In a passage from his autobiography “Spare” (German: “Reserve”), Harry writes about the number of people he killed in his operations in Afghanistan. “Well, my number: twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But it wasn’t a number that I was ashamed of either.” While he would rather not have that number on his military resume, he would also prefer to live “in a world without Taliban and without war”. However, some facts could not be changed.
Many media outlets quoted this passage in the days leading up to the book’s publication, after it accidentally became temporarily available in Spanish bookstores. The passage where Harry describes the “taught deployment” of soldiers as problematic received less attention.