The detachment is so damn secret that no one at the airfield even knows that they exist. There are a lot of Brits here, and in the desert, Brits wear shorts, which makes Shaftoe want to punch them in the nose. He controls the urge. But his obvious hostility towards men in short pants, combined with the fact that he is demanding to be pointed in the direction of a unit that is so secret that he cannot specify it by name or even vaguely describe it, leads to a lot of bafflement, a lot of incredulity, and generally gets the Anglo-American alliance off on the wrong foot.