Prince Harry on How He Reconciles with Ethical Impacts of War: 'Silence Is the Least Effective Remedy'
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Prince Harry reflects on his military service in his new memoir Spare.
In this week's exclusive PEOPLE cover story, the Duke of Sussex, 38, addresses how he reconciles the ethical impacts of war, including the lives that are lost and taken.
"I don't know that you ever fully reconcile the painful elements of being at war. This is something each soldier has to confront, and in the nearly two decades of working alongside service personnel and veterans, I've listened to their stories and have shared mine," Prince Harry tells PEOPLE.
"In these conversations, we often talk about the parts of our service that haunt us — the lives lost, the lives taken. But also the parts of our service that heal us and the lives we've saved," he adds.
RELATED: Prince Harry Tells PEOPLE: Spare Is a Raw Account of the 'Good, the Bad and Everything in Between'
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"It's a duty, a job and a service to our country — and having done two tours of duty in Afghanistan for my country, I've done all I could to be the best soldier I was trained to be," he says. "There's truly no right or wrong way to try and navigate these feelings, but I know from my own healing journey that silence has been the least effective remedy. Expressing and detailing my experience is how I chose to deal with it, in the hopes it would help others."
RELATED: Prince Harry Vowed to Leave Afghanistan with His 'Conscience Intact,' He Writes in Memoir
Prince Harry graduated from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 2005 and served in the British Armed Forces for a decade, deploying twice to Afghanistan and completing elite training to fly Apache helicopters. He launched the Invictus Games, an international adaptive sports tournament for injured, sick and wounded service personnel and veterans, in 2014, and left operational military service the following year.
Harry held the honorary military titles of Captain General of the Royal Marines, Honorary Air Commandant of RAF Honington and Commodore-in-Chief, Small Ships and Diving, Royal Naval Command before he and Meghan Markle stepped back from their senior royal roles.
PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE The book jacket of Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare'
In Spare, Prince Harry said he wanted to leave the war in Afghanistan with his "conscience intact."
"I made it my purpose, from day one, to never to go to bed with any doubt whether I had done the right thing...whether I had shot at Taliban and only Taliban, without civilians in the vicinity. I wanted to return to Great Britain with all my limbs, but more than that I wanted to get home with my conscience intact," Harry wrote.
With videos taken from the Apache helicopters and relayed to the base, he was able to "say with exactness how many enemy combatants I had killed. And it seemed to me essential not to be afraid of that number," he wrote. "So my number is 25. It's not a number that fills me with satisfaction but nor does it embarrass me."
Jenna Jones
For more from PEOPLE's exclusive interview with Harry, check out this week's issue, on newsstands Friday
Looking back at his former roles as a solider and working royal, Prince Harry tells PEOPLE he sees himself today as "a husband and a father — first and foremost — as well as a veteran, environmentalist and mental-health advocate. I know that I want to live my life in service of others and that I want to live by example for my kids."
