It was in the line of fire that Prince Harry developed a passion for helping wounded colleagues. Photo / AP
As Prince Harry prepares to visit New Zealand this week, Penny Junor examines what the future holds for the playboy prince who has outgrown his wild days to become a natural leader.
Captain Harry Wales was never cut out for a desk job. Strapped into the front seat of an Apache attack helicopter was where Prince Harry shone, where he made himself useful, where his quick wit, decisive nature and fast reactions saved lives. It was in the line of fire that he developed a passion for helping wounded colleagues.
He was a brilliant co-pilot gunner, one of the best - literally, the Top Gun. But Camp Bastion has been disbanded, the British army has pulled out of Afghanistan - right now, there is no call for Apaches in active service - and Harry has spent the past year in the comparative safety of an office in Whitehall.
The announcement in March that, after 10 years, he is to leave the army next month came as little surprise. Harry says it was "a really tough decision" but "inevitably, most good things come to an end, and I am at a crossroads in my military career".
The tough bit for him will be giving up the camaraderie of his fellow soldiers and the freedom to be himself - to do a job like any normal person, without being marked out as special - that the army has given him.
Harry now finds himself at a familiar fork in the road. At 30, he is at a point at which many of the most talented soldiers in the British army leave: when they have left behind the youthful impulses that first led them to sign up but are still young and impressive enough to start a new career.
As Lieutenant Colonel Tom de la Rue, Harry's former Apache Regiment Commanding Officer, said: "I am not surprised that Harry is planning to leave. He is a truly remarkable person, someone with a unique touch, able to make people feel very special.
"It therefore follows that his time in the army was always going to be limited. He has outgrown his rank and role and will now, no doubt, move on to make an even greater contribution in his royal capacity."
If he were to stay in the army beyond the summer, Harry would be promoted to Major and, as such, would be off to the Joint Services Command and Staff College at Shrivenham to enrol on the Intermediate Command and Staff Course.
This would mean nine months in the classroom, and academia was never Harry's forte. As a former member of his household says: "Prince Harry likes being down and dirty.
"He's a natural soldier. Whether he's on a hill in Scotland or in the middle of nowhere and it's raining and blustery and cold and miserable and wet, Harry will stay out there. He's a hard fellow, he revels in that sort of environment, in physical challenge."
Prince Harry, who will pushed down to fifth in line to the throne with the birth of William and Kate's second child, only took the desk job so he could mastermind last September's Invictus Games. He wanted to showcase the bravery and determination of wounded servicemen and women, to prove to the world they needn't be consigned to the scrap heap and still have plenty to offer employers post-injury.
The games - a larger, international version of America's Warrior Games - had been his brainchild. His enthusiasm and leadership skills turned that vision into reality in record time. Those skills were learned and honed in the army. According to another former member of his household: "The army was the making of the man. The man was there, he just needed time to be moulded and matured.
"I'm not going to be a pop psychologist and guess at what his mother's death meant to his maturity, but there is no doubt he matured quickly in the forces and prospered. He loved it because he could be one of the 'normal' guys. He's an absolutely natural soldier, a natural leader."
Sandhurst, where Harry had his first taste of military life, was undoubtedly a physical challenge. He went to the Royal Military Academy at the age of 20, younger than most of his fellow cadets who had been through university first. He admitted he had found the infamous first five weeks, when one in seven drops out, "a struggle".
He lost weight, was shouted at by sergeant majors but said later it had done him good. When he arrived in his chosen regiment, the Household Cavalry, his regimental corporal major Shaun Pickford, whose task was to keep new young officers in check, recalls how Harry was down-to-earth and "a soldier's officer" from day one.
"Some come in cocky. Harry didn't. He was interested in what the guys had done, what they wanted to do. He wanted to lead them; that's what stood out with him from when he first joined the regiment. From day one, Harry wanted to go to the front line."
When, in 2007, the 22-year-old prince was prevented from serving in Iraq amid safety concerns - military chiefs said he would become a "high-value" insurgent target - he reverted to the man who fell out of nightclubs drunk at 3 in the morning and who would take a swing at the waiting paparazzi. But he was saved by a remarkable commanding officer.
"The best thing that ever happened to Prince Harry, in a military sense was Lieutenant Colonel Edward Smyth-Osbourne, a Lifeguards officer and former member of the SAS," says one of his team.
"He was one of those paragons who got Harry, and Harry got him, and he really took Harry under his wing. He was the man who picked him out of the gutter and said, 'You're coming to Afghanistan with me'."
In 2007, he went to Afghanistan as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) but was pulled out after 10 weeks after his cover was blown by an American blogger.
Harry really began to shine when General Sir Richard Dannatt, then Chief of General Staff (now Lord Dannatt), suggested the way to get back to the front line was to retrain as a helicopter pilot.
After years of feeling second best - the less good-looking of the brothers, the less important - Harry discovered something he could do almost better than anyone else in the army: fly Apaches. It gave him self-esteem and confidence he had never felt.
And with that newfound confidence came the realisation he could use his HRH title as a force for good, shining a light on all the causes that are close to his heart: forgotten and disadvantaged children and young people, veterans and military families, and sustainable development and conservation.
Harry has convened the Invictus Games, raised millions for Aids orphans in Lesotho and walked with the wounded to the South Pole. It is a racing certainty these causes will form his day job along with his part-time royal duties.
And while he is working out precisely what that form will be, he will do some volunteering on a conservation project in Africa, then with the Ministry of Defence's Defence Recovery Capability, which co-ordinates support for wounded service personnel.
Time was when some of his friends feared that after the army, Harry might turn his back on royal duties altogether and disappear to Africa, where there are no paparazzi to hound him and no one to judge him. But Sir David Manning, the former diplomat who advises him and his brother, says whatever Harry ends up doing, the nation will doubtless be proud of him for doing it.
"Prince William has a very clear destiny," he says. "Prince Harry's is much more open to discussion. He has options. He doesn't have to give the kind of leadership that his brother will have to display - but my guess is he will."
• Penny Junor is author of Prince Harry: Brother, Soldier, Son (Hodder & Stoughton).
In 2002, the then 17-year-old Prince Harry confessed to smoking marijuana and getting drunk. Three years earlier he was caught ordering cherry brandy while on a school sailing trip. According to the
News of the World
, Prince Charles scared Harry straight by taking him to a rehabilitation centre where he spent a day talking with addicts and learning about the dangers of drugs.
In 2005, just two weeks before Holocaust Memorial Day, Prince Harry turned up at a "colonials and natives" costume party dressed as a Nazi. British tabloid the Sun published a photo of the prince wearing a swastika armband and a desert uniform similar to those worn by Erwin Rommel's German Afrika Korps. "I'm very sorry if I have caused any offence," the prince said in a statement. "It was a poor choice of costume, and I apologise."
In 2006 he founded the charity Sentebale in Lesotho to help the orphans of Aids victims, into which he and has ploughed huge amounts of money, much raised in the name of his mother Diana.
In 2008, Harry and his brother William were summonsed to a dressing-down - known as an "interview without coffee" - when they used part of their flying training to land a helicopter in the garden of William's then future parents-in-law to attend a stag party.
In 2009, the News of the World leaked a video in which Harry refers to his South Asian army comrades using racist language. Touring a room while his friends dozed, he described one officer as "our little Paki friend Ahmed". Spotting a colleague wearing camouflage netting over his head and said: "It's Dan the Man ... you look like a raghead."
A spokesman said afterwards: "Prince Harry used the term raghead to mean Taliban or Iraqi insurgent," he said. As for Ahmed, the spokesman claimed that Paki was his nickname.
In 2012, Harry was a constant presence at the London 2012 Games, during which he was an Olympic ambassador. He was highly visible during the Queen's Jubilee the same year, and won a legion of fans as he completed his first royal solo tour overseas with visits to Belize, the Bahamas, Brazil and Jamaica.
That same year pictures emerged of the prince cavorting at pool parties in Las Vegas, culminating in the publication online of two pictures depicting him naked while indulging in a game of "strip billiards". The most salacious images, sold by a party guest for
an estimated $20,000, showed the prince wearing just a watch and a necklace as
he embraced a young, naked woman clutching a pool cue.
In 2014, the prince launched the Invictus Games for injured members of the armed forces.
Saturday
Prince Harry touches down in Wellington. There's an official welcome at Government House before a wreath-laying ceremony at the National War Memorial. Later that evening he attends the Hurricanes vs Sharks rugby game at Westpac Stadium.
Sunday
Harry travels to Stewart Island and visits Ulva Island, a Department of Conservation open island sanctuary.
Monday
The prince heads to Christchurch to meet members of the Student Volunteer Army at the University of Canterbury.
Wednesday
Harry will learn the haka at Linton Military Camp south of Palmerston North and take part in a number of army activities.
Thursday
A visit to Putiki Marae in Whanganui, including a waka trip on the river and visiting the War Memorial Centre.
Friday
The prince lands in Auckland and will visit Southern Cross Campus School and Middlemore Hospital's Spinal Rehabilitation Unit. He will also attend a reception with emergency services and disaster relief organisations at Government House.
Saturday
Harry will join young footballers at a Fifa under-20 event at the Cloud then visit the Millennium Institute of Sport before flying out of Auckland in the evening.
A live cook-off featured ox heart, wapiti, wild boar and plenty of edible wildlife.