Spare

by Prince Harry

He stood between us, looking up at our flushed faces: Please, boys—don’t make my final years a misery.

I was the shadow, the support, the Plan B.

I’d take all my Opal Fruits and squeeze them together into one massive gobstopper, then jam it into the side of my mouth. As the wad melted my bloodstream would become a frothy cataract of dextrose. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.

He presented me with one of those wooden rulers, engraved along both sides with the names of every British monarch since Harold in 1066. (Rulers, get it?) The royal line, inch by inch, right up to Granny. He said I could keep it at my desk, refer to it as needed.

we sensed the presence of the Other Woman, because we suffered the downstream effects.

I was a poor student, a dreadful writer, and yet I had enough education to recognize that this right here was a master class in illiteracy.

I opened Hamlet. Hmm: Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper…?

I had no time to think about eternity.

Of course…I had been doing cocaine around this time. At someone’s country house, during a shooting weekend, I’d been offered a line, and I’d done a few more since. It wasn’t much fun, and it didn’t make me particularly happy, as it seemed to make everyone around me, but it did make me feel different, and that was the main goal. Feel. Different. I was a deeply unhappy seventeen-year-old boy willing to try almost anything that would alter the status quo.

They can’t break me, I thought. Is it, I wondered, because I’m already broken?

We practiced putting on protective gear, pulling it off, cleaning and wiping the poisons and other muck that might be thrown, dropped or sprayed on us. We dug countless trenches, donned masks, curled into the fetal position, rehearsed the Book of Revelation over and over.

Since the Taliban had no air force, not one plane, that was easy. We British, plus the Yanks, owned the air.

They had a solemn reverence for royalty. A king, to their minds, was divine. (Their own king was believed to be the reincarnated Hindu god Vishnu.)

The Americans saw no need for a 2,000-pound bomb. We prefer to drop two 500-pound bombs, Widow Six Seven. How very un-American. I felt strongly that I was right, and I wanted to argue, but I was new and lacked self-confidence. This was my first airstrike. So I just said: Roger that.

In the distance were poppy fields. I looked off, thought of the famous poem. In Flanders fields the poppies blow…In Britain the poppy was a symbol of remembrance, but here it was just the coin of the realm. All those poppies would soon be processed into heroin, sales of which would pay for the Taliban bullets fired at us, and the IEDs left for us under roads and wadis. Like this one.

Demand for the wristband skyrocketed, donations began rolling in. It was the start of a long, meaningful relationship. More, it was a visceral reminder of the power of our platform.

The royal road to mastery was paved with facts.

It wasn’t just the memories of Mummy’s funeral. More than three thousand bodies lay beneath us, behind us. They were buried under the pews, wedged into the walls. War heroes and poets, scientists and saints, the cream of the Commonwealth. Isaac Newton, Charles Dickens, Chaucer, plus thirteen kings and eighteen queens, they were all interred there.

How did this happen? he wanted to know. North Pole, I told him. I went to the North Pole and now my South Pole is on the fritz.

Some kinds of fame provide extra freedom, maybe, I suppose, but royal fame was fancy captivity.

Carpe your diems while ye may.

He was a Scot, with a thick burr, and often sounded like Sean Connery, which was charming under normal circumstances, but now he just sounded like Sean Connery having a panic attack.