On January 10, 2023, Prince Harry's memoirs were released in bookstores to the delight of lovers of crowned heads. Entitled The Substitute, the autobiographical work addresses the eventful life of the youngest son of King Charles III and Lady Diana. This pavement reveals crisp and unpublished details concerning the royal family, but not only... Harry also looks back on his period of service in the army. A passage from the book that made the British Secretary of State for Defense, Ben Wallace, guest of the LBC Radio program react this Thursday, February 23, 2023.
Prince Harry in the Army
It's no secret... At least for those who have followed the news regularly in the past. The latter indeed know that Prince Harry served a good part of his youth in the armed forces of his Majesty: for 10 years exactly. A military career marked, among other things, by two successive deployments in Afghanistan in 2007-2008, then as a helicopter pilot in the Army Air Corps. In 2015, he announced with regret his resignation for security issues related to his royal title. "'Captain Wales', his military title, has had a fulfilling career and considers serving his country in the Armed Forces a tremendous honour," Buckingham Palace said in a statement at the time.
25 Taliban killed
In The Substitute, the now husband of Meghan Markle returns to his many years of service in the army, during which he claims to have killed 25 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Targets he considered "chess pieces".
These remarks were strongly criticized by Ben Wallace, British Secretary of State for Defence, at the microphone of the LBC radio program, Thursday February 23, 2023: “The armed forces are not a register. bragging about the number of people being killed, or talking about it, distorts reality by forgetting to show that the army is a team sport. If you start talking about what you have done, you are actually disappointing the people. others.
You're no better, because you did it, and they weren't". Invited on the set of Stephen Colbert in January 2023, the Duke of Sussex had meanwhile confided in regretting the media treatment reserved for this passage of the book: “The context is everything. They intentionally chose to remove the context and to make headlines."
