Spare (18 page)

No matter. Next day, you had to guzzle that plastic piss water again, from the same water bottle, and then get out there for another post-vomit run.

Oh, the running. We ran constantly. We ran around a track. We ran along a road. We ran through deep woods. We ran across meadows. Sometimes we ran with 40 kilograms on our backs, sometimes carrying a huge log. We ran and ran and ran until we passed out, which we sometimes did while still running. We’d lie there, half conscious, legs still pumping, like sleeping dogs chasing squirrels.

In between the runs we’d drag our bodies up ropes, or hurl them at walls, or ram them against each other. At night something more than pain would creep into our bones. It was a deep, shuddering throb. There was no way to survive that throb except to dissociate from it, tell your mind that
you
were not
it
. Sunder yourself from yourself. The color sergeants said this was part of their Grand Plan. Kill the Self.

Then we’d all be on the same page. Then we’d truly be One Unit.

As the primacy of Self fades, they promised, the idea of Service takes over.

Platoon, country, that’ll be all you know, cadets. And that’ll bloody well be enough.

I couldn’t tell how the other cadets felt about all this, but I bought in, all the way. Self? I was more than ready to shed that dead weight. Identity? Take it.

I could understand, for someone attached to their self, their identity, that
this experience might be harsh. Not me. I rejoiced as slowly, steadily, I felt myself being reduced to an essence, the impurities removed, only the vital stuff remaining.

A little like what happened in Tooloombilla. Only more so.

It all felt like an enormous gift, from the color sergeants, from the Commonwealth.

I loved them for it. At night, before blacking out, I gave thanks.

After those first five
weeks, after the close of boot camp, the color sergeants eased up. Ever so slightly. They didn’t shout at us quite so much. They treated us like soldiers.

As such, however, it was time to learn about war. How to make it, how to win it. Some of this involved stupefyingly boring classroom lessons. The better bits involved drills simulating different ways of being killed, or not, depending.

CBRN, they were called. Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear. We practiced putting on protective gear, pulling it off, cleaning and wiping the poisons and other muck that might be thrown, dropped or sprayed on us. We dug countless trenches, donned masks, curled into the fetal position, rehearsed the Book of Revelation over and over.

One day the color sergeants assembled us outside a redbrick building, which had been turned into a CS gas chamber. They ordered us inside, activated the gas. We took off our gas masks, put them on again, took them off. If you weren’t quick about it, you got a mouthful, a lungful. But you couldn’t always be quick, and that was the point, so eventually everyone sucked gas. The exercises were supposed to be about war; to me they were about death. The whole leitmotif of Army training was death. How to avoid it, but also how to face it, head-on.

It felt natural, therefore, almost inevitable, that they put us on buses and took us to Brookwood Military Cemetery, to stand on graves, to listen as someone read a poem.

“For the Fallen.”

The poem predated the ghastliest wars of the twentieth century, so it still had a trace of innocence.

They shall not grow old,

As we that are left grow old…

It was striking how much of our earliest training was intercut, leavened, with poetry. The glory of dying, the beauty of dying, the necessity of dying, these concepts were pounded into our heads along with the skills to avoid dying. Sometimes it was explicit, but sometimes it was right in our faces. Whenever we were herded into chapel we’d look up and see etched in stone:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.

Words first written by an ancient Roman, an exile, then repurposed by a young British soldier who’d died for his country. Repurposed ironically, but no one told us that. They certainly weren’t etched ironically into that stone.

Poetry, for me, was slightly preferable to history. And psychology. And military strategy. I wince just remembering those long hours, those hard chairs in Faraday Hall and Churchill Hall, reading books and memorizing dates, analyzing famous battles, writing essays on the most esoteric concepts of military strategy. These, for me, were the ultimate trials of Sandhurst.

Given a choice, I’d have taken five more weeks of boot camp.

I fell asleep in Churchill Hall, more than once.

You there, Mr. Wales! You’re sleeping!

We were advised, when feeling sleepy, to jump up, get the blood flowing. But that seemed overly confrontational. By standing you were informing the instructor that he or she was a bore. What sort of mood would they be in when it came time to mark your next paper?

Weeks ran together. In week nine—or was it ten?—we learned bayoneting. Wintry morning. A field in Castlemartin, Wales. The color sergeants put on head-splitting punk rock music, full volume, to rouse our animal spirits, and then we began running at sandbag dummies, bayonets high, slashing and shouting:
KILL! KILL! KILL!

When the whistles blew, when the drill was “over,” some guys couldn’t turn it off. They kept stabbing and stabbing their dummies. A quick glimpse into the dark side of human nature. Then we all laughed and pretended we hadn’t seen what we’d just seen.

Week twelve—or maybe thirteen?—was guns and grenades. I was a good shot. I’d been shooting rabbits and pigeons and squirrels with a .22 since I was twelve.

But now I got better.

So much better.

In late summer we
were shipped to Wales and put through a punishing exercise called Long Reach. A nonstop march, yomp and run over several days, up and down barren countryside, with a load of gear strapped to our backs, equivalent to the weight of one young teenager. Worse, Europe was suffering a historic heat wave, and we set out at the crest of the wave, the hottest day of the year.

A Friday. We were told that the exercise would run through Sunday night.

Late Saturday, during our only enforced rest, we slept in bags on a dirt track. After two hours we were awakened by thunder and hard rain. I was in a team of five, and we stood up, held our faces to the rain, drinking the drops. It felt so good. But then we were wet. And it was time to march again.

Sopping wet, in driving rain, marching now became something altogether different. We were grunting, panting, groaning, slipping. Gradually I felt my resolve start to give way.

At a momentary stop, a checkpoint, I felt a burning in my feet. I sat on the ground, pulled off my right boot and sock, and the bottom of my foot peeled away.

Trench foot.

The soldier beside me shook his head.
Shit. You can’t go on.

I was gutted. But, I confess, also relieved.

We were on a country road. In a nearby field stood an ambulance. I staggered towards it. As I got close, medics lifted me onto the open tailgate. They examined my feet, said this march was over for me.

I nodded, slumped forward.

My team was getting ready to leave.
Goodbye, lads. See you back at camp.

But then one of our color sergeants appeared. Color Sergeant Spence. He asked for a word. I hopped off the tailgate, limped with him over to a nearby tree.

His back to the tree, he spoke to me in a level tone. It was the first time in months he hadn’t shouted at me.

Mr. Wales, you’ve got one last push. You’ve literally got six or eight miles left,
that’s all. I know, I know, your feet are shit, but I suggest you don’t quit. I know you can do this. You know you can do this. Push on. You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t.

He walked away.

I limped back to the ambulance, asked for all their zinc oxide tape. I wrapped my feet tightly and rammed them back into my boots.

Uphill, downhill, forward, I went on, trying to think of other things to distract myself from the agony. We neared a stream. The icy water would be a blessing, I thought. But no. All I could feel were the rocks in the bed pressing against the raw flesh.

The last four miles were among the most difficult steps I’ve ever taken on this planet. As we crossed the finish line I began to hyperventilate with relief.

One hour later, back in camp, everyone put on trainers. For the next several days we shuffled about the barracks like old men.

But proud old men.

At some point I limped up to Color Sergeant Spence, thanked him.

He gave a little smile and walked away.

Though exhausted,
though a bit lonely, I felt radiant. I was in the shape of my life, I was thinking and seeing more clearly than ever before. The feeling was not unlike that described by people who enter monastic orders. Everything felt lit up.

As with monks, each cadet had his own cell. It had to be pristine at all times. Our small beds had to be made—tight. Our black boots had to be bulled—shiny as wet paint. Our cell doors had to be propped open—always. Even though you could close the door at night, color sergeants could—and often did—walk in at any time.

Some cadets complained bitterly.
No privacy!

That made me laugh. Privacy? What’s that?

At the end of each day I’d sit in my cell, bulling my boots, spitting on them, rubbing them, making them mirrors in which I could see my shorn head. No matter what institution I landed in, it seemed, a tragically bad haircut was the first order of business. Then I’d text Chels. (I was allowed to keep my mobile, for security reasons.) I might tell her how things were going, tell her I missed
her. Then I’d loan my phone to any other cadets who might want to text their girlfriends or boyfriends.

Then it was lights-out.

No problem. I was no longer remotely afraid of the dark.

It was now official.
I was no longer Prince Harry. I was Second Lieutenant Wales of the Blues and Royals, second oldest regiment of the British Army, part of the Household Cavalry, bodyguards to the Monarch.

The “passing out,” as they called it, took place on April 12, 2006.

On hand were Pa and Camilla, Grandpa, Tiggy and Marko.

And, of course, Granny.

She hadn’t attended a passing-out parade for decades, so her appearance was a dazzling honor. She smiled for all to see as I marched past.

And Willy saluted. He was at Sandhurst too now. A fellow cadet. (He’d started after me, because he’d gone to university first.) He couldn’t resort to his typical attitude when we were sharing an institution, couldn’t pretend not to know me—or he’d be insubordinate.

For one brief moment, Spare outranked Heir.

Granny inspected the troops. When she came to me, she said:
Oh…hello.

I smiled. And blushed.

The passing-out ceremony was followed by the playing of “Auld Lang Syne,” and then the college adjutant rode his white horse up the steps of the Old College.

Last, there was a lunch in the Old College. Granny gave a lovely speech. As the day petered out, the adults left, and the real partying began. A night of serious drinking, raucous laughter. My date was Chels. There was eventually a second passing out, as it were. I woke the next morning with a wide grin and a slight headache.

Next stop, I said to the shaving mirror, Iraq.

Specifically, southern Iraq. My unit would be relieving another unit, which had spent months doing advanced reconnaissance. Dangerous work, constantly dodging roadside IEDs and snipers. In that same month ten British soldiers had been killed. In the previous six months, forty.

I searched my heart. I wasn’t fearful. I was committed. I was eager. But also: war, death, whatever, anything was better than remaining in Britain, which was its own kind of battle. Just recently, the papers had run a story about Willy leaving a voicemail for me, pretending to be Chels. They’d also run a story about me asking JLP for help on a Sandhurst research project. Both stories, for once, were true. The question was—how could the papers have known such deeply private things?

It made me paranoid. Willy too. It made us reconsider Mummy’s so-called paranoia, view it through a very different lens.

We began to examine our inner circle, to question our most trusted friends—and their friends. With whom had they been speaking? In whom had they confided? No one was above suspicion because no one could be. We even doubted our bodyguards, and we’d always worshipped our bodyguards. (Hell, officially
I
was now a bodyguard—the Queen’s bodyguard.) They’d always been like big brothers to us. But now they were also suspects.

For a fraction of a second we even doubted Marko. That was how toxic the suspicion became. No one was above it. Some person, or persons, extremely close to me and Willy, was sneaking stuff to the newspapers, so everyone needed to be considered.

What a relief it will be, I thought, to be in a proper war zone, where none of this is part of my daily calculus.

Please, put me on a battlefield where there are clear rules of engagement.

Where there’s some sense of honor.