6 INCHES FROM DEATH
It’s the one chapter of Prince Harry’s life that has remained top secret – until now, as a new biography tells the dramatic story of his heroism in Afghanistan and the hidden bomb that left him just . . .
THE bleak villages and arid landscape of wartorn Helmand province might seem like a strange kind of ‘normal’, but for Prince Harry, the desert skies offered the greatest freedom he has ever known.
Deployed to southern Afghanistan with the Household Cavalry in late 2007, he found for the first time in his life that he could be almost completely anonymous, unrecognised in a world still without television.
The Prince could sit down to drink chai with village elders in the certain knowledge that they had no idea at all who he might be.
‘It’s very nice to be out of touch from everything. That is probably the nicest bit about this place,’ he said at the time.
‘OK, you’re walking around in two inches of sand, but you’re miles away from everybody, miles away from everything. It’s very nice to be a normal person for once.’
Yet his presence in Afghanistan brought terrible risks. Home for Harry was an isolated forward operating base in the perilous Garmsir area, close to the Pakistani border which was, according to his commanding officer Major Mark Millford, ‘about as dangerous as it can get’ – as the Prince would soon discover for himself.
Harry was employed as a forward air controller and his task was to study what the troops knew as ‘Taliban TV’. This was a live video feed from high-resolution cameras mounted on aircraft and unmanned drones.
Studying the images beamed to his laptop, Harry would hunt for troop movements or even signs of body heat that could betray the position of the Taliban.
The task was a delicate one, and Harry spent endless hours consulting detailed ‘pattern of life’ studies to identify places such as schools, mosques and marketplaces with innocent civilian traffic to ensure they were not targeted.
His first taste of action came as New Year’s Eve approached. Harry had stayed at his post in the operations room – a prefabricated hut lined with detailed maps – until well after midnight to make sure that his co-ordinates were accurate and that his intended targets were legitimate military objectives.
When a camera on a Desert Hawk drone picked out the shape of Taliban fighters moving between bunkers, he was watching.
Just before 10am, an enemy force attacked a group of Gurkhas at a small British observation post.
The first response came from three Royal Artillery guns at another British base seven miles away. This helped force the Taliban back. From his operations room, Harry plotted their retreat and scrambled two American F-15 fighters, ordering them to a holding position six miles away.
There, downwind and out of sight and earshot, the planes were a hidden death sentence for the Taliban fighters who by now had fled to a base codenamed Purple.
A period of deceptive calm followed, and a group of some 15 Taliban cautiously emerged in the false belief they were safe and undetected. But the F-15s were waiting. And that was when Harry knew his moment had come.
Double-checking the co-ordinates, he called in the jets. The pilots signalled that they were in position with the words ‘In Hot’. After further checks, Harry delivered the command to attack, with the words ‘Cleared Hot’.
The jets screamed towards their target and dropped a single 500lb bomb with devastating consequences. The Taliban bunker – one Harry had been watching for days – simply disappeared amid the debris and dust of a groundshuddering explosion.
Then there was a pause. To be sure, Harry called the jets back just minutes later with a second bomb. He could see no sign of life on Taliban TV.
The Prince’s first mission had been a success. FOR Harry, however, the risks would only increase. Shortly afterwards he was moved to an even more isolated position at Forward Operating Base Edinburgh, close to the Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala.
Just weeks before, fundamentalist forces had been driven out of the town following a fierce threeday battle.
The mission for Harry’s C Squadron was to carry out reconnaissance on Taliban villages in Scimitar armoured cars and Spartan armoured personnel carriers.
They were also responsible for making routes safe for British and Nato troops in an area heavily mined with crude but devastatingly effective improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
These were a clear and everpresent danger. This time, his contact with the enemy was rather more direct. Out on reconnaissance, Harry and his comrades were frequently shot at in their Spartan. Indeed, on just the second day of his posting with C Squadron, they found they were sitting ducks.
‘We were approaching a tiny bridge over a dry wadi [water channel] and we immediately slowed down,’ recalled Captain Dickon Leigh-Wood, who had known Harry since their days at Ludgrove prep school and who had trained with him at Combermere Barracks, near Windsor.
‘Whenever you approach something like a bridge, you’re on high alert because you’re expecting an ambush or an explosion.
‘The guys in the back of the Spartans dismounted with their metal detectors and went forward and cleared the route.
‘On that occasion we were lucky: the kit worked and no one got hurt.
‘We were shot at pretty much every day and we got in a proper scrap once a week, but he dealt with it all and I think that’s what made him such a good officer.’
Photographer John Stillwell, who was in Harry’s tank for the Press Association, recalls an even more terrifying moment when he, the Prince and his unit found themselves blocked by a crude landmine. ‘We were in a riverbed waiting for help.
We were shot at pretty much every day – but he dealt with it
There were houses on either side of us and I must admit, I was quite nervous – it was pretty dangerous,’ said Stillwell. ‘A sniper could easily have taken him out, but Harry didn’t seem to be worried at all.
‘He was just sitting up in the turret looking, watching, scanning both sides.’ As a forward air controller, it was Harry who called in a helicopter with a specialist Gurkha bomb disposal team on board. The Prince later recalled the episode: ‘It proves the system does work, and the guys on the ground are pretty hot s***.’
The disposal team blew up the IED and the tanks were able to advance to safety.
‘It was group bravery rather than individual bravery, but I never saw Harry look frightened and the IED was about ten yards away from him,’ recalled Leigh-Wood.
‘We were all expecting the worst. He’s a ballsy character. He never backed out of doing anything.’
Just a few days later came Harry’s closest brush with death.
Leigh-Wood was blunt: ‘We almost drove over an IED – it was a much closer shave than the first time.
‘One of the vehicles in the column suddenly noticed something flick underneath the tank in front and everyone was ordered to stop. You automatically think, “This is gonna go off. This is it.”
‘The previous vehicles, including Harry’s, had missed the pressure plate of an IED by about six inches. If any of us had gone over it, it would have been game over.’
Life in this unforgiving landscape was harsh. Harry and his colleagues slept in trenches known as shell scrapes that they had dug out and then surrounded with sandbags. Each trench slept up to four people, huddled together in their sleeping bags for warmth, with no more than a tarpaulin pulled over the top for protection.
The temperature often dropped to -26C at night. ‘It was boneachingly cold, but Harry just got on with it. I never once heard him complain,’ recalled Capt LeighWood. Far from it, it seemed that the Prince was actually revelling in his freedom.
Leigh-Wood continued: ‘He often went into the villages with the interpreter to chat to locals, just to find out what was going on, drink some chai, and experience their life.
‘He was never recognised and I think he really cherished that. These people had no TV. I don’t think they’d have recognised the Queen if she’d have been there. He was also brilliant at keeping everyone’s spirits up. We had a lot of Fijians in our troop. They love playing touch rugby and Harry’s obsessed with it, so he would often instigate a game right there in the middle of the desert with a ball he kept in the tank.’
There was one episode in particular that stays with Capt Leigh-Wood: Harry, a keen motorcyclist, had been shocked when an American soldier with a Special Forces unit opened fire without warning and hit a man on a motorbike in the leg.
The victim, a shepherd, was taken away for interrogation, even though he appeared to be an innocent civilian.
‘Harry came up to me and suggested, “We should go and get that motorbike,”’ Leigh-Wood said.
‘I asked him why and he said, “We need to give it back to that guy when he recovers and make sure someone else doesn’t steal it.”
‘Harry managed to clean it up and kick-start it. We gave it to the village elder and said it belonged to the wounded shepherd. They were very grateful.
‘It summed up Harry.’
Harry: Life, Loss, And Love, by Katie Nicholl, is published by Hachette on April 12, priced £20. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount, including free p&p) until March 25. Pre-order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640.