her, “Who are you?” to reply that she was half Californian, half Pennsylvanian, even when she knew that wasn’t the answer they were seeking.
The character of Rachel Zane was aspirational in many ways. Some of the outfits Meghan wore on camera emulated former first lady Michelle Obama’s high-low mixing and matching of designer labels with more affordable brands. Meghan even wore her own jewelry on the series, including her grandmother’s charm bracelet. While Rachel is usually in sheath dresses and pencil skirts wi
th blouses or twinsets, most of those ensembles also come from top-tier fashion designers, which a real-life Rachel could never afford on her paralegal’s salary. But anyone can imitate the looks for less from many chain stores, even H&M, where Meghan serendipitously pulled from the rack that thirty-five-dollar LBD that helped her win the role of a lifetime.
Unfortunately, Meghan’s personal life suffered from her success. Although she and Trevor Engelson had been together for seven years prior to tying the knot, they separated in 2013 after just two years of marriage. Citing irreconcilable differences, they ended their marriage that August. Meghan didn’t request a penny from Trevor in the divorce.
At the time, a mutual friend described Trevor as being “devastated at the split,” adding that “suddenly [Meghan] had no time for him.” It also may not have sat well with Trevor that Meghan was chilling out after a long and exhausting day on set playing Apples to Apples and drinking Scotch with the cast “into the wee hours of the night,” as well as spending holidays with her Suits family. They shot from March through November; and Meghan, a self-described “adopted Canuck” after several seasons on the show, would join the cast for the July 1 Canada Day festivities at Patrick J. Adams’s island retreat on the Georgian Bay.
But there are always at least two sides to every story, especially when the dissolution of a marriage is the plot line. Another source revealed that it was really Meghan’s career that became the biggest issue between her and Trevor. “The more successful she got, the more they drifted apart.” Perhaps what Trevor’s ego had the most trouble handling was not the distance between Los Angeles and Toronto but a highly successful wife.
Meghan was also accepting other acting work when Suits was on hiatus. Even when a performer is on a successful series, nothing lasts forever. A show can always be canceled. It’s safer in show business to live one’s life more like Aesop’s fabled ant than like his grasshopper, a steady and diligent worker when there is employment to be had; and hoarding income from one project as a hedge against lean times when work is scarce.
American Princess Page 12