The younger prince vowed it would be the ‘first time, last time, we’ll live together’ – with William observing acidly, ‘It’s been an “emotional” experience.’
Becoming serious, Harry put in a bid to get out to Afghanistan again. ‘[It] would be fantastic,’ he said, ‘and my best chance is to do it from a helicopter … I’m a bit of a Lynx lover since I started this course.’
Still more than a year from getting engaged to Kate, his elder brother agreed, expressing the hope that he too would be able to see serious action before long.
‘I didn’t join up to be mollycoddled or treated differently,’ said William. ‘As far as I am concerned, in my eyes, if Harry can do it, then I can do it.’
Prime Minister Gordon Brown did not agree. There were immense government benefits to be derived from handsome young princes undertaking military service – whether by helping to legitimise Britain’s controversial Afghan adventure or by raising troop morale and encouraging recruitment.
But the risks of dangling a future king in front of the Taliban were too great, not least since that would also endanger the soldiers around him. ‘Mollycoddling’ proved the only option. William’s helicopter destiny became domestic – and heroic enough, in all conscience, as he started to work in Search and Rescue on the island of Anglesey. In 2013 the heir moved to the Air Ambulance Service in East Anglia, where he settled with Kate in Anmer Hall on the Sandringham Estate and started raising their family. William would delay his royal duties in order to spend several years working as a full-time helicopter rescue pilot.
It was Harry who went to Afghanistan for a second tour of active duty – war was the perfect job for a royal ‘spare’. The prince had qualified as an Apache helicopter pilot in April 2011, the same month that William and Kate got married, and he was deployed to Helmand Province over Christmas 2012.
So once again the Queen said prayers for Harry over a Christmas lunch at Sandringham – while the prince put on a Santa hat to cook breakfast for his crew, then queued for his turkey dinner alongside the thousands of other servicemen and women who were deployed in Camp Bastion. His father had sent him some Highgrove honey for Christmas and a box of Cuban cigars – which Captain Wales promptly traded for sweets and chocolates with his fellow officers.
This time the prince completed his full eighteen-week tour at the battlefront without interruption, enjoying military success with his combat unit that was averaging two Taliban kills per week. Harry was proud to have made his own first kill within a few weeks of arrival, attributing his success to his skill with computer games.
It was ‘a joy for me,’ he explained in his pooled press interview, ‘because I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox. So with my thumbs, I like to think I’m pretty useful.’
Linking the killing of people to PlayStation ‘joy’ would not be well received when Harry got home, but the soldier prince was unapologetic.
‘Take a life to save a life,’ he responded stoutly to his critics. ‘That’s what we revolve around. If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game.’
‘I’m not here on a free pass,’ he continued. ‘Our job out here is to make sure the guys are safe on the ground, and if that means shooting someone who is shooting them, then we will do it.’
Speaking in the aftermath of another tabloid exposé, Harry was feeling especially anti-press. While enjoying a pre-combat spree with friends in Las Vegas, he had got involved in a game of strip billiards – miss a shot and you have to take off an item of clothing. It had been a hot night and since Harry started the game wearing only swimming shorts, it hadn’t been long before he was completely naked – and was rushing to the rescue of a young lady who was similarly bare. The resulting tableau was captured by the inevitable mobile phone and appeared shortly afterwards on the muck-raking US website TMZ. Within hours the grainy pictures of the naked prince cupping his ‘crown jewels’ had gone viral.
Prince Charles’s lawyers tried to keep the worst pictures out of UK papers on privacy grounds – Harry had been in a private hotel room, with a reasonable ‘expectation of privacy’. But the images went round the world, and then the Sun broke ranks under the headline ‘Heir It Is’. There was a clear public interest, argued the paper, in Britons seeing what everyone else could see.
Prince Harry was approaching twenty-nine years of age when his strip billiards pictures hit the papers in August 2012 – a full decade since his ‘Drugs Shame’ story of 2002 and nearly eight years since the swastika scandal of 2005. So how much progress had this young man really made?
For the last two years of his twenties, Harry would later confess, his life had slipped sideways into ‘total chaos … I just didn’t know what was wrong with me … I had probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions.’
William came to the rescue, urging him to seek professional help.
‘My brother was a huge blessing,’ Harry recalled. ‘He kept saying, “This is not right, this is not normal – you need to talk about stuff.”’
Working with Kate, William had recently been developing his involvement and contacts in mental health. It had always been an interest of his, but by then he was engaging in the cause more strongly, serving as an ambassador for the charity Heads Together, and he helped Harry to find a specialist he could talk to.
‘I started to have a few conversations,’ remembered Harry in 2017, ‘and actually all of a sudden, all of this grief that I had never processed started to come to the forefront and I was, like,
