Finding Freedom

Military service is a rite of passage for male members of the British royal family. Prince Charles served in the Royal Navy, as did his father, Prince Philip. Prince William completed more than seven years of military service. (He was an active Search and Rescue pilot when he married Kate.) For Harry, though, the military was much more than just a rite of passage—it was a chance for him to see the world as a normal human being, and it provided a source of great purpose.

Ever since he was a little boy riding atop a tank while accompanying his parents on an official engagement, Harry had wanted to serve his country. After completing his training at Sandhurst, there were debates both publicly and privately about whether Harry could serve in the war in Iraq, already several years old at that point. There was a need for forward air controllers like himself in the conflict zone, but his high profile presented a host of complications. Yet Harry was adamant he wouldn’t be “held back at home twiddling my thumbs.” And in February 2007, it looked as though he was headed to the front lines when the UK Ministry of Defence and the Palace issued a joint statement that Harry would be going to Iraq to take up a “normal troop commander’s role involving leading a group of twelve men in four Scimitar armored reconnaissance vehicles, each with a crew of three.” But Iraqi insurgents issued their own statement that quickly put the kibosh on Harry’s deployment.

“We are awaiting the arrival of the young, handsome, spoilt prince with bated breath and we confidently expect he will come out into the open on the battlefield,” said Abu Zaid, the commander of the Malik Ibn Al Ashtar Brigade. “We will be generous with him. For we will return him to his grandmother—but without ears.”

In public, Harry had put on a brave face. Privately his dreams had been dashed. Everything he worked for had been jeopardized because of his Royal birthright. Harry was devastated. His commanding officers knew something needed to be done.

The patriotic royal wouldn’t be sent to the Middle East as a soldier for another year. After a media blackout was negotiated so the Taliban wouldn’t be alerted to Harry’s whereabouts, it was none other than his grandmother the Queen and commander in chief of the British Armed Forces who delivered the news. “She told me I’m off to Afghanistan,” said Harry, who on December 14, 2007, boarded a C-17 military aircraft in Oxfordshire bound for Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Two days later he was aboard a Chinook helicopter with Special Forces headed to Forward Operating Base Dwyer in the Helmand province. Close to the Pakistan border, it was one of the most dangerous places on the planet. In the military, Harry was known as Second Lieutenant Wales. Once he hit the ground in Afghanistan, he was simply “Widow Six Seven.”

Like the rest of the soldiers, Harry could be called to duty at any moment, scrambling out of the makeshift canvas tent from which the British flag hung in the dead of night. “One minute you’re in bed asleep,” he said, “six and a half minutes later you’re speaking to someone on the ground who is being shot at.”

As Christmas approached and the media blackout continued, the rest of the world had no idea Harry was due to join the Gurkhas at Forward Operating Base Delhi, a military expeditionary base occupied by the United States Marine Corps, in Garmsir.

While Harry patrolled the dusty, bombed out terrain of Helmand—the camp had been repeatedly attacked by RPGs, mortars, and machine gun fire from the Taliban since the British took over the base—his grandmother gave her annual Christmas address praising the British troops in Afghanistan. “I want to draw attention to another group of people who deserve our thoughts this Christmas,” she said in the televised recording. “We have all been conscious of those who have given their lives, or who have been severely wounded, while serving with the Armed Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.” It was not a safe place for a British prince, and certainly not the third in line to the throne.

Ten weeks into his fourteen-week tour of duty, an Australian tabloid breached the news embargo by revealing that Harry was secretly serving in Afghanistan. Evacuated from the war zone within the hour, a deflated Harry was met by his father and brother when he touched down at RAF Brize Norton back in the UK.

While Harry described being “broken” by the experience of leaving his soldiers not of his own accord, he almost immediately started working on making his way back to the front lines—this time as an Apache helicopter pilot.

At the start of 2009, Harry enrolled in the Army Air Corps to begin training as a helicopter pilot at RAF Middle Wallop in Hampshire. The prince was committed to the grueling training and examinations required to get his pilot’s license. By mid-2009, Harry passed the first phase of his training, which he described as the “easiest way of getting back on the front line, maybe safer, maybe not safer, I don’t know.” In the summer of 2010, he enrolled in the second phase. The prince had impressed his commanding officers enough that he was afforded the opportunity to train as an Apache pilot, which only two percent of British pilots achieve. The attack helicopter, equipped with antitank missiles, rockets, and a chain gun, was used in thousands of battles and rescue operations in Afghanistan because of its lethal nature.

He flew to the United States in October 2011 to complete the final phase of his training. Harry spent the last days of his training at the Naval Air Facility in El Centro just north of San Diego (often referred to as the Top Gun school) and the Gila Bend Auxiliary Air Force Base in southern Arizona near the Mexican border. The desert training—which prepares pilots with air-to-ground bombing skills, rocket firing, and mobile land target practice—is as close as pilots get to actual air combat. NAF El Centro is the most rigorous training in the world and prepares Naval and Marine Corps military personnel as well as Army Green Berets and Allied pilots from Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. When it was over, Harry was cleared to return to Afghanistan.

Harry arrived back in the Islamic Republic in September 2012 as a copilot gunner with the 662 Squadron, 3 Regiment Army Air Corps. This time, it was with full knowledge of the public, and within a week of his arrival, nineteen members of the Taliban, armed with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and automatic weapons stormed his fortified base camp. Inside the camp, the gunmen started firing their RPGs and Kalashnikov AK-47s in a gun battle that lasted for more than five hours.

A few days earlier, the Taliban had announced “Harry Operations,” which was just as its name sounded. Their goal was to kill or injure the prince. Under the cover of night, the insurgents, pretending to be farmers from a nearby maize plantation, got past the floodlights and armed guards keeping watch from towers to breach the thirty-foot wire fence topped with barbed wire. “We attacked that base because Prince Harry was also on it,” a Taliban spokesman said.

While it had been assumed that a plan for emergencies was in place to shuttle Harry to a “panic room,” a source close to the prince shared that there were zero special arrangements made for Harry on the base or anywhere in theater. Should he be attacked, his response would be the same as any other serviceman. After all, he was trained to fire a gun for a reason. “Harry was aware of the risks against him, and the blackout deal was brokered to try to ensure that the enemy had no idea where he was, so that he would not be specifically targeted,” said the source.

Despite the obvious danger, Harry was grateful to be allowed to finish his twenty-week tour of duty. The military provided Harry with much needed structure, camaraderie, and anonymity. In Afghanistan, Harry lived like every other soldier at Camp Bastion where he was stationed. In the confined space of a dusty VHR (Very High Readiness) tent, the prince made his own bed and passed the time by playing Uckers, a board game popular with Royal Navy personnel, and FIFA 07 on the Xbox. Harry tried his best to lie low, even going to the base’s canteen late, after most of the other soldiers had cleared out, so there were fewer people to gawk at him during mealtime.

“My father’s always trying to remind me about who I am and stuff like that,” Harry said when he returned home in January 2013, “but it’s very easy to forget about who I am when I am in the army.” Never a fan of the stuffier side of royal duties, Harry, better known as Captain Wales, was at home in the no-frills, hands-on world of a soldier.

It’s not surprising, then, that when he made the “tough decision” to end his ten-year career with the British Army in 2015, Harry found himself at loose ends. Anger and anxiety started to bubble to the surface, and neither emotion fit into the official persona of a prince. At royal engagements, he suffered panic attacks. In the most proper and officious of settings, such as a reception by MapAction to mark Harry’s new patronage of the humanitarian emergency response charity, the flight-or-fight instincts of an Apache helicopter pilot kicked in. A source remembered that when Harry left the event held at the Royal Society in London, “He just started taking in deep breaths.

“The people, the cameras, the attention,” the source said. “He had just let it get to him. He was on the edge.”

Harry described the phenomenon himself. “In my case, every single time I was in any room with loads of people, which is quite often, I was just pouring with sweat,” he told the UK army channel Forces TV, “my heart beating—boom, boom, boom, boom—literally, just like a washing machine.”

During both his tours, Harry saw the kind of action that doesn’t leave a soldier’s mind even long after he or she has come home. His first tour in Afghanistan, when he was serving as a joint terminal attack controller on the ground, he directed the support aircrafts in an emergency medical evacuation when the Afghanistan National Army came under fire from the Taliban and took heavy casualties.

The seriously injured were in the process of being airlifted back to camp by a Chinook when suddenly Harry’s position came under attack from the Taliban. Harry was ordered to dig in and take cover as the rockets rained down. One exploded to devastating effect a mere fifty meters from where the prince was.

The photographer John Stillwell, part of the Press Association team embedded with Harry in Afghanistan while he was on operational duties, initially thought Harry would be shielded from some of the more dangerous missions. But that notion was totally dispelled when he and everyone else in the prince’s tank found themselves to be sitting ducks for a sniper’s bullet as they waited for help in a riverbed.

Stillwell, riding in the prince’s tank, remembered coming around the outskirts of a town and about to cross the creek when the lead vehicle in their convoy spotted an IED in the road.

“Before I went to Afghanistan I thought, ‘Oh, Harry will be at Camp Bastion, thirty feet underground, miles away from danger,’ ” the photographer said. “I was totally wrong. He was in very real danger a lot of the time, but he took it all in his stride.

“When you think of him being a prince, the Queen’s grandson, he could have had a cushy office job,” Stillwell added. “But he chose to do the hard stuff, go out on the front line.”

While the prince’s heroism earned him accolades from the public and his fellow servicemen, it wasn’t without a price. After retiring from military service, when Harry wasn’t suffering from anxiety, he had bouts of rage. “I took up boxing, because everyone was saying boxing is good for you and it’s a really good way of letting out aggression,” he said. “That really saved me because I was on the verge of punching someone, so being able to punch someone who had pads was certainly easier.”

Boxing, however, wasn’t a sufficient bandage for the internal conflict raging within him. Harry was, as he put it, “very close to total breakdown on numerous occasions when all sorts of grief and lies and misconceptions are coming to you from every angle.”

While his experiences on the front lines contributed to his emotional state, it wasn’t the complete answer to his issues. And the worst part was, he didn’t know what exactly was happening. “I just couldn’t put my finger on it,” Harry said. “I just didn’t know what was wrong with me.”

If the struggle was hardest on anyone other than Harry, it was William. The brothers were bound not only by blood and royal titles but also by the unique tragedy of losing their mother at such a young age and in such a public way. “Every year we get closer,” Harry told reporters in 2005. “Ever since our mother died, obviously we were close. But he is the one person on this earth who I can actually really . . . we can talk about anything. We understand each other and give each other support.”

That mutual support between brothers took many forms—everything from renting a cottage together when both were training at a Shropshire flight school in 2009, to both becoming helicopter pilots, to setting up the Royal Foundation, the umbrella organization for all their philanthropic work, the same year. Even once William got married and started a family, the two still found time for fun. According to a source, the brothers enjoyed sneaking out for drinks and food at a place called Mari Vanna about a mile away from the Palace. The Russian restaurant is a favored locale for some the world’s wealthiest oligarchs, but it’s also a very private place. “Most of the look-at-me action takes place across the road at Mr. Chow,” said a staffer. Inside the restaurant, gaudily decorated with glass chandeliers, Russian dolls, looming bookcases full of antique tomes, and lounge chairs, the brothers were afforded a rare bit of privacy. One night in early 2016, they both got “totally drunk,” according to the source. But it wasn’t until Harry went outside to smoke that there was a problem. “He fell into a little bush. Someone tried to take a photo of him on their phone and Harry’s protection officer literally jumped to block them from taking it,” the source said. “Harry was none the wiser. He just went back in to William, so they could carry on drinking.”

Each brother wanted real happiness for the other. It was precisely because of this that William confronted his brother in 2015 about his mental health. As Harry later recounted in a podcast interview with the columnist and friend Bryony Gordon, who herself has obsessive-compulsive disorder, he said, “You really need to deal with this. It is not normal to think that nothing has affected you.”

Those words broke through to Harry and spurred him to begin the daunting process of true soul-searching, including therapy, which is no small thing for a member of the House of Windsor.

In his open, honest manner, the prince revealed how before he came to terms with his own pain he had felt completely overwhelmed by the demands of public life. For two years, Harry said, he was in “total chaos.”

It didn’t take many conversations about his feelings for Harry to realize that he had a lot of unprocessed grief from his mother’s death. It was a trauma that he never had the chance or ability to cope with before then. When he lost his mother at the age of twelve, his sorrow had been immediately subsumed by the grief of an entire country, which turned into conspiracies and other national obsessions. Meanwhile, Harry and William had to put on brave faces for all of England and the world. The first and only time he let himself cry over his mother was at her burial on September 6, 1997, on the island within the lake on the grounds of her family home, Althorp Park.

Harry described himself as having “shut down” all thoughts and feelings about his mother’s death for nearly two decades. “I thought that thinking of her was only going to make me sad and not going to bring her back,” he said, reasoning, “right, don’t ever let your emotions be part of anything.”

Talking about his feelings turned out to be the best medicine—and part of the inspiration for the single biggest project the princes had ever undertaken together.

In April 2016, William, Kate, and Harry launched Heads Together, a campaign to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health. The goal was to change the conversation about mental health so millions might feel safer getting the help they needed. William, Kate, and Harry hoped that if they opened up about mental health, others in the UK, where the British stiff upper lip prevailed, would feel they had permission to do the same.

William and Harry credited Kate for the initiative’s genesis, saying the original concept was scribbled on the back of a cigarette pack one night. With much of her humanitarian work focused on early-childhood development and addiction, the Duchess of Cambridge had become an outspoken proponent of mental health awareness. She believed the root of many unresolved adolescent problems could be traced to mental illness, which, if left untreated, often manifested as greater societal problems later in life.

While Heads Together, a flagship initiative for the Royal Foundation, might have been Kate’s brainchild, it was Harry’s radical public admission of his personal struggles during one of the darkest periods in his life that imbued the mental health initiative with real impact. A year after the launch of the charity, Harry stunned the world when he bravely shared his decades-long repression of grief over his mother’s death, his subsequent anger and anxiety issues, and the confusion he felt about the source of his problems on Bryony’s podcast, which brought a lot of publicity for his cause but also broke with convention.

William and Harry had never spoken so candidly about their mother, and certainly they had never shared in the press the immense pain they felt in the aftermath of her death. It was a watershed moment that defied the stereotype of the royal family.

It was a brave and bold decision for Harry to open up about the anguish he suffered over the years. He was helping untold millions with his candid confession. Yet some Palace courtiers privately questioned whether the “soul baring” had gone a step too far, setting the wrong precedent and exposing William and Harry in the future. After all, the royal family normally revealed very little and certainly never addressed such intimate struggles.

At the time, his father didn’t comment on his son’s confession, although in 2019, Prince Charles said he was “proud” of his son’s work to remove the stigma of mental health struggles. Though there was no public response from the Queen to his admission, the mere fact that Harry was launching a public mental health campaign with his brother and sister-in-law implied that he had the tacit approval of his grandmother. Harry’s personal revelations weren’t a break from protocol; they were a move forward for the monarchy within the confines of its rules.

Only Harry, however, could have gotten away with such an admission. It had nothing to do with playing favorites. There were stricter confines for his brother, because he was direct heir to the throne. The same dynamic was true for Prince Andrew, who had been continually given chances after making major missteps or lapses in judgment. Until his association with American financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Andrew got to keep going on as a working member of the royal family after behavior that would never have flown with Charles. There is a different level of protocol for direct heirs to the throne.

Harry was proud of the two and a half years in which he not only prioritized his royal duties but was “able to take my private life seriously as well.” Three months later, when he joined his brother at a private service at Althorp House to rededicate Diana’s grave on what would have been her 56th birthday, Harry could honestly say that he was a changed man. By his own admission he put “blood, sweat, and tears into the things that really make a difference,” both for himself and others.

But even as he hit his stride as a public figure, Harry still struggled to find a soul mate. His brother, William, had been lucky enough to settle down with a woman he first met at the age of nineteen, while Harry had two failed long-term relationships and a history of bad headlines. William and Kate’s successful courtship and marriage, however, was more than just luck. William went to university, which allowed him to meet new friends in a protected environment. At St. Andrews, in Fife, Scotland, he developed his social skills without intrusion from the press, because of an agreement with the British media, including tabloids, that he would be left alone while at university. In that safe space, he met Kate, who, except for a three-month split in 2007, has always been someone William could lean on and trust.

In a committed relationship, William didn’t always understand Harry’s interest in London nightlife. He checked out the scene with Kate now and then, but it was a very different experience as part of a couple.

During his 2013 tour of Afghanistan, Harry admitted being “very jealous of my brother . . . back home he gets to go home to his wife and dog.” Whether he was “stuck playing PlayStation in a tent full of men” while on active duty or playing Call of Duty and ordering pizzas from PizzaExpress (a favorite of the princes) to his modest Kensington Palace apartment that he moved into once he returned, Harry led a relatively solitary life. His longing for his own family only grew as William and Kate expanded theirs with a second child after the birth of Princess Charlotte on May 2, 2015.

All combined, Harry had changed, from the impulsive prince Meghan had been told about by the friend who cautioned against dating him, to the man, ready to find love, in front of her.

Bringing Meghan to Botswana, one of the most sacred and special places in his life, was a symbol of how he felt about her. She was smart, independent, adventurous, optimistic, and beautiful. But perhaps most important to Harry, Meghan came across as authentic. With Meghan, he knew she wasn’t trying to impress him. He felt as though he was getting the real Meghan from day one.

Just three months into their relationship, a Meghan pal said, they had already begun swapping the words “I love you.” It was Harry who said the three little but very loaded words first, but Meghan immediately replied, “I love you, too.” From there it didn’t take long for them to begin talking in non-oblique terms about their future.

In another display of affection, Meghan left inside jokes and references littered across her Instagram feed. There was her July reference to a “date night for one,” on the evening she spent alone in her hotel room during one of the first trips when she met Harry, and her posting a photo of two kissing matches with the caption “Sunday kind of love” on July 17. Then came the pretty displays of peonies that were presumably a gift from one Captain Wales. “Swooning over these,” she wrote on July 1. More flowers came two weeks later. “Because I’m spoiled rotten,” she said, alongside the hashtag #theynevergetold.

Harry also showed his feelings by traveling to Toronto three times between August and October. Fearing his famed ginger locks would be an easy spot, they had both largely avoided going out to her favorite haunts, such as Bar Isabel and Terroni, preferring to hunker down at the three-bedroom, two-bath house she began renting in the summer of 2013, right around the time of her divorce.

When Meghan moved in, it was the largest place she had ever had to herself—and to furnish. Meghan decorated like she dressed. She was a big fan of mixing high- and low-end products. While she may have had some decent art to hang on the walls (it was an occasional payday treat to pick up a small piece for her growing collection), for some of her furniture and home accessories she often turned to affordable places such as HomeSense, IKEA, and even Home Depot. “Money in the bank doesn’t mean money to spend” was the advice her father gave her as a teen, and she still took that to heart.

She eventually treated herself to the ceramic kamado-style Big Green Egg barbecue she had had in her Internet bookmarks for a year; the large patio space was perfect for entertaining. With its deck, beachy décor, and large open windows to the rear, the space reminded her a little of California. Friendly neighbors, mostly families, lived in the closely grouped houses centered around a good public school and dog park where Meghan’s rescue dog, Bogart, could frolic.