Prince Harry’s friend makes his feelings clear on Duke of Sussex’s controversial comment
Army veteran and TV explorer Levison Wood has shared his thoughts on Prince Harry’s controversial Afghanistan kill count comment, stating he “wouldn’t have done that” himself.
Wood, 42, who trained alongside Harry at the Royal Military College of Sandhurst and served with him in Afghanistan in 2008, made the comments while discussing the Duke’s memoir “Spare”.
The remarks come after Harry sparked backlash from some military figures for revealing he had killed 25 Taliban fighters during his second tour of Afghanistan in 2012.
Speaking to The Times, Wood said: “I personally wouldn’t have done that, but he’s sold a lot more books than me, hasn’t he?”
The former paratrooper, who recently caught up with Harry at a charity event in London, offered a brief but positive assessment of the Duke, stating simply: “He’s great.”
Wood made the comments while promoting his latest travel book, “Walking the Nile”, which documents his 4,250-km journey along the world’s longest river.
In his memoir “Spare”, Prince Harry wrote about his combat experience, stating that everything he did during two combat tours was “recorded, time-stamped”.
The Duke detailed his exact number of Taliban fighters killed, writing: “My number: Twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed.”
He explained his military mindset, writing: “You can’t kill people if you think of them as people… They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods.”
Several high-profile military figures criticised Harry’s revelation about his kill count.
Iraq veteran Colonel Tim Collins told Forces News: “That’s not how you behave in the army; it’s not how we think. He has badly let the side down. We don’t do notches on the rifle butt. We never did.”
Former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who also attended Sandhurst, accused Harry of “boasting” about his tally.
Wallace told LBC’s Nick Ferrari: “I frankly think boasting about tallies or talking about tallies distorts the fact that the Army is a team game. It’s a team enterprise. It’s not about who can shoot the most.”
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Prince Harry strongly denied accusations of boasting about his kill count, calling it “a dangerous lie” during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
“Without a doubt, the most dangerous lie that they have told, is that I somehow boasted about the number of people I killed in Afghanistan,” the Duke said.
He added: “If I heard anyone boasting about that kind of thing, I would be angry. But it’s a lie.”
Harry claimed some media outlets had deliberately “strip away the context” of his account.