Harry Read Free Page B

preparing to celebrate Hogmanay with Camilla at his Scottish home, Birkhall, and had no great desire to know details of the war his son was fighting.
    Passionate about his role in the war, he was frequently spotted by Connor studying air-support books ‘even at meal times’. But he did not spend his entire period of service in Helmand poring over books or his laptop (watching a programme known as
Kill TV
). On New Year’s Day he fired his first shots in combat from JTAC Hill, pumping rounds from a .50 machine gun in the direction of around twentyTaliban who had been spotted approaching the British position. A shredded piece of sackcloth hanging in front of him provided the only cover.
    Would men have died as the result of his machine-gun fire? ‘It was extremely difficult to confirm Taliban “kills”,’ says Connor.
    We knew we were killing and wounding Taliban, usually at a distance of 0.5 to 1 kilometre away. However, we didn’t walk up and see those we killed. We did see some places where the Taliban had not yet retrieved their dead but we could not go there. I say this because I am sure Harry and his men killed/wounded Taliban, but it would be extremely unlikely to have been able to confirm how many were killed.
    Although during interviews at the time he was to remain tight-lipped about killing Taliban fighters, during his second tour of Afghanistan he made no bones about it: ‘You do what you have to do – what’s necessary to save your own guys. If you need to drop a bomb – worst-case scenario – then you will, but that’s just the way it is. It’s not nice to drop bombs. But, to save lives, that’s what happens.’
    His comrade-in-arms Bill Connor recounts his first experience of potentially fatal contact with the enemy:
    I can’t speak for all the soldiers I commanded, and I’m sure they had varying emotions. Though I had been on prior operational deployments before Afghanistan, I didn’t have to dealwith the ‘killing’ aspect of war until then. I wasn’t sure how I’d react when I had to point my weapon with the intent to kill another human being. However, in my first major firefight (in Kandahar, before I went to Helmand) I remember the surreal feeling of being shot at when my small convoy was ambushed. I remember thinking, ‘They’re trying to kill me, and this may be my last day on earth.’ That thought was extremely brief, because my training kicked in immediately and I gave orders directing fire at those who were attacking us.
    Connor describes the fatal act in these chilling words, which perhaps offers a parallel of Harry’s own feelings when confronted with a similar situation:
    When I saw some of them killed in the fight … I honestly didn’t have any guilt as they were trying to kill all of us. Harry never showed any emotions when he was doing his job. Part of war is suppressing emotions and he showed everyone he could do that… The bigger problem with guilt comes with those fights – and thank God we were not in them – in which the enemy used civilians as shields. I can imagine the times a soldier may have done everything ‘right’ by the rules of engagement and yet accidentally killed a civilian. Those would be the times someone would have a hard time putting the kill behind them. Again, through God’s grace, I did not have to deal with any of those types of kills and, to the best of my knowledge, neither did Harry.
    A serving soldier who was there with Harry puts it more bluntly: ‘I don’t believe he would have lost a moment’s sleep over it. He’s a professional, this is war and these men were coming to kill us. He used that gun in exactly the manner intended.’ Harry, who handed his camera to a Gurkha soldier to film his introduction to live action, simply said: ‘They poke their heads up and that’s it.’
    To think, just a few