Harry Read Free Page A

man so you get the job done. That’s the way he worked.
    However, I noticed he had a nasty habit of leaving something just outside the bivvy [tent] when he got into his bed at night time and he would call someone over to say ‘Can you pass me that?’ But he always added ‘please’.
    Bill Connor, who is a lawyer and has since returned to practice in South Carolina, recalls the social side of his days alongside Harry in the war-ravaged territory:
    He talked to me about London, the pubs he liked going to, his girlfriend and funny moments during his training or with his platoon. He was very proud of his Regiment, the Household Cavalry, and specifically his company. The Blues and Royals have hundreds of years of lineage and he wanted to uphold the traditions he felt were eroding. Like most junior officers Harry had his opinions on what his superiors could be doing differently.
    We stayed off tabloid issues and rumours relating to the Royal Family. There was plenty of good-natured banter going on: once when we were discussing nationalities and Harry had said something, the company commander of the Gurkhas – a normally soft-spoken, intellectual English major, as I recall – yelled out to him, ‘Shut up, you’re a German anyway.’ Harry took it in good part, in fact he laughed.
    As indeed he should have: had the Queen’s grandfather, King George V, not changed the family name to Windsor he would be Harry Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
    What he did not talk about was how troubled his romance was. For three years Harry had been seeing Chelsy Davy, the daughter of wealthy South African safari operator Charles Davy. He had met the feisty blonde, just a year younger than him, when he was working on a farm in Zimbabwe during his double gap year after leaving Eton. When their relationship ran into trouble because of the 6,000-mile gap between their homes, Chelsy agreed to move to the UK and enrolled on a law course at Leeds University.
    Although barely 200 miles from London, the Yorkshire city might have been a continent away for all the good it did their romance. In two months, she complained, Harry ventured north to see her just twice and on the weekend she celebrated her twenty-second birthday, he chose to go to France to cheer on England in their Rugby World Cup semi-final. One graduate told a newspaper reporter that she had had difficulty making genuine friends and, used to the better things in life, was not impressed by the digs she shared with three others in a shabby red-brick terrace house where old mattresses were stacked in neighbouring gardens. Just eight weeks into the course and shortly before Harry left for Afghanistan, Chelsy’s talkative fellow student reported, she had packed her bags declaring she could not stand the bitterly cold northern weather and was going home to Cape Town. It was said to have led to yet another blazing row with her royal beau. Awar zone, Harry had decided however, was no place to display a broken heart.
    As forward air controller, Harry’s job in no man’s land was to call in air support to bomb the Taliban attempting to attack forward positions. He had the momentous task of preventing friendly fire deaths as well as setting coordinates for the bomb drops that were to kill thirty members of the Taliban. On New Year’s Eve – as the Bishop of Norwich, the Rt Revd Graham Jones, was chastising his royal congregation at St Mary Magdalene, during his twelve-minute sermon (he was allowed not a minute longer), about the ecological extravagance of Christmas lights – three 500lb bombs were dropped on Taliban bunkers by two US F15 jets, the first on Harry’s say-so. The pilots Harry communicated with had no idea that the man they spoke to for hours each day was in fact the son of the heir to the British throne. Though news of the activity was relayed back to his seniors in London, his father was not informed; Charles was already north of the border