London, Europe Brief News – Prince Harry says that he killed 25 Taliban fighters during his second tour of duty in Afghanistan.
According to reports based on the Spanish edition of his memoir, the British royal writes that he did not think of those he killed as “people” but as “chess pieces” to be taken off the board.
Prince Harry served as a forward air controller in Afghanistan’s Helmand province in 2007/8 and then as an Apache helicopter pilot in the British Army Air Corps deployed to Camp Bastion in the south of the country.
It was on that second tour that Harry says he killed 25 Taliban fighters, coming up with an exact figure after he watched video footage of every “kill” recorded by a camera mounted on his helicopter.
“So my number is 25,” the British prince writes. “It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction. But nor does it embarrass me.”
Prince Harry would watch the video footage of the missions back at base. He writes that in the “din and confusion of combat”, he saw the Taliban fighters he killed as “baddies eliminated before they could kill goodies”.
He did not, he writes, “see them as a person”, because to do so would have made it impossible for him to kill them. The British Army, he writes, had “trained me to ‘other’ them, and they had trained me well”.
“I made it my purpose, from day one, to never go to bed with any doubt over whether I had done the right thing,” Harry writes. “Whether I had shot at Taliban and only Taliban, without civilians in the vicinity. I wanted to return to Great Britain with all my limbs, but more than that I wanted to get home with my conscience intact.”
