"He's Finished" — The US Captain Who Mocked the SAS Veteran Minutes Before He Turned the Battle
Chapter 10
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He said at 11:24, "That's... that's a good shot."He said it in the flat, small voice of a man who is trying, in real time, to work out how many good shots make a school, and how many schools make a regiment, and whether he had, 90 minutes earlier, called such a school a place where amateurs drink tea.Spate, again without looking at him, said, "Three good shots, sir. In a row. In under seven minutes."The amateurs, he had called them.It was, at 11:24, becoming difficult for the captain to hold that word in his mouth at the same time as the picture through the Swarovski, and he was, in the small internal way that men do this, beginning to rearrange his sentences. Perhaps he had, he thought, been referring to a specific kind of exercise. Perhaps he had been speaking generally about Anglo-American doctrine. Perhaps the sentence, taken as a whole, had been misinterpreted by men who had chosen—the British were like this—not to correct it in the moment.The Ranger had not, of course, been misinterpreted by anyone. He had been heard precisely, and Merrick had written six left-handed words in the green notebook, and one of those words had been amateurs, and there was a tick beside it.Hobley on the captain's left said quietly, "Sir, that's... I've never seen...""I know, Terrence," Kohler said.He did not, then, take out the chamois. He had noticed in the last half hour that he was reaching for it more often than he wanted to, and he had made himself a small, unnecessary rule about not reaching for it in front of Spate. He kept his hands on the Swarovski.Through the lens, 430 meters away, the fourth sentry on the compound wall—the one on the western side, who had been out of Doyle's arc—was walking along his section of parapet, alive and unaware. And Halloran was watching him from the observation post, and Doyle was already halfway through the arithmetic that would end him.The third blow was the one that took the argument out of Brandt Kohler. And it came not from the Regiment, but from the local interpreter, a man in his 40s called Yousef Al-Rashad, who had before the war been a schoolteacher in a town 20 kilometers south of the compound, and who spoke, as he was fully aware, better English than most of the officers in the room.At 11:41, the assault force—12 men of B Squadron mounted in two vehicles, with Halloran having come off the observation post to join them—was on the last stretch of ground before the compound, moving up a dry watercourse to a form-up 300 meters from the wall. The captain and Hobley and Spate had come down from the roof to the operations room. They were standing behind Merrick, who was in front of a bank of radios and a plot of the compound, and Yousef Al-Rashad was standing beside Merrick because a woman on the compound wall had, 90 seconds earlier, started shouting, and Yousef was translating.