Now he wasn’t pleading, he was insisting, and it was 2 A.M., and I was starting to lose it. For months, I’d been crossing out the comeback, and for months Harry had been pleading for it to go back in. Good for Harry that he had the nerve, but ending with what he said would dilute the scene’s meaning: that even at the most bizarre and peripheral moments of his life, his central tragedy intrudes. Harry always wanted to end this scene with a thing he said to his captors, a comeback that struck me as unnecessary, and somewhat inane.

When the simulation is over, one of the participants extends an apology. Clawing that specific wound, the memory of Harry’s dead mother, is out of bounds. (Two of his fellow-soldiers don’t they crack.) At last, Harry’s captors throw him against a wall, choke him, and scream insults into his face, culminating in a vile dig at-Princess Diana?Įven the fake terrorists engrossed in their parts, even the hard-core British soldiers observing from a remote location, seem to recognize that an inviolate rule has been broken. The idea is to find out if Harry has the toughness to survive an actual capture on the battlefield. He’s hooded, dragged to an underground bunker, beaten, frozen, starved, stripped, forced into excruciating stress positions by captors wearing black balaclavas. It’s a simulation, but the tortures inflicted upon Harry are very real. Harry, at the close of gruelling military exercises in rural England, gets captured by pretend terrorists. For two years, I’d been the ghostwriter on Harry’s memoir, “ Spare,” and now, reviewing his latest edits in a middle-of-the-night Zoom session, we’d come to a difficult passage. Then, as Harry started going back at me, as his cheeks flushed and his eyes narrowed, a more pressing thought occurred: Whoa, it could all end right here. And yet some part of me was still able to step outside the situation and think, This is so weird. My head was pounding, my jaw was clenched, and I was starting to raise my voice.

Until the real thing comes along book