Return of the Prince…
Prince Henry of Wales was secretly deployed to Afghanistan and the media was complicit in not reporting what was going on. The subsequent furore and accusations of this being an exercise in public relations distracts from a comment that Prince Harry himself made in a subsequent interview:
“There were two injured guys who came back on the plane with us who were essentially comatose the whole way… one had lost two limbs – a left arm and a right leg – and another guy who was saved by his mate’s body being in the way but took shrapnel to the neck. Both out cold throughout the flight.”
We hear on the news when a member of the armed forces is killed but only occasionally do reports of the horrifically injured surface. I doubt if the Prince had mentioned it these two soldiers’ return home would have been in the papers at all. That is the real and unforgivable complicity on the part of the media. Not the rehabilitation of a Prince as a ‘hero’ but of the ongoing human cost of war, both borne by British soldiers and inflicted upon the Afghan population.
Then there is our own complicity. The cost of ‘operations’ in Afghanistan and Iraq could be as high as £3.3bn this year according to the Commons Defence Committee. Once again the British taxpayer acquiesces to funding ongoing misery and suffering for unspecified reasons.
