SEE OUR PRINCE HARRY IN AFGHANISTAN PIC GALLERY
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“Incoming! Get down!” shouted a senior officer as bullets zipped angrily overhead during the ferocious firefight. 

Harry, his face caked with dust, stayed calm amid the din of war as soldiers shouted instructions and encouragement to each other. 

Rocket-propelled grenades mingled with the thump of mortar rounds which exploded around the British troops as they hunkered down in the alien landscape.

The air was thick with the smell of gunfire. 

Harry fired long bursts as Taliban fighters equipped with heavy machine guns, small arms, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, briefly showed themselves. 

They would not know they were fighting a member of the Royal Family who had long wanted to be on the front line with his men.

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WATCH OUR VIDEO OF HARRY ON THE FRONT LINE

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With bullets flying, a Gurkha alongside Harry calmly filmed the incident on a hand-held camera. Like many other soldiers, Harry wanted a souvenir from his first battle. 

Manning the powerful machine gun for the first time, Harry was helping Gurkha troops repel the  attack on a British position.

In blistering heat and crouching on sandbags, an open box of ammunition at the ready next to him, the prince pumped rounds across 500 metres of cratered no-man’s-land using only distant puffs of smoke as his target.

Trained as a battlefield air controller, Harry was working within sight of Taliban trenches when 16 to 20 Taliban were spotted moving forward, preparing to attack the British position. As a Gurkha rifleman fired off a Javelin missile the order went out to man the machine guns.

In the ensuing rush it is Harry – just three weeks into his tour in Afghanistan – who claims one of them, seizing the chance to put his training into practice. “This is the first time I’ve fired a .50 cal,” he said with a smile.

Wearing earplugs, the third-in-line to the throne gritted his teeth as he concentrated hard on his target.

“It’s just no man’s land ... they poke their heads up and that’s it,” he said.

A shredded piece of sackcloth hanging in front of an arch of sandbags provided the only cover for his firing position. But next to him the Gurkha soldier happily filmed the prince’s debut on the “.50 cal” on Harry’s own  camera. 

And then, as suddenly as it began, the contact with the enemy was over.

It was time for Harry to relax with his comrades and analyse the most terrifying – and exciting – day of his young life. No amount of training could prepare him for the exhilaration he now feels. 

His determination to fulfil his professional duty has finally had its reward.

Like thousands of other British soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, the prince has a lively private collection of video clips which were filmed during his tour of action.

Half a kilometre away lay “Line Taunton”, the heavily-fortified trench system marking the start of a Taliban-controlled area extending as far south as the Pakistani border. 

“The whole place is just deserted, there are no roofs on any of the compounds, there are craters all over the place, it looks like something out of the Battle of the Somme,” he remarked.

Harry’s immediate boss, Major Mark Milford, Officer Com-manding B Company of the 1st Battalion, the Royal Gurkha Rifles, had been watching the prince.

“This is the southern border for the coalition troops,” he said. “This is about as dangerous as it can get.”