The Insult That Cost A French Colonel The Whole Exercise Against The SAS

[00:00:00]You clicked because you wanted to hear a French colonel say it. So here it is in the tent where he said it. On the first gray morning of the exercise, with the coffee still going round and the map spread flat on a trestle table that had been set up an hour before dawn, Colonel Bertrand Vererad of the Perier regime de Parachutist Dinfontter de Marine tapped the map with two fingers as if the map had asked him a question.

[00:00:29]He said, "They are not elite soldiers. They are English amateurs who drink tea. Send them in first and we will see what is left." He said it in a briefing tent at a French combined arms training area in the southwest of the country. At 9 minutes past 8 in the morning of the first day of an exercise, the directing staff had christened feric anvil. He said it to 14 of his own officers and warrant officers to a French army liaison captain writing in a small green notebook and to one British brigadier who did not at that moment react. He said it loudly enough to carry through the canvas wall to the Nissen hut where the British contingent were drawing rations. Whether he had intended it to carry is a question you can answer for yourself by the end of this video. He would remember saying it. He would be made to. That is not a thing the narrator of this channel says lightly.

[00:01:31]And it is not a thing this channel says to hold your attention. It is a fact of the record we are going to walk through together for the next hour, blowby counted blow, until the colonel is standing at the edge of a helicopter landing point at last light, with an umpire's board in front of him and a number on it he cannot argue with, and the men he had told to be sent in first, walking past him in the near dark without looking at him once. Every word of what he said in that tent will be collected from him. Not by a speech, not by a lecture, and not by any Englishman raising his voice. It will be collected by four problems set by his own directing staff on his own ground with his own stopwatch. That is the shape of the thing. A named man, a real réumé, a specific sentence, and a week in which reality quietly took the sentence apart in front of him. The narrator will not gloat. The narrator does not need to.

[00:02:30]What Vorjiard said at 9 minutes 8 on a Monday morning is on the record. What happened between then and Friday night is also on the record. And by the time we are finished, you will know exactly which line from that briefing tent he could no longer make his mouth say aloud, and exactly which man on his own side named it out loud for him. begin then where reality began with the colonel raised as high as he could go.

[00:02:57]Bertrand Vojerard was not a fool, and if this story worked by making him one, it would not be worth an hour of your evening. He was 53 years old that spring and he had been a soldier for 31 of those years. 29 of them in the Ferno regime de Parachutist's donor dear Marine the regiment that men in that army call quietly and without much decoration the house. He had gone in through Kwezi as a young lieutenant in May of 1978 when the Paris had jumped onto the strip at low altitude to get to the Europeans in the town before the killings finished. And he had come out of that week with the beginnings of a reputation and a small scar on the back of his left hand that he had never bothered to explain. He had done Chad.

[00:03:45]He had done sievo with the United Nations in the years when the United Nations meant standing in a car park watching a city be shelled and being told not to fire back. He had done kat divvoir. He wore the lejon doner and one other decoration whose ribbon he kept polished. He had commanded at every level a French officer could command at before he took the regiment. And he had taken the regiment 3 years before feric anvil. And in those three years, he had rebuilt its selection pipeline and won two large exercises against forces the French take seriously. He kept a folded photograph of his father, an Indo-China veteran, inside the cover of his notebook, and he checked it now and then in the way other men check a compass.

[00:04:30]His contempt, therefore, was not the contempt of a man who did not know what special forces looked like. It was the contempt of a man who thought he already knew what British special forces looked like. He had worked alongside them once briefly in the Balkans in a role that involved more waiting than shooting, and he had come away with the impression that they were quieter than his own men and slower to commit, and when they did commit, more polite about it. Polite in Vjger's dictionary was a word that lived very close to soft. He respected the American units. He respected, in his own way, the Israelis. The British he thought of as a well-mannered older brother who had stopped going to the gym. So when he stood in that briefing tent on the Monday morning of Feric Anvil and tapped the map, he was not performing. He genuinely believed what he said. Sir Deit, he said again because he liked the sentence and because it had got a laugh the first time. He looked around the tent at his own people. Cissand Demater Anglair Kibwav Dut. Two of the younger captains laughed openly. The adjudant chief leading the assault team, a compact man called Sebastian Ru, who chewed the inside of his cheek when he thought, gave a short flat smile, and stopped chewing. The liaison captain Mark Deahay wrote the sentence down in his small green notebook in pencil and underlined it twice. And commandant Etien Lcom, the colonel's most senior subordinate, a man who had run three joint problems with the Special Air Service already in his career, and who therefore knew what was about to arrive on his side of the wire, closed his eyes for exactly the length of one breath, and opened them again. Onvoy umpier said vojerad still smiling. Send them in first on veril rest. The laughter went round again. Someone at the back of the tent said something too quiet to record.

[00:06:35]Brigadier James Halstead, the senior British officer present. A man from the joint special operations headquarters who had said almost nothing all week and would say almost nothing for the rest of it made a small mark on the corner of his own paper with a bro and did not lift his head. That was the roof. That was the sentence. That was the man who said it. And in the Nissen hut on the other side of the canvas, drawing rations from a French quartermaster who apologized for the coffee, where the teaing amateurs he had promised to spend first. The ground ferret anvil was fought over, sat in a fold of country south of the Gon, an old French army training area with a purpose-built mock village at one end, a chute house complex behind it. Two ranges dug into the side of a low ridge, and at the far edge, a helicopter landing point marked out in white stones on a strip of turf that had been moan flat that spring. The directing staff had set four escalating problems for the week, a standoff marksmanship serial on the Tuesday, a covert reconnaissance and target marking task on the Wednesday night, a hostage room close quarter problem in the Shoot House on the Thursday, and on the Friday night in the near dark, a combined assault on the mock village with objectives spread across 11 buildings and a hard time limit set by the French Chief Empire. Each side would attempt each problem. The umpires were French, drawn from Major Cecile Berser's directing staff. The stopwatches were French. The scoring board was French. In every sense that mattered on paper, the away side was the regiment. The French had brought more men, more vehicles, more radios, and a signals detachment that took up half a hanger, and Vogarad had walked his own regiment past the British lines on the first afternoon with the quiet satisfaction of a host who owns the good crockery. That is the only time in this hour that the phrase will appear, because it is not the point, and it was not the reason. The regiment's contingent had arrived the previous evening in three unmarked minibuses in civilian clothes with their kit in soft cases and their weapons in locked transit boxes. There were fewer of them than the French had expected and they walked into the accommodation block without introducing themselves and were within 20 minutes gone into the rangers to zero. The commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel Ian Menses, called Rory by the men who knew him, a wiry highlander who rolled his own cigarettes on a small tin and never smoked them indoors. He said hello to the French duty officer, shook hands with Halstead, nodded once at Valer across a hanger floor, and disappeared into a briefing with his squadron sergeant major. The sergeant major was warrant officer class 2 David Kersley diesel to his troop. A man who had come back from Sierra Leone speaking so quietly that other men had to lean in and who had never adjusted his volume upward since when Kley spoke to his troop staff that first evening in the accommodation block. Very walking past thought at first the man was mimming. He was not. He was giving orders. He was giving them at the exact volume required for the room and no louder and voerad who liked to feel a briefing at the base of his spine thought this was affectation. He noted it as a mark against. He was not the only man watching. Deah the liaison captain walked past the same room 10 minutes later and wrote in his small green notebook in pencil pala. They speak low. He underlined that, too. The regiment on the range that afternoon did nothing that looked like a demonstration. Staff Sergeant Hugh Pritchard, a slowspoken man from Bethesda in North Wales, who still wrote letters to his old climbing club, walked his troop through 30 drills with their L119 A1 rifles, and said at the end, "Write, Sergeant Tom Feriter, the sniper number one, left-handed by nature and right-handed by training and never inclined to explain why, put 10 rounds through a target at 500 meters in a group. A French sergeant on the neighboring laying paused to look at, then paused longer over. His spotter, Corporal Wesley Ainsworth, who read paperback westerns and carried one folded into his belt kit against the small of his back, said nothing about the group at all. Trooper Adam Ozanne, the youngest man on the ground, a Channel Islander who spoke passable French and had learned in his first week in the regiment not to admit it, listened to two French corporals on the next firing point, discuss the British zero and filed away the phrase they used. He said nothing back to them in either language. He filed it in the way he had been taught to file everything.

[00:11:40]They walked the shoot house at last light. Vojerad walked it half an hour later with his own team leads and made a point of standing at each doorway and describing what he would do. He was not wrong about any of it. He was in fact technically excellent. But when Ru stepped into the last room and saw a piece of chalk laid on the floor at exactly the angle a man clearing that room would have needed to place his foot and saw next to it a second piece of chalk marking a spot that meant nothing to anyone who had not spent 3 hours in that room already. He stopped chewing his cheek and did not start again for some time. Nothing had been said.

[00:12:20]Nothing had been announced. Someone from the British side had walked through that room in the interval and left two small marks that were to a man who knew what they meant. A full assault plan. Ru did not point it out to his colonel. He filed it and walked on. That in the narrator's voice and not in ruses, was the loaded gun. It was the shape of the whole week. The regiment had come to this exercise to work quietly in front of men who thought quiet was the same as slow, and to do the four problems the French had set them, in a way that would leave the French directing staff with nothing to write on the umpire's board except a number. And the man who most needed to see the loaded gun being pointed at him, the colonel who had jumped at Cowei, and who had said what he had said in the tent that morning, was the one man in the whole of Feric Anvil, who was not going to see it until it fired. The Tuesday problem was written on the umpire's board in French and in English, in that order, in Major Burgger's careful hand. Standoff marksmanship serial. two targets per team appearing for 4 seconds each at ranges to be determined on the day by the chief umpire scoring on first round hits only. Misses did not compound but did not recover. The intention as Burger explained it to the assembled team leads at 8:00 was to test cold accuracy at ranges that would not be announced to the shooters in advance. She tapped the face of her father's old watch as she spoke and Deah standing at her shoulder with his green notebook out wrote the ranges down as she read them. The French intended quietly to set the second target at a range they believed no team would be zeroed for. The French pair shot first because Ru always went first.

[00:14:13]He went down on the mat with a young Caparal chef on the glass. Their first target came up at 380 m and Ru hit its center mass inside two seconds and the caporal chef called the hit and the target went down and the range staff went to lift the second target. The second came up at 740 m in a small crosswind at an angle that put the sun on the shooter's left shoulder. Ru missed the first round low and left by a hand's breath, corrected fast and hit the second round. The umpire on his lane wrote, "One hit, one miss." And the caporal chef swore softly and grinned.

[00:14:54]Ru stood up and walked off the mat, and Verard, watching from the hut, said aloud to no one in particular, "Pal, not bad. He meant it." Ferritterer went down on the mat next, with Ainsworth on the glass. Farer had not been told the rangers. He did not ask. Ainsworth read the glass and said quietly, "380. No wind, come up too." And Ferriter came up too. And the first target came up at 380 m and went down again inside a second and a half with the target's center paper carrying a hole. The umpire on the lane went up close to inspect and then without saying anything ticked. The range staff lifted the second target.

[00:15:40]Ainssworth watched the glass. He watched it for longer than a French observer would have expected. His mouth moved once, then he said at the volume of a man reading a paperback western in a warm room, 910 half a mil right, "Send it when you like." Ferrer sent it when he liked. The propellant smoke lifted off the barrel in a thin gray line and the target at 910 m, which was not the range the French had set because the French had set the target at 740 and Ferritter had without asking ranged the target that was actually standing on the far berm past the intended target. At 910, the target at 910 stayed standing because the target at 910 was a piece of steel that had been placed there for a different serial the following week. And steel does not fall when it is hit by a single round of 5.56 from an L119A1.

[00:16:36]But it does ring and it rang and the ring carried back across the range at a delay that a French sergeant on the neighboring lane counted in his head and then stopped counting. Ainssworth said in the same voice on come back to 740 wins the same. Ferritta came back to 740.

[00:16:58]The first target of the second stand appeared. He hit it. It went down. The umpire on the lane wrote two hits no misses and paused and then wrote in the margin of his sheet in French. A shot at 910 ranged without announcement hit steel. Burger who had walked over from her hut when she heard the ring tapped the face of her father's watch once with the pad of her forefinger and did not tap it again. Ru was the second man on the French side to understand what had just happened. The first was the Caparole chef, who had walked up behind Ainsworth after Ferritta cleared the weapon, and who had leaned forward to look at the small notebook Ainsworth had open on his knee, and who had seen the wind call written down at the correct value, and who had straightened up and said nothing at all. Ru, when the capital chef came back to the hut, listened to what the young man told him, and chewed the inside of his cheek for a full 4 seconds, and then stopped. Vojira in the hut took the umpire's sheet from burger when she brought it and read it and handed it back. Undou lucky shot. He said it with the flat certainty of a man who could not conceive of the alternative. Burger did not answer. She tapped her watch face once softly and walked back to her hut.

[00:18:24]And that was the first time that Tuesday morning that the colonel who had called them amateurs was wrong about them. and it was only the first time that day there would be another before the sun crossed the ridge. The Wednesday problem was patience. Burger set it as a covert reconnaissance and target marking task against a mocked up insurgent command post in a wood two ridges east of the main camp with a hard 48hour window and a scoring scheme based on the quality of the intelligence returned and the presence or absence of contact. To score full marks, a team had to spend at least 36 hours in observation, mark four separate targets by their patrol patterns and extract without being seen by the 12man French garrison force who had been given the ground and told to hunt. The French assault team went in on the Tuesday evening in two four-man patrols, moving well and quietly by their own standards. By the second morning, they had good eyes on the command post from a lying up position on the north side of the wood, and by the second afternoon, they had marked two of the four target patterns and passed the intelligence back by short-range burst.

[00:19:37]Then at 1700 on the Wednesday, the French garrison force put a snap patrol along a fire break that ran 200 meters from the lying up position, and one of the garrison privates, walking last in the file, glanced left at exactly the wrong moment, and saw the corner of a set of night vision goggles against a treeine that should not have had corners. The French patrol went to ground, exchanged blank rounds, and the umpires called it a compromise. Two targets marked, contact made, extraction under duress. Burger wrote the score on the board in her careful hand, and did not comment. The regiment's four-man patrol had inserted 6 hours earlier than the French. Pritchard led. Ozanne was on the map and the pace. They had walked in through country the French garrison had assessed as too open to use, and had spent the last two hours of the insertion moving at a speed measured in yards per minute rather than meters/ hour, and had settled into a lying up position on the south side of the wood.

[00:20:42]In a fold of ground, the garrison force had walked past twice in their preparations without registering as usable. They stayed there for 39 hours.

[00:20:52]In 39 hours they moved a total of 11 ft.

[00:20:56]All of it Pritchard adjusting his hip against a route. Ozanne who had come up through boat troop and was accustomed to lying still in wet places developed cramp in his left calf on the second afternoon and did not shift his leg.

[00:21:10]Ainssworth because Ainsworth was on this patrol too as the second observer read his paperback western in his head from memory over the course of the second night. and at one point mouthed a line at Ferritta that Ferritta in the near dark did not see. Ferritta, for his part, watched a French sentry take a piss against a tree 80 m from their position and did not blink and did not shift. At last light on the Thursday, they extracted through the same fold of ground they had come in on, and they walked out with the patrol patterns of all four targets marked, timings noted, centuries counted, one radio antenna located, and because Ozanne had spent a long, slow hour listening to the French garrison force talking to each other at 3:00 in the morning through the trees, and because his French was better than he had ever admitted to any officer in the regiment, a fifth item on the intellig igence sheet, which was the call sign the garrison force had been using between their two-man reliefs, written down phonetically in Pritchard's slow hand from Ozanne's dictation, and initialed by both of them. They were not compromised. Burger walked out to the wood that morning with Ru and two of her umpires and Ru with the garrison force commander at his shoulder stood at the edge of the firebreak and looked into the wood and said, "Uil."

[00:22:37]Where were they? The garrison force commander did not know. Ru did not know.

[00:22:42]Burger walked 20 paces into the wood along a line she had been given by Pritchard on the extraction debrief and knelt down in the fold of ground that had held four men for 39 hours and picked up nothing because there was nothing to pick up and stood up again and tapped the face of her father's watch once. Vojira when the score was read to him that evening listened to it in silence and then said deceer.

[00:23:11]They were lucky with the ground. Lomb standing at his shoulder closed his eyes for exactly the length of one breath and opened them again as he had done in the tent on Monday morning. He said, "Monol Ilhoniser, my colonel, they chose the ground."

[00:23:29]Vojerad did not answer. He walked out of the hut and rolled his shoulders once and lit a cigarette and stood in the dusk with his back to the door. the amateurs, he had called them, in the tent on Monday. On the Thursday evening, in the dusk outside Burgger's hut, he stood alone and finished his cigarette and did not go back inside for a further 11 minutes. Burger set the shoot house problem on the Thursday morning, two rooms deep, one corridor, three roleplaying hostages seated at a table in the second room, and four role-playing hostiles positioned by lot at the start of each run. Live 5.56 into paper targets pinned to armored backing behind the role players seats. Hard time from breach to all clear called at the corridor mouth by the umpire. Penalties for any round fired within a cone that would have taken a hostage. No reruns.

[00:24:25]Ru went first because Ru always went first and because Ru was on any measurable scale an excellent close quarter operator. His team stacked at the door and blew the brereech at a good tempo and cleared the first room in six seconds and the second room in 11. And the umpire on the door called all clear at 17 seconds from breach. And the paper behind the hostages showed four clean hits on hostiles and no rounds inside the penalty cone. Burger wrote 17 seconds on the board and next to it in her careful handraat zero penalty four out of 40 penalty. It was by any French standard a strong run.

[00:25:12]Ru walked out of the chute house sweating lightly and did not smile. He walked past his colonel without meeting his eye because his cheek was not moving. Pritchard's team stacked at the door in a different order from Ruse. The breacher was Pritchard himself. The number two was Ferritter because Ferritterer was left-handed by nature and could clear the corner to the left of the door in a way a right-handed man could not. Ainssworth was three. Ozanne on his first exercise in the chute house at this level was four and Pritchard had put him there because Pritchards trusted him and because Pritchard's trust in that troop was a currency. The breach went. The first room cleared in 4 seconds. In the corridor, Pritchard's foot came down on the exact chalk mark that had been laid quietly on the floor of the second room at last light on Monday evening. The mark ru had seen and understood and not pointed out. And the mark told Pritchard without a word being spoken where the second hostile was going to be standing under the geometry the umpires had rolled that morning.

[00:26:18]Because a man from the regiment had walked the room 3 days earlier and marked the six most likely positions, and Pritchard had memorized all six. The second room cleared in 5 seconds and change. Ferritterer took the corner.

[00:26:33]Ainssworth took the far wall. Ozanne at 4 put a single round through the paper behind the third hostage's chair from an angle a right-handed man could not have made. Because Ozanne had been drilled that morning by Pritchard on the exact stance he would need for that shot in that corner under that light. The umpire on the door called all clear. Burger looked at her stopwatch. She looked at it for longer than she had looked at anything all week. Then she wrote on the board in her careful hand, "Nerf secondsers, nine seconds, four hostiles down, zero rounds inside the penalty cone, three hostages unharmed, and the umpire in the second room added when he came out." One of the role players had not yet realized the room had been cleared. Because the noise had been so brief and so localized that the man had thought the first two rounds were the entry. Vojerad was standing at the door of the shoot house when Pritchard walked out. Pritchard did not look at him.

[00:27:34]Pritchard walked past his colonel with his rifle at low ready and his breathing even and said in Welsh accented English to Kley who was standing 10 paces further down the line that was clean.

[00:27:47]Diesel. Kesley in a voice you had to lean in for said I. It was Ozanne walking three paces behind Pritchard heard a French warrant officer near the door say to another quietly deja paret. They had already been through that room. Ozanne did not turn his head. He filed it as he had been trained to file everything and walked on. Vojerad did not speak. He stood at the door of the shoot house for perhaps a minute after the British team had walked out and he looked at Burgger's board and he did not speak. Lomb walked up to his shoulder and said quietly in French, Monolad is amateurs. My colonel, they are not amateurs. Vojerad turned his head half an inch and did not answer and walked away from the chute house in the direction of his own hut. The man who had called them amateurs at 8 minutes past 8 on Monday morning had by 10 on Thursday morning stopped calling them anything. He still had a night to get through. Friday last light at 7 minutes 9. Burger set the final problem in the briefing tent at 1500 with all team leads present and the colonel at the back of the tent with his arms folded across his chest. Combined assault on the mock village at the north end of the training area. 11 numbered objectives 1 to 11 distributed across the 11 buildings. A mixture of hostile clearances, hostage rescues, sensitive sight exploitation tasks, and one high value target extraction from the building marked seven. Hard time limit 90 minutes from crossing the line of departure to all objectives declared cleared to the chief umpire by radio.

[00:29:41]umpires embedded in each building. Live blanks and simunition on both sides.

[00:29:46]Four French assault cereals each with a designated slice of the village. One British cereal entering from the west tasked with all 11 objectives. Burger read the tasking twice in French and then in English and tapped the face of her father's watch and closed the briefing. The French assault went in at 2100. Ru led the first serial into buildings one and two and cleared them at cost, taking two umpire adjudicated wounded in the second room of building two because a defender the umpires had placed on the roof of building three had a line down through the window that the assault plan had not accounted. four.

[00:30:27]The second French serial into buildings four and five met heavier resistance than the umpires had briefed and lost time on the breach of five when the initial charge failed to seat and had to be reset under contact. The third serial into six and 8 cleared six inside the plan and then bogged in the alley between 6 and 8 when a defending machine gun team correctly imp placed held the alley for 11 minutes before being flanked. The fourth cereal did not reach its objectives because by the time the third serial had cleared the alley, the 90-minute clock was inside its final third, and Burger's umpires had already called serials 1 and two as timed out.

[00:31:10]At 2210, Burger looked at her watch, and in her careful French told her assistant to open the second board on the wall of the umpire's hut, and to prepare to score the British cereal. The regiment crosses the line of departure at 2211.

[00:31:26]Pritchard is on point. Ksley is behind him. Menses is at the rear of the lead element with the radio. Ferretta and Ainsworth are already in position, not with the assault, but on a low rise 900 m west of the village where they have been lying since 1400, watching the village settle into its own patterns, counting centuries, and building a mental picture. The umpires do not know they have. Ozanne is with Pritchard's element. There are 22 men on the ground and there is no reserve. Building one goes at 2212.

[00:32:04]It goes in 20 seconds. Ferritter from 900 m away puts a single simmunition round through the shoulder of the sentry on the roof of building three at the moment the sentry lifts his rifle to look west and the sentry correctly goes down and the umpire on that roof calls him out of play. Building two goes at 2214.

[00:32:27]Buildings four and five are taken by the second British element simultaneously at 2218 because the second element has moved through a drainage culvert the French planners had assessed as too narrow and Ozanne has led them through it in the dark on the strength of a walkthrough he did that afternoon in civilian clothes with his hood up. Building 6 is cleared at 220022.

[00:32:51]The machine gun team that held the French for 11 minutes in the alley never gets into position because Pritchard's element has come through building six by the roof and taken the alley from above at 2223.

[00:33:05]Building three, whose sentry is already out of play, is cleared at 2225.

[00:33:11]Building 8 is cleared at 2227.

[00:33:14]Buildings 9 and 10 fall in the same minute. at 2229 to a two team hit that begins with a breach so quiet the umpire in building 10 writes in his notebook in the margin lash janelipa onu the charge I did not hear it building 7 the high value target goes at 2231 and the target played by a French warrant officer selected by Burgger herself for his weight and his temper is carried carried out of the building on a twoman lift with his hands secured and his mouth taped in silence and put into the correct extraction position at the correct time. Building 11 falls last at 2234.

[00:34:03]Menses transmits all clear to the chief umpire at 2234 and 11 seconds. Burger looks at her stopwatch. She looks at it and then at her assistant and then at the board on the wall and then at her father's watch on her wrist. She does not tap it. She walks out of the umpire's hut and into the briefing tent and the British and French senior staffs are already there because Menses has asked for them to be there and Vojiar is standing at the back of the tent with his arms folded across his chest and Halstead at his shoulder and Lcom half a pace behind. Burger walks to the board at the front of the tent and she writes on it in her careful hand in French and reads it aloud in French and then in English. Objectives soper Britany Tom's finale quarantin 11 objectives out of 11. Zero British casualties final time 43 minutes. She adds, "Because she is a fair umpire and because the record demands it that all four French assault serals have been scored as failed or timed out." 47 minutes under the limit. 11 for 11.

[00:35:17]Nothing to argue with. Lome standing half a pace behind his colonel says quietly in French so that only the men in the first three rows of the tent hear him. Monol am.

[00:35:32]My colonel, they are not English amateurs. Vojerad does not turn his head. The tent did not empty at once.

[00:35:39]Burger stood at the board with her assistant, and the four French serial commanders stood in a loose row along the left hand canvas, and the British stood along the right, and for perhaps 30 seconds, no one moved, and no one spoke. Vojerad's arms were still folded across his chest, and there was a small muscle working in his jaw that had not been working before Burger read the number. He did not speak in the tent. He did not speak when Menses walked past him and nodded once, a nod so small and so unacented that if you had blinked, you would not have registered it as a nod. He did not speak when Kesley, at the volume of a man leaning in, said to Pritchard, "Right, that'll do." He did not speak when Halstead at his shoulder took his own paper and folded it in three and put it into his tunic pocket and buttoned the flap. When the tent finally emptied, Vojer walked alone to the umpire's hut. He stood in front of the board on the wall, the board that carried in Burger's careful hand the 11 numbered objectives and the four French serial columns and the one British serial column with its 43 minutes and its zero and its 11. He stood in front of it for a long time. He read the number. He read it twice. He did not lift his hand to it. He did not tap the board. He did not ask for the sheet. He read it, and he read it again, and his mouth moved once in a shape that would have been the beginning of a sentence in any other week of his life, and no sound came out of it, because there was no sentence left in the language he had chosen on Monday morning that would have fitted the number on the board on Friday night. Outside the umpire's hut on the strip of turf that had been moaned flat that spring, the regiment was walking past the helicopter landing point in the near dark. Two pummers were sitting with their rotors turning. Pritchard walked past first with his rifle slung and his bergen on one shoulder. Ferit and Ainsworth walked past together. Kersley walked past at Mens's shoulder. Ozanne was somewhere in the middle of the file.

[00:37:48]None of them looked at the hut. None of them looked at Vojiard who had come out onto the top step of the hut and was standing there with his hands loose at his sides and his shoulders down. They did not look at him because Menses had told them quietly on the walk out of the tent not to. That is a piece of restraint the narrator will let stand without comment. Deah was standing at the bottom of the steps of the umpire's hut with his small green notebook out.

[00:38:17]He had on the Monday morning written the colonel's sentence down in full in pencil and underlined it twice. He now on the Friday night wrote the number Burger had read aloud into the tent and next to it he wrote a second sentence in his own words in French and underlined that too. What he wrote is a matter of record because the notebook was later reviewed as part of the exercise afteraction package. And what he wrote was this.

[00:38:46]Lucif the colonel did not contest the number. Lombbe walked out of the tent last. He stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at his colonel, and he said quietly in French, so that only Deah and Vojerad heard him. the sentence he had already said in the shoot house on Thursday morning and in the briefing tent 10 minutes earlier and that he was now saying for the third and final time so that it could not in any court of memory be unsaid coronel amateur my colonel they are not amateurs vorad did not answer he stood on the top step until the second pummer had lifted off the strip and he watched the tail light of it out to the edge of the ridge and he did not lift a hand as it went.

[00:39:36]Then he went back inside the hut and stood in front of Burger's board for a further 11 minutes and no one who was there afterwards remembered him saying a single word in that room and he did not in the debrief the next morning used the word amateurs in any sentence he spoke and he never used it of the regiment in any recorded briefing for the remaining two years of his command. That is what eating your words looks like when reality serves them to you cold and in front of witnesses. You came for the sentence. So here is the sentence one last time turned the other way round.

[00:40:12]Colonel Bertrand Vererad of the Fernia RPM was right about the tea. The regiment did drink it in the accommodation block on the Monday morning from a French urn with a French quartermaster apologizing for the coffee. He was right about that. He was catastrophically wrong about the men who drank it. He was wrong at 380 m. And he was wrong at 910. He was wrong on a fold of ground the garrison force walked past twice. He was wrong at the door of the shoot house at 9 seconds. He was wrong at 2234 and 11 seconds in front of 11 numbered buildings in front of his own umpire. in front of his own directing staff, in front of the man on his own side who had told him three times in the same careful sentence that he was wrong, right about the tea, wrong about the men who drank it. The theme of this hour is not that one force is better than another force. It is not that Britain outclasses France because Britain does not, and it is not that special forces are magic, because they are not. The theme is that contempt is a form of blindness. The colonel, who had jumped at Kwezi in 1978, spent the week of Feric Anvil looking at a body of men he had already on Monday morning decided not to see. And while he was looking away, those men quietly, patiently, without ever raising their voices, spent the week learning the ground he was standing on and turning it against him. That is what the regiment does. That is what it has always done.

[00:41:49]That is what a man who calls them amateurs never sees coming and never sees even when it has already happened until someone on his own side leans in and names it. The last image of the week is small. It is a rolled cigarette unlit in Mensy's hand held between two fingers as the second pummer lifts off the strip. He does not light it. He puts it into the tin and the tin into his pocket and he walks up the ramp of the aircraft and the aircraft goes. If this is the kind of story you want an hour of your week, a real regiment, a real sentence, a real number on a real board told without shouting, then subscribe because there are more weeks like this one in more forces with more sentences that got collected on. We will see you in the next