Prince Harry has reportedly claimed he killed 25 people when he was an Apache helicopter pilot during his second tour of duty in Afghanistan.
The Duke of Sussex makes the claim in his autobiography, Spare, due to be published next week.
He flew on six missions that resulted in “the taking of human lives”, something of which he is neither proud nor ashamed, The Telegraph reported.
In the heat of combat, the prince did not think of the 25 as “people” but instead as “chess pieces” that had been taken off the board.
It is the first time the 38-year-old has revealed how many Taliban fighters he killed during his military service.
Prince Harry served in the Army for 10 years, rising to the rank of Captain and undertaking two tours of Afghanistan.
The prince also claims in his autobiography that his brother, William, and Princess Kate encouraged him to dress up as a Nazi soldier – an incident he has called “one of the biggest mistakes in my life”.
Harry is reported by The Guardian to also say in the book that William physically attacked him during an argument in 2019 over the Duke of Sussex’s marriage to Meghan Markle.
He has now branded his brother, the Prince of Wales, his “arch-nemesis”.
His book, due for release on Tuesday, accidentally went on sale early in Spain, and shows he has dedicated his memoir to his wife, children and his mother, Princess Diana.
On his duty in Afghanistan, he describes watching video of each “kill” when he returned to base, as a nose-mounted video camera on his Apache helicopter recorded each mission.
Soldiers do not usually know how many enemies they have killed, he says, but “in the era of Apaches and laptops” he was able to say “with exactness” how many he had killed.
“And it seemed to me essential not to be afraid of that number. So my number is 25. It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me,” he writes.
In the “din and confusion of combat” he saw the insurgents he killed as “baddies eliminated before they could kill goodies”.
It is not possible to kill someone if you see them as a person, he says, but the Army had “trained me to ‘other’ them – and they had trained me well”.
Harry writes: “I made it my purpose, from day one, to never go to bed with any doubt whether I had done the right thing… whether I had shot at Taliban and only Taliban, without civilians in the vicinity.
“I wanted to return to Great Britain with all my limbs, but more than that I wanted to get home with my conscience intact.”
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Kaynak: briturkish.com
