"He's Finished" — The US Captain Who Mocked the SAS Veteran Minutes Before He Turned the Battle
Chapter 8
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
Down in the wadi, 400 meters away, Halloran did not know any of this was happening. He was doing his job. He was watching the compound. He had, in the 17 minutes since he had reached the observation post, counted six armed men on the walls, three vehicles inside the courtyard, and one specific figure in a green shirt whom he had marked in the small waterproof notebook he kept in his left thigh pocket with the two letters HV—high value—because the figure had come out of the ground-floor storeroom carrying an AK-74 and had, before going back inside, spoken sharply to a man on the wall in a way that suggested he was, if not the commander, then the deputy. Halloran had marked the figure. He had written the time beside the letters. He had gone back to counting.Up on the roof, the captain said at 10:41, "How the hell—" and then stopped, because he had realized mid-sentence that finishing it would require him to admit something he did not yet want to admit: which was that the men he had called amateurs 72 minutes earlier had just done in front of him a thing his own Rangers could not have done on that ground, in that time, without at least one stone moving.He closed his mouth. Hobley quietly adjusted his own scope. Spate said nothing more; he had said his one sentence. He would not need to say another until last light.And that was only the first time that day the captain would be wrong. It was, in fact, the smallest of the wrongnesses he was going to accumulate before the sun came down. It was the wrongness of a man who had not yet realized that everything he thought he knew about the 22 men in the courtyard had been assembled from a film, a paragraph, and an evening in a bar, and that none of those three sources had prepared him for what a British reconnaissance patrol looked like when it did not want to be seen.The re-hook, if you want to call it that, is that the captain still, at 11:15, believed the day was recoverable. The patrol had been a good piece of fieldcraft, he had privately conceded. But fieldcraft was not, in his professional understanding, the thing that ended men. Fieldcraft got you to the fight; what ended men was the rifle. And what ended men well was the rifle in the hands of a soldier who had shot a great deal, at great distance, at things that were trying to kill him. And Kohler had, on that specific subject, opinions.He was voicing them quietly to Hobley on the roof of the operations building at 11:17 when Doyle, 430 meters away in a hide he had dug that morning behind a small crest to the southeast of the compound, took his first shot.There was a range issue the captain had not been briefed on: which was that the sentry on the northeast corner of the compound wall—a man in a black jacket with an AKM slung and a radio on his hip—had in the last 20 minutes developed a habit of walking to the far end of his sector and looking, for reasons known only to him, at the fig trees along the north wall. He would walk to the fig trees, look at them for approximately 15 seconds, and walk back. He would do this every four minutes.