Visit by Prince draws crowd
WASHINGTON — The throngs swooned but Prince Harry was having none of it.
The British soldier-prince is spending most of his week in the U.S. honoring the wounded and the dead of war, a salute that began Thursday at a land-mine exhibition in Congress at the side of one of America’s most storied wounded warriors, Sen. John McCain. Accorded heart-throb treatment, the prince was all royal business.
As he entered the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building near the Capitol, the prince was greeted by a roar and shouts of “Harry!” from a crowd of about 500, nearly all of them women. They filled a roped-off hallway and stairway with a view of the exhibit, hoisting their cellphones and tablets to get a picture. Harry didn’t visibly react except to give what appeared to be a polite wave.
Today, Harry visits Arlington National Cemetery, meets comrades in arms at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and flies to the 2013 Warrior Games in Colorado Springs, Colo., where more than 200 wounded servicemen and women from the U.S. and Britain will compete.
Harry also made a previously unannounced visit to the White House, surprising military mothers and their children at an afternoon tea with Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden’s wife, Jill. The prince joined in helping the kids make Mother’s Day gifts from tulip and rose bouquets, vegetable chips and edible dough jewelry.
The prince recently served for 20 weeks as a co-pilot gunner in an Apache attack helicopter in the Afghanistan war zone.
McCain, R-Ariz., who was shot down over North Vietnam and tortured as a captive, said he told the prince that “he was probably a much better pilot than I was.”
