The developing scenario between Prince Harry, the media, and the Ministry of Defense surrounding the Prince’s military service in Afghanistan leaves me feeling cold and cynical. As a former military officer, I can identify with and understand what Prince Harry must feel with respect to his duty and service in Afghanistan.
A bond develops between an officer and the other officers and troops around him and that bond becomes the basis for trust and teamwork. This trust leads to effectiveness and survivability in a combat zone. For the MOD to bring Harry home prematurely disrupts that trust and causes those left behind to reorganize and deal with their missing team mate, and in effect reduces their effectiveness and thus, their survivability.
I am still not sure what really happened here, but what appears to have happened is quite disturbing indeed. The MOD conspired with the media to keep secret Harry’s deployment to Helmand province. The media kept its end of the bargain as long as the secret remained unpublished, but once it broke online, they all rushed in and acted as if the act of keeping quiet was repulsive to them. Jon Snow, of Channel 4 News, even went so far as to thank Matt Drudge for letting the cat out of the bag because he felt his journalistic integrity was being corrupted daily by the silence.
The MOD, then reacted in the worst way possible by bringing Harry home and destroying his credibility among his brothers in arms. Not only that, and perhaps most significantly, they implied, by so doing, that his life was that much more important than the lives of everyone else they didn’t bring home. Furthermore, the media and the MOD then tried to paint a picture of Harry as a hero. While I feel Harry has acted in good faith and truly sought to deploy with his unit to serve as others are in the region, this act is no more or less heroic than that of every other man and woman who deploys and continues to serve daily in Afghanistan, Iraq, and any other combat zone in which one’s life can be taken in an instant.
It is a sad statement to make in these dark times that what amounts to a token deployment in Afghanistan makes Harry a hero just because he is a royal. I am sure he knows how utterly silly this sounds and even now is in the process of trying to keep the media and the MOD from making him look bad in the process.
