by Penny Junor
They had a simple message. “It’s not about the rights and wrongs of war, we just want to support those who serve our country and are injured in doing so.” It caught the public imagination. The Sun got behind it; they launched a massive campaign called HELP OUR HEROES, encouraging readers to wear the distinctive tricolored wristbands. And then William and Harry put on those same wristbands and were photographed in them.
Bryn had telephoned Jamie and asked whether he might send some wristbands over to Clarence House for the Princes. “William and Harry wearing our wristband gave us fantastic credibility and their support was hugely appreciated,” says Bryn. “They wore the wristbands,” says Jamie, “and it just kind of went whoosh. That wasn’t down to them but they were a catalyst.” Soon they were a common sight on celebrity wrists and Help for Heroes took off. Within six months the Sun had helped raise over £4 million for the charity.
The original objective had been to raise money for a swimming pool at Headley Court, the military rehabilitation center near Leatherhead in Surrey, where wounded servicemen and -women were sent once they had been discharged from Selly Oak. By the time the swimming pool was officially opened by Prince William in June 2010, Help for Heroes had raised a staggering £57 million. As Colonel Jerry Tuck, who was Commanding Officer there at the time, says, “You don’t get a flavor for Headley Court until you see the prosthetics department, because it is that which delivers the feel-good headlines. It’s a strength and a weakness of this place. As a strength, we can demonstrate to the nation that we are doing the best we possibly can for our patients; the weakness is that that might be interpreted by the nation as Happy Ever After, and for our complex trauma survivors, we don’t do Happy Ever After. We do maximum functional capacity that your injuries will allow you to do, but if you are a triple amputee, at the end of every day before you go to bed, you take off your very expensive componentry and you see, surgically, what is left of three previously fully functional limbs. I don’t believe that’s happy ever after. I don’t know what’s going to happen in ten, twenty or twenty-five years, thirty years, forty years—we’ve still got veterans from World War Two with prosthetics. What are the mental health implications down range? I’m not necessarily talking about post-traumatic stress disorder, but I am talking about reactive depression. It’s going to be very difficult if you are depressed because of the way your body looks, because your body’s going to look like that until the day you die.”
William and Harry had both visited Headley Court in April 2008. As William said in his speech of that day, “We expected to find a place of suffering with, perhaps, a pervading atmosphere of desolation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here reigns courage, humor, compassion and, above all, hope for the future. How can this be? Well, part of it—it seems to me—is down to the extraordinary spirit and indomitable nature of the British soldier, sailor and airman. However, it is also about individual courage, the refusal to give up—even in those darkest moments that each and every one of you must have gone through. But if courage is the foundation stone of recovery, the unconditional love and support of friends and family, and the unstinting dedication and selfless care of the staff here, and at Selly Oak, are the tools by which this stone is levered into place. And that unconditional love is exemplified by that of Help for Heroes for this place, Headley Court. This great day—the opening of this state-of-the art complex behind me—has been brought about by this unique charity and the millions who support it.
“Very occasionally—perhaps once or twice in a generation—something or someone pops up to change the entire landscape. Help for Heroes, under the magnificent and brilliantly quirky leadership of the mad cartoonist, Bryn, and his equally inspirational wife, Emma, is one such phenomenon. What it has achieved here at Headley Court is, in truth, but the tip of the iceberg. Help for Heroes has galvanized the entire British people. Always supportive of its men and women in uniform, this country has been elevated by Help for Heroes to a state of realization and proactive support for our military that has made me personally, very, very proud to be British, and a member of our Armed Forces.”
The brothers had also made several secret visits to Selly Oak. On one such visit, Harry met the families of two soldiers who had been unconscious for five days while their families sat at their bedside and waited. It was a common sight in Selly Oak. These boys were in a very bad way, but it seemed probable that they would pull through. The staff had put diaries at the end of their beds, in which the nurses and families and other visitors were encouraged to write something. These diaries had been shown to be helpful for patients when they came round and are usually wholly disoriented and think they are still on the battlefield under attack. According to the critical care manager, soldiers read the diaries over and over again and it helps to put their experience into perspective. Harry wrote, “For God’s sake, mate. Came to see you and what were you doing? You were kipping.” The families were delighted.
Bryn had asked whether the Princes might become patrons of Help for Heroes but was told they preferred not to be patron of any service charity but that they would be supporters. And when they were asked to the premiere of the James Bond film Quantum of Solace at Leicester Square, wary of being seen as celebrities, they accepted on two conditions: that the proceeds were split between Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion; and that both sides of the red carpet should be lined with veterans from Headley Court.
It was a cold night, but both Princes spent a full hour outside chatting to the wounded and their families. They then met the stars of the film, Daniel Craig and Dame Judi Dench. “Harry arrived in the foyer of the cinema laughing,” remembers Bryn, “and said to me, ‘I’ve made a terrible boob. I’ve just told Daniel Craig that Sean Connery was the best James Bond!’ ”
Bryn Parry is passionate about what he does—and with good reason. “When we started we thought we were going to raise half a million pounds and give it to some other charity that would help build a swimming pool,” he says. “Then we started meeting the guys. Rory Mackenzie, for example, is a very high leg amputee; he’d been a Para but had then gone to the Medics and been blown up in Iraq. He told us that he’d been to the Priory [a mental health hospital in Roehampton] because he thought he had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); he’d been asked not to talk about his military experience because it might upset everybody else in the group, and he was roomed next to a lady who was having bereavement counseling for losing her cat. He didn’t stay there very long. He didn’t have PTSD; he had stress because he’d lost his leg, his life had been turned upside down, he could no longer do the job he wanted, and his mum was miles away. Very early on, Emma and I started realizing we were in this for the longer haul.”
There are some extraordinary personalities who have done remarkable feats post-injury, like the Paralympians but, as Bryn says, they are not representative of the wounded population.
BY HOOK OR BY CROOK
Harry arrived back from Afghanistan in March 2008 to a hero’s welcome. General Dannatt had pulled him out four weeks ahead of schedule, after news of his deployment broke, and as he touched down at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, the media were waiting for the promised interview. He had shared the flight with two injured soldiers; both were comatose for the entire trip. One of them, Ben McBean, a twenty-one-year-old Marine, had lost his right leg and left arm. The other had taken shrapnel in the neck. One can only imagine how Harry must have felt that morning as he stood in front of the cameras with all his limbs intact, having been on that aeroplane for no better reason than because he was third in line to the throne.
It was a Saturday morning and Prince Charles and Prince William were both waiting at the airfield to welcome him home. Like every father and every brother of every soldier in Afghanistan, they had been extremely anxious about him and were greatly relieved to see him safe.
The interview began and Harry was very swift to point out who “the real heroes” were, and to dismiss any suggestion that he
was one of them. After about twenty minutes of questions, Harry was asked what was next for him. As he started to answer, William, who had been sitting to one side during the press conference, turned to Miguel Head, Chief Press Officer at the MoD, who was in charge of the proceedings, and ran his finger across his throat, indicating it was time to end the interview.
Aware that he was supposed to be the one in charge (and that there were still supposed to be another ten minutes to run), but loath to ignore the heir to the throne, Miguel got to his feet, stood in front of the camera and said, “Thank you, the interview’s over.” Everyone was very surprised, not least Harry, who chucked his bags into the back of the car and sped off with his father and brother to Clarence House. The Princes later sent a message saying how impressed they’d been that they had asked a press officer to end an interview and he’d actually done it. Never having met Harry before, Miguel had not known his comfort levels; one can only assume that William recognized his brother had done enough.
A few months later Miguel, who is not much older than both Princes, had a call from Clarence House, which culminated in an interview with them. They had decided they wanted their own spokesperson and had talked to their father who had agreed. Paddy Harverson’s principal focus was inevitably Charles and Camilla and, because of William and Harry’s historically rocky relationship with the media, they wanted someone whose focus would be on them alone.
“Harry had gone through a period when he’d been spotted falling in and out of nightclubs a lot,” says Paddy. “Compared to most other lads of his age, he was almost monk-like. What was happening again and again was, he would go out on a Friday night and admittedly he would have a big night and be up until 6.00 in the morning—but those pictures taken that night would be repeated for about three weeks, often as different stories, so you were left with the impression, as a reader, that he was out every night. He wasn’t at all and he got very fed up with it. They felt they needed someone to put the record straight on things like that and they wanted someone to help take them through their career, help ensure that the coverage about them was balanced, nothing more than that. I remember them saying this in the interview—it didn’t have to be positive, they just wanted it to be fair and balanced.”
Miguel joined the team as Assistant Press Secretary in September 2008 (and left to become William’s Private Secretary at the end of 2012), but in all that time says the only instruction he ever had from either of them was, “Please, please, always, always tell the truth.”
Frustrated by being pulled out of Afghanistan, Harry was immediately very keen to get back to the front line. “Of course, having gone once,” says Richard Dannatt, “he got a real appetite for it. Quite soon after he came back, he and Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton came to Kensington Palace, where I was living at the time as the Chief of General Staff, and we had a long talk about it, and with Pippa, my wife—the four of us had lunch together—talking about what really was the next stage in his military career to fulfill his ambition of getting back to Afghanistan. I was Colonel Commandant of the Army Air Corps at the time as well as everything else, and I said to him, ‘Why not think about flying—because you’re pretty anonymous in a helicopter? We’ve got attack helicopters, communications helicopters—Apache, Lynx—you can fly either of those.’ ‘How long will that take?’ ‘Well, it will take quite a long time, the best part of two years.’ ‘That’s far too long.’ ‘Yup, but actually it’s a really good skill to have; I think you’d enjoy it and there’s a very high probability that we’ll still be in Afghanistan and you can get back there.’ Of course at that stage one didn’t know whether he had a natural aptitude for helicopter flying. I suspected that being a whiz kid of the younger generation he probably did, because they all grow up with buttons and switches and joy sticks and things.”
The Army Air Corps training base is at Middle Wallop in Hampshire and the Chief Flying Officer was Lieutenant Colonel David Meyer. “When I first heard that Harry was going to come flying I had two thoughts: first, very simply, that’s fine; second was, but we don’t drop the standards because this is too serious. We all knew he was going to have to go on to Afghanistan; whether on an Apache or Lynx, he was going to have to be an operational pilot and the risks are too high. That message needed to be conveyed and I spoke to Jamie and he completely got it. There was a standard to be met and we weren’t going to cut corners. So he had a series of meetings along the lines of what if we did this, how would it look in terms of course length, opportunities, challenges, etc.? Then it was, okay, let’s give it a go and see what happens—how does he get on with his medical, his aptitude test, his interviews? He had to pass them; there wasn’t a bye at any stage.
“I first met him when I was on the interview panel. He came in, I thought, remarkably under-confident and very reserved. I was expecting somebody to fill the room more than he did, to be quite cocky and self-assured, and I was pleasantly surprised. He came across as a young subaltern, just another young subaltern, and I thought, that’s interesting, so you’re like anybody else because those interviews are not easy and I don’t think he thought he was going to get through it without problems.”
Having the right motivation was crucial, but so too was understanding just how long and relentlessly tough the course was. “It wasn’t so much are you quick-witted, have you got good hand–eye coordination? Those were going to be found out very quickly. It was: can you see it through to the end? Every day you are going to be criticized; every day you are going to have to perform and it’s a long course. The motivation has to be there to get up every morning and perform to the best of your ability and then do it again the next day and the next day and the next day, despite the fact that somebody’s saying you’re not good enough. You’ve got to be really determined to do it. It’s one of the longest professional qualification courses in the Army—and nobody sails through it. I used to say, ‘You want to fly? Great, but we’re not talking about flying from one airport to another; we’re talking about doing this at night in some pretty hostile environments. Flying’s one thing; operating is a completely different thing, and in eighteen months we’ve got to invest a lot of money and time and we’ve got to get the right result at the end of it.’ It’s a pretty tough course and the quality coming in is pretty good. They get weeded out. There’s a lot of competition so it takes quite a lot of courage just to put your head above the parapet and give it a go.”
There are three distinct phases to the course. Students start at Barkston Heath in Lincolnshire on light fixed-wing aircraft to learn the basic skills of flying. From there they move to RAF Shawbury in Shropshire, a tri-service school, where they learn the specific skills needed to fly a helicopter. The third stage, known as the Operational Training phase, is at Middle Wallop in Hampshire, which is Army specific, and involves training in flying in formation, flying at night, in bad weather, controlling other aircraft, controlling artillery. After four months of that, the pilots are awarded their wings, and told which aircraft they are most suited to fly—the workhorse Lynx or the Apache.
“One of the great strengths on any course is that if it’s well bonded and well integrated, the students will invariably do better, because they drag each other through it. If someone’s having a problem and they’re in isolation, that’s an issue. Harry’s course—and I do genuinely believe it had a lot to do with his influence—was incredibly well galvanized and they tended to galvanize around him. That was one of his key strengths, because he wasn’t better than anyone else at flying or anything like that, but he just understood the whole team ethic, how to win together, as opposed to be individuals going forward; and that was very refreshing. The problem with flying training is it can go wrong very quickly. If you have a bad trip, that’s fine, everybody has bad trips. If you have two or three bad trips, you’re suddenly on a very slippery slope, and by the end of the week you can be off, finished. You lose confidence, the course is marching on… It’s pretty ruthless, you can’t afford to carry people.
For six months, Harry and William overlapped at Shawbury. Like Harry, William had signed up for a short-term commission with the Army and had felt as strongly as his brother about serving on the front line, but because of the way the squadrons were rotating within the Blues and Royals, there was no chance he would get to Afghanistan during the length of his commission. There would also have been the same concerns about sending him as thwarted Harry. He had therefore decided, since he will one day, as King, be Colonel-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, to spend some time in the other services, to give him an understanding of all three at ground level. The job he finally settled on was search and rescue with the RAF, based at RAF Valley in Anglesey, which was the perfect solution and confounded any worries that he would be putting others in danger. On the contrary, it put no one but himself in danger, but allowed him to rescue others.