A few days ago Prince Harry tripped again – this time,
repeatedly, on his tongue. In a string of interview he gave before flying home
from a four-month stint in Afghanistan, he acknowledged he had killed some
Taliban fighters. He also said firing missiles at them from the controls of his
Apache gunship did not feel all that different from zapping the bad guys in a
video game.
The Taliban PR office derided Harry, a.k.a. Captain
Wales, describing him as a dimwit incapable of distinguishing a real war from
its Nintendo replica. More sympathetic commentators also criticized him for the
apparent insensitivity of his remarks. An article in The Guardian, though, sought to place Harry’s remarks in a broader context. It said his
“candid admission that he has killed insurgents during his tour of duty in
Afghanistan places him in a long line of royals who have bloodied their hands
in warfare.” Except that he didn’t. All he did was press once in a while a knob
while processing digitized images projected into the apple of his right eye.
I can imagine the difference between pressing a knob
to “kill” a video game character and pressing a knob to dispatch an enemy
fighter is really not that big. And it would take extraordinary sensitivity to be
consistently and keenly able to make that distinction. Unfortunately, spending
countless hours playing with a video console – whether in your bedroom, in an
air force simulator, or in the cockpit of a fighting machine – on top of other
countless hours in front of other screens, may not exactly enhance this kind of
emotional attunement and “situational awareness.”
Judging from the casual language he used to describe some
of his experiences, Harry may have some deficits in the area of processing
human drama and tragedy, as opposed to video streams. Explaining his role in
providing air support to allied troops, he said: "If there's people trying to do bad stuff to our
guys, then we'll take them out of the game, I suppose." Harry’s musings on
the difficulties of reconciling his “tree mes” – “one in the army, one socially in my own
private time, and then one with the family and stuff like that” – provide another fairly representative sample.
But perhaps the prince should not be judged too
harshly. Like Manti Te’o, he could be seen as a victim of larger
sociotechnological forces. To which we all – and particularly kids with their
superplastic brains and epigenetic profiles – are more susceptible than we
realize.
