Prince Harry has been unavoidable in recent weeks as the quasi-king made the press rounds to promote 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 for ten years during the war in Afghanistan from 2007, eventually reaching the rank of Captain in the British Army. On his second assignment, he flew Apache helicopters.
In Spare, Prince Harry revealed he had killed 25 people in Afghanistan – all members of the Taliban, he claimed. He called his victims “chess pieces taken off the board, bad guys eliminated before they kill the good guys” and said he wasn’t “ashamed” of his actions because he had been conditioned by the military not to feel anything.
“You can’t kill people by seeing them as people,” he wrote. “They trained me to ‘change’ them, and they trained me well.”
During a much-hyped appearance Tuesday night on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the presenter awkwardly asked Harry about the controversial passage.
“Another strange thing about this is that this is nothing new. Here’s an article from – I think it’s from Portal – from ten years ago describing how you killed Afghan insurgents, the Taliban, in operations,” Colbert offered.
“Almost ten years to the day, my face was spattered on the front pages because someone asked me, while I was still in Afghanistan, if I had killed anyone by a helicopter gunship. And I said ‘yes’,” Harry explained to the comic.
As for why he chose to share these troubling details in his memoir, Prince Harry, who has spent much of his time helping wounded veterans cope with PTSD — and invited veterans to tape the Late Show — said it all Part of his mission is to help struggling vets.
“I chose to share it because, after spending nearly two decades working with veterans around the world, I think the most important thing is to be honest and give others space so that they.” Shame on being able to share their experiences without them,” said Prince Harry. “And my whole goal and attempt to share that detail is to reduce the number of suicides.”
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Prince Harry’s admission in his memoir that he killed 25 Afghan insurgents and called them “pawns” has sparked a spate of protests in Afghanistan – including at a local university in Helmand, the AP reported.
“The atrocities committed by Prince Harry, his friends or anyone else in Helmand or anywhere in Afghanistan are unacceptable, cruel. These acts will go down in history,” Sayed Ahmad Sayed, a professor at the university, told AP during the protest.