I’m about 80% of the way through the audiobook (narrated by the author and he does a great job, btw).

I don’t think it’s surprising that people with a vested interest would isolate information from a book like this, and remove all context to create a more salacious headline. Nearly the same exact thing happened with Lisa Brennan Jobs’s memoir, which was remarkably tame and even handed— but you wouldn’t have known that from all of the articles quoting sources friendly to Laurene Powell Jobs.

In order to make the claim that Harry boasted about the number of people he killed, you would have to focus on four words— “So, my number— 25” and ignore literally everything else he’s written about his military service, which is a good chunk of the book. That particular quote comes in a paragraph in which he’s talking about accountability in a messy war with significant civilian casualties.

At no point does he dehumanize Taliban combatants or brag about their deaths. He talks a bit elsewhere about how to square the morality of killing during wartime within himself and forgot him it seems to have come down to a belief that waging war would prevent more deaths by terrorism. He refers to 9/11 quite a bit, though not the July, 2005 London attacks which I think is interesting but is probably because he’s writing to an American audience.

I feel like a lot of issues are getting conflated if you’re just going by second hand articles, not least of which is how badly the United States fucked the rest of the world by invading Iraq, thus ensuring Afghanistan would be an interminable failure.

His mindset is not very different from the mindset a lot of good but low level people had in the decade following 9/11, even if you were against the invasion of Iraq. It may have been misguided, overly trusting of American military judgement, and stuck in a sunk cost fallacy— but it wasn’t cruel or callous (words I reserve for the American neo-cons who orchestrated that mess).