"He's Finished" — The US Captain Who Mocked the SAS Veteran Minutes Before He Turned the Battle
Chapter 5
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Vane, the left-handed breacher, was building a frame charge on a groundsheet using a strip of PE4 plastic explosive, a length of detonation cord, a piece of duct tape, and—this is the part the captain would not have believed if you had told him—a meter and a half of ordinary garden cane he had bought that morning in the local bazaar for the equivalent of 40p. The cane was the frame; the plastic was the cutting charge; the tape held the geometry. Vane worked left-handed, which is to say the wrong way round to the diagram in the manual, and the result, when he was finished with it, would put a door-shaped hole through a mud-brick wall with a report that would sound from 30 meters away like a heavy book being dropped on a table. It was the only time that morning that anyone counted the money against the mission, and no one counted it out loud.You could have walked through that courtyard at 9:25 in the morning and thought nothing was happening. You could have concluded that the British were slow, or unserious, or, in the phrase Kohler had used ten minutes earlier, amateur. That was the trap the courtyard laid for a certain kind of visitor.And the captain, standing in the gate of it with Hobley at his shoulder and Spate two paces behind, walked into the trap because he had, without knowing it, been walking towards it all morning.Spate saw the trap. He had seen the trap before in 2007, in a compound outside Basra, where he had watched a four-man Regiment patrol come back in from a job with a prisoner and a body count and no visible sign that any of the four had been more than mildly inconvenienced by their morning. He looked now at the courtyard, and then he looked at Kohler's back, and he chose, because he was a master sergeant of Special Forces and not a captain, to say nothing. He would say something later. He would say it in one sentence at the airstrip, and it would be the sentence that named what had happened. But he did not say it now.The captain watched the courtyard for perhaps 90 seconds. He watched Halloran assemble the rifle. He watched Prosser read the Housman. He watched Doyle on the roof and Vane on the groundsheet and the 12 other men doing 12 other quiet things. And what he saw was a group of men who did not, in his professional judgment, look like they were about to go and do a hostage rescue in 90 minutes. They looked like they were about to have lunch."Are they always like this?" he asked Hobley, not quietly.Hobley, who had done a joint exercise with a British parachute company two years earlier and had come away from it with a very particular respect he had never been able to articulate to his captain, said, "Yes, sir." He said it the way you say yes to a doctor who has just asked whether the pain is here.The captain took out the yellow chamois. He cleaned his Oakleys. He set them back on his nose.