The spare goes to war

CNN's Chris Cuomo did not win any friends over the water recently when he referred to Britain's Prince Harry as the expendable spare. Poor Prince Harry fought for and won the right to serve his country in Afghanistan. He was there for only a few weeks, when the media blackout, designed to protect him and the men with whom he served, was broken by an Australian women's magazine. Not that the initial squib garnered any notice--it took Matt Drudge's reprint of the news to blow Harry's cover, which resulted in his early removal from the front lines.

Since then, things have gone from bad to worse. After an initial flurry of hailing Harry as a hero, the British tabs are back at it, today publishing a front page photo of Harry at a pub with his girlfriend. That segment of the British publish that lives to comment on the lives of others are now decrying the fact that Harry remains Harry. The "darling Diana" group, who have all but canonized the dead Princess of Wales, want a pristine icon are furious that Harry has returned to his life rather than beginning a life of prayer and contemplation.

My cynical take on the whole mess is that the military used Harry's honest desire to serve as a publicity stunt to drum up support for an increasingly unpopular war. But  these things have a way of backfiring with everything from negative comments from the parents of soldiers who died there to a public who expected Harry to return home a changed man.

Well, war, even a brief encounter with war, does change people and it also makes them yearn to return to life as they knew it, away from the heat, the dust, and gunfire aimed in their direction. Harry has done what all returning soldiers have done when they arrive home in one piece: He took his best girl out for a drink. 

Given recent history, one assumes the British government is aware that spares have a way of becoming heirs. King George V and King George VI were both spares. So, maybe the issue is not one of expendable spare, as suggested by Chris Cuomo, but one of expendable young men sent off to do fight on foreign lands. If we think that spare Harry is expendable, aren't we actually saying that all troops everywhere are made up of equally expendable young men?

Apparently, young Harry served with distinction and enjoyed the brief anonymaty in the process and that should have been enough. Now he's back in the world, which persists in the blood sport of comparing him to his dead mother, who also did her job with distinction right up to the moment that her arranged marriage crashed and burned. I don't know where Harry goes from here, and I feel confident to say  that he probably doesn't either, but I'm pretty sure that wherever he goes it will not be in the direction ordained by a public that creates icon just so they can whittle them down to size and then is dissatisfied with what they find. And the tabloids will be there to record every moment.