"He's Finished" — The US Captain Who Mocked the SAS Veteran Minutes Before He Turned the Battle
Chapter 17
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There is a photograph taken later that afternoon that does not exist in any official record, but exists in the honest memory of everyone who was on the strip that day. And the photograph is of a United States Army captain standing three paces back from the tail ramp of a lifting Chinook, with a folded yellow chamois in his right hand and his eyes on the middle distance.He said at 9:13: "You people drink tea and shoot paper. My guys shoot men. Send the amateurs in first, and we'll clean up what's left of them."He was, on the first count, correct: the Regiment does drink tea. They drink it in the courtyards of forward operating bases, and in the sangars of observation posts, and in the kitchens of Stirling Lines in the county of Herefordshire in England. And they drink it in a particular way, out of tin mugs, and they have done so for the whole of their history, and this is not a thing anyone in the Regiment would deny.He was, on everything else, catastrophically wrong.He was wrong about the paper, because the paper is what you shoot when you are building the habits that will, at 430 meters, in a subsonic load with a four-knot crosswind, put three men down on a wall in silence in the space of six and a half minutes.He was wrong about his guys—not because his guys were not good; they were, in their own way, very good—but because the sentence "my guys shoot men" was a sentence about the last stage of a process, and Brandt Kohler had that morning, in a canvas briefing tent at 9:13, made the specific error of a man who confuses the last stage of a process with the whole of it.And he was wrong, most of all, about who should be sent in first. Because when they were sent in first at 11:44 in the morning, they came out in single file at 13:21 with two hostages walking on their own feet, and 19 counted in a green notebook, and nothing left for anyone to clean up.He was right about the tea. He was wrong about the men who drank it.Kohler served another 11 years in the United States Army, and he did well in them, and he never spoke of that morning again—except once, to Spate, in a car park in Fort Bragg in the winter of the following year, when he said without preamble, "I meant it when I said it."And Spate, who had been carrying the sentence for a year, said, "I know you did, sir. That's what made it what it was."The Regiment, in the years since, has drunk a great deal more tea. It has also, in that time, done a great deal of the other work, and there is no record of any of that work in the honest press, because there is no record of most of what the Regiment does. And the number in Douglas Merrick's green notebook was written down once, and never spoken of again, because the men who did the work did not need to speak of it.They had, in fact, never needed to. That was the whole thing.