KEY POINTS:
It's 3.30am on Wednesday morning and all's quiet on the Southern front ... or at least this part of it. Across the world, in Valencia, there's sunshine and smiles and a red carpet on the sea as Ernesto and Brad and the rest of the team claim their
trophy.
But there's no sunshine here, only the still, cold darkness. In Spain, their racing done, those two great yachts whose fortunes we have followed with such optimistic intensity, bob gently in a turquoise sea. Here, their counterparts rest empty at their moorings, bare masts above the decks, hulls mirrored perfectly on the black satin surface of an impenetrable sea.
Whispers of wind stir the long orange lines of light reflecting from the sulphurous lamps on the Oil Wharf. Somewhere down in the port a generator hums, its single sound echoed and amplified by the brooding hills on the other side of the harbour, the smudge of their ridges blacker even than the clear black sky above them.
Lost shadows in the dead of night, these hills evoke something other than money and yachts and the dangers of defeat in a race whose true significance lies only in the importance we gave it.
Remote and strangely alien in the faint light of a watery moon, they look as you imagine the hills of Afghanistan would have looked that night three years ago when, unknown to us, with no cameras or commentators to chart their progress, another team of New Zealanders faced another kind of battle.
"At least we fought to the end," the commentators said as Alinghi crept over the line. "We went down with guns blazing." And we did. But the guns were metaphoric and, if we're honest, the only thing our "enemy" could wound was our pride.
That's not how it was at 3.15am "in an Afghan war zone" in 2004. The guns were real then. And so was the rocket-propelled grenade that hit an SAS vehicle, wounding two soldiers and blowing Lance Corporal Willy Apiata off the bonnet. What he did next was his job, at least as he sees it, although his commanders were less sanguine.
Which is why, some three years later, the dazed soldier who picked up his critically injured mate and carried him 70m over rocky ground - with real guns blazing every step of the way - was finally awarded the Victoria Cross.
Quite why it's taken this long to recognise Willy Apiata's valour is a mystery. If, by way of comparison, it had taken an equal time to award Second-Lieutenant Ngarimu a VC for his courage in Tunisia in 1943, he would not have received the decoration until 1946, a year after Adolf Hitler had surrendered and Berlin been occupied by the armies of another dictator.
We don't talk about the SAS, is the Government's line. We like to keep their activities hush hush. Mum's the word, old chap, when it comes to our most elite and deadly force. While this may be sensible from an operational point of view, it's also indisputably convenient from an electoral perspective.
If we weren't so pathologically anti-American in this country, the powers-that-be may have told us much more about the SAS and its role in Afghanistan, especially since they're fighting a particularly ugly foe.
If there is any group of toxic zealots and rampant male chauvinists more obnoxious than the Taleban, they've yet to be identified. These are people who're quite willing to impose their beliefs at the point of a gun and quite ready to kill anyone committed to the emancipation of women, especially those attempting to educate young girls.
They would likely applaud any healer who chose to become a killer. Certainly, as part of their medieval world view, they've been perfectly happy to host terrorists, giving them the land and protection they need to rehearse whatever evil atrocities they wish to inflict on civilians around the world.
We "should" be glad Lance Corporal Apiata was fighting these people. A world ruled by the Taleban would be much like a world ruled by the Nazis. Yet we seem as embarrassed by our part in this war as we are proud of the courage he displayed fighting it. And that is sad.
It is good to have a hero - a real hero - a man who did things most of us secretly fear we would not be brave enough to do if we were ever in a place where real guns were blazing real bullets, but it would also be good for us to acknowledge there is heroism in the war as well as the soldier.
Thanks to television - and our own fascination - we know well what has happened in Valencia in recent months. Yet we have little or no idea what's been happening in Afghanistan and even whether our SAS team has been a part of it. We're not told. Perhaps we'll have to wait another three years to find out.
But for now, as we hail the sailors who "fought so hard" to win the America's Cup in Spain, it would be good also to hail the soldiers who - paid a pittance by comparison - are fighting even harder to win America's Cup in Afghanistan.
