The Duke of Sussex, Britain’s Prince Harry, revealed in his memoirs that he killed 25 people during his second visit to Afghanistan.
Prince Harry has said he has completed six missions that have resulted in “human casualties” of which he is neither proud nor ashamed.
In his book The Spear, he wrote that in the midst of the fighting, he thought of 25 not as “people” but as “chess pieces” taken off the board, according to As reported by The Telegraph..
This is the first time the 38-year-old has discussed the number of Taliban fighters he personally killed during his military service.
Spear’s book has already been sold in Spain, where The Telegraph bought a Spanish-language copy from a bookstore.
Recounting his time in Afghanistan, the prince recounted how, upon his return to base, he would watch a video of each “kill” where a video camera mounted on the nose of his Apache helicopter recorded each completed mission.
He added that during the “noise and confusion of fighting” he saw the rebels he killed as “bad ones who were finished off before they could kill the good ones.”
He pointed out that a man could not be killed “if you look at him as a man,” but the army “trained me” in “others” and they “trained me well.”
And he added: “I set a goal … from the first day … never go to bed with any doubts about whether I did the right thing … whether I shot at the Taliban and only at the Taliban, with no there were civilians… I wanted to go back to Britain with all my limbs, but most of all I wanted to go home with my conscience.”
He explained that soldiers in war usually didn’t know how many enemies they had killed, but “in the era of Apaches and laptop computers” he could tell exactly “how many enemy combatants I killed, and it seemed to me important not to be afraid of that number.”
“So my number is 25… it’s not a number that satisfies me, but it doesn’t embarrass me,” he continued, noting that “part of the reason he doesn’t feel guilty about losing his life is because he never forgot being in the TV room at Eton watching the news of the attacks.” September 11 attacks New York, and later meets with the families of the victims of the attacks during visits to America.
Prince Harry was appointed forward air traffic controller for Helmand province during his first tenure in 2007-2008, which was cut short when foreign news outlets violated a news ban agreed to by the British media.
Source: “Telegraph”