UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace on Thursday blasted Prince Harry for “boasting” about his Taliban kill count — saying the exiled royal was “letting down” his brothers in arms by making it out like he was “a better person.”
The top politician overseeing the UK’s military let rip in an interview with LBC when asked about Harry’s confession in his memoir, “Spare,” that he’d killed 25 troops who he “didn’t think of … as people.”
“I frankly think boasting about tallies or talking about tallies… It distorts the fact that the army is a team game,” he said of how each infanteer on the frontlines “is supported by hundreds of people behind them.”
“It’s a team. And it’s not about who can shoot the most,” he said.
“If you start talking about who did what, what you’re actually doing is letting down all those other people — because you’re not a better person because you did and they didn’t,” he said.
While Wallace is the most high-ranking official to condemn Harry’s revelation, his rebuke is just the latest, with military officials horrified and Taliban officials even calling for war crimes hearing.
One of Wallace’s predecessors, Lord Hutton, previously told LBC that Harry’s brag was “a very serious mistake” that “grates horribly” and is “just wrong on every level.”
Still, during his lengthy promotional tour, the privacy-loving prince blamed the suggestion that he’d been “boasting” — the very word Wallace would later use — on “dangerous lies” by the media.
“I would say that if I heard anybody else, anyone, boasting about that kind of thing, I would be angry. But it’s a lie,” he told “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” last month.
In “Spare,” Harry reckoned it was “vital never to shy away” from how many enemy troops you’d killed in combat because of “accountability.”
“So, my number: Twenty-five,” he wrote.
“It wasn’t a number that gave me satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed,” he wrote.
“While in the heat and fog of combat, I didn’t think of those twenty-five as people. You can’t kill people if you think of them as people,” he added.
“They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods.”
He conceded that “on some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering.”
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