13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (33 page)

“Hey man,” Tanto told D.B. “If they come at us with anything bigger than RPGs or AKs, or they come with a Technical mounted, bro, we’re not going to be able to fight that off. We don’t have the weaponry for that.”

“Yeah, I know,” D.B. told him.

“Well fuck, I hope they don’t come with the Technical, ’cause if they do, me and you we’re going to have to get down off this building and start getting out of this compound. We’re going to have to move towards them. And we’re going to have to attack them direct.”

Again D.B. nodded and said, “Yeah, I know.”

D.B.’s brief acknowledgment was exactly what Tanto had hoped to hear. When D.B. said he accepted the odds they might face together, Tanto considered it reaffirmation of the bond they’d developed over the previous decade, responding to each other’s close calls in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya. Tanto’s comments also were his way of saying that if they had to leave the Annex with fewer than a dozen fighters to confront a large, heavily armed force, he’d feel confident with D.B. beside him. Knowing Tanto as he did, D.B. got the message.

The discussion of what weapons and tactics they might encounter beyond rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s made Tanto think about his wife and children. The idea that he might not talk to them again gave him chills. Tanto tried to force the thought from his mind.

Tanto recalled a scene from the HBO television series
Band of Brothers
in which an officer tells a frightened soldier in a foxhole to start fighting. He remembered a line about embracing death as a way to find the strength to fight.
I don’t want to die
, Tanto thought.
None of us wants to die. But it’s a possibility, and if you don’t accept that, it’s just going to be in the back of your head the whole time, and you’re not going to be able to function. So you accept it, you realize that you’re not going to be able to talk to your family possibly ever again.

Tanto took comfort in knowing that he’d told his wife and children how much he loved them during their most recent phone call, less than twenty-four hours earlier. But again he tried to squeeze them out of his thoughts. He
knew that it was a vicious cycle. The more Tanto focused on his family, the less he could focus on doing his job well, which was the very thing that would increase his chances of returning to them.

Tanto took off his helmet and poured water over his head, then shook it off like a dog emerging from a stream. He slid from the lawn chair to the rooftop, sitting with his elbows on his knees, his fingers intertwined in front of his face. Tanto checked his pockets for ammo and his knife, to be sure that he was ready for whatever came next. His assault rifle within reach, he made a point of trying to remember everything that had happened so far, down to the smallest detail. If he made it home, he wanted to be able to tell the story of what occurred this night in Benghazi. And if one of his fellow operators didn’t make it home, Tanto wanted to be able to tell that man’s family how brave he’d been and how much good he’d done.

Sitting on the roof, Tanto thought back to the amount of time they’d lost at the beginning of the battle, waiting for the OK to respond to the Compound. His anger at Bob the Annex chief flared.

“Why did he keep telling us to stand down?” Tanto asked rhetorically, then launched into a profanity-laced attack on Bob. He added sarcastically: “He’s probably trying to get 17 Feb to come save us right now, too.”

D.B. felt the same way. He believed that Sean Smith wouldn’t be dead and Chris Stevens wouldn’t be missing, if only they’d rushed to the Compound when they first jocked up.

Tanto called quietly to the DS agent, who’d been sitting on his own on the far side of the roof, watching the area beyond the south wall.

“Hey dude,” Tanto said. “What happened over there?”

“We’re sitting enjoying ourselves,” he told the operators, “about ready to go to bed. We’re smoking hookahs. And then all of a sudden we hear some chanting and guys are at our gate, and all of a sudden all shit goes to hell and they start firing.”

“So you guys had no alert at all?”

“Nope.”

“What did your 17 Feb guys do?”

“Man, they weren’t even around.”

“Where were your Blue Mountain guys?”

“I don’t know where they were, either,” the DS agent said. “We didn’t know, we had no alert. By the time we knew what was going on, they were already on top of us.”

Tanto and D.B. apologized to the DS agent for not getting there sooner.

After the firefight ended, Jack saw cars arriving and people congregating around the north end of Zombieland. Tanto, Tig, and some of the other Annex defenders heard chants coming from the direction of the Fourth Ring Road. Several saw smoke rising over the 17 February barracks building as it continued to burn at the Compound.

Unknown to the Americans at the Annex, looters, curiosity seekers, and perhaps some of the initial attackers roamed unchecked inside the unlit Compound. The burned-out hulk of an armored Land Cruiser sat outside the barracks, its rubber tires melted down to the metal rims. Official papers littered the ransacked TOC and fluttered outside on the trampled grass. One sheet showed Ambassador Stevens’s schedule for the week. Bullet shells dotted
the brick driveway. A beige upholstered chair with gently curved arms floated in the villa pool alongside a broken umbrella and a flock of red cushions. Patio furniture, appliances, and other debris rested on the pool’s blue bottom. Black soot stains and spray-painted Arabic words spread like ivy across the buildings’ yellow outer walls. Young men with guns exulted to the sky as photographers captured the scene, with the flames of burning buildings as the backdrop.

The villa’s blown-open front doors led to a charred ruin that resembled the inside of a huge fireplace. Paint and wallpaper curled from the scorched walls. The marble floor was cracked like an ancient mosaic, and the thick rugs that once covered it were reduced to ash. Interior wooden doors lay smashed and prone. Broken stone planters spilled their contents like earthen puddles. A chandelier hung improbably from the ceiling, coated with ashy grime. Twisted metal, shattered glass, and splintered remnants of blackened furniture completed the apocalyptic murder scene.

The fire in the villa had burned itself out. The building had cooled enough to allow local men to skitter through the rooms and hallways, including the safe-haven area, which they entered through the open bedroom window. At least some came to strip the villa of any remaining value or respect. Several left with garment bags filled with the Americans’ clothing. Somewhere around 1:00 a.m., or ninety minutes after the last Americans left the property, a few local men reached the previously inaccessible back rooms of the villa’s safe haven. There they found an unresponsive, middle-aged white male, his lips black with soot, his white T-shirt smeared with ash.

A young Libyan man who made a cell-phone video
of the man’s motionless form later told CBS News that he heard someone shout in Arabic, “There’s a body, a foreigner!” As the man was carried from the villa through the window, the video captured someone yelling in Arabic, “God is great! He’s alive, he’s alive!” The man who made the video told CBS News that no one knew the man’s identity. He said several people called for a doctor but couldn’t find one in the crowd.

An official US government review said six unknown men believed to have been acting as Good Samaritans brought the unidentified man to the Benghazi Medical Center, less than two miles from the Compound, between the Second and Third Ring Roads. They arrived there around 1:15 a.m. Although the man showed no signs of life, doctors said they attempted to resuscitate him for roughly forty-five minutes before they pronounced him dead from apparent smoke inhalation.

At 2:00 a.m., the US Embassy in Tripoli received a call from Scott Wickland’s cell phone, which he’d given to Chris Stevens when they took refuge in the safe haven. During the call, a man speaking Arabic gave a description fitting the ambassador and said the unidentified man was at a Benghazi hospital. Someone apparently had plucked the phone from the man’s pants pocket, and the Arabic-speaking man had been calling stored numbers. But the caller couldn’t provide a photograph or other proof that would satisfy the Tripoli diplomats that he was actually with Stevens.

Complicating matters further, at first it wasn’t clear which hospital was involved. When embassy officials learned that the man had been taken to Benghazi Medical Center, they feared a trap, according to the official review.
Local sources told them that the medical center was allied with, or possibly controlled by, the Ansar al-Sharia militia. US Embassy officials were suspicious that someone had simply found the phone or had taken it from a dead or kidnapped Stevens. Claiming that the phone’s owner was at a hospital might be a devious ruse to draw Americans into the open for an ambush. The embassy’s political attaché, David McFarland, pressed his Benghazi contacts for answers.

Even if the caller’s claims were true, the possibility existed that any Americans who went to the hospital to find Stevens would cross paths with injured attackers from the Compound and their companions. If American officials were certain that Stevens was there and alive, they would treat it as a hostage rescue situation and send operators loaded for bear. Otherwise, they’d be prudent and wait. To speed the process, embassy officials sent a Libyan they trusted to the hospital, to confirm the man’s identity and his condition. The Libyan was the same man who’d rescued the downed American F-15 pilot in 2011, and who now ran the school where Stevens had planned to establish an American Corner.

Almost simultaneously, word spread through the Annex radios that the seven-man team from Tripoli had reached the Benghazi airport. But it didn’t look as though they’d be joining the Annex defenses anytime soon. Bob the Annex chief and the diplomats in Tripoli were struggling to get the Libyan government to send transportation and security to the airport to escort the response team to their destination. None of the new arrivals had ever worked in Benghazi, so
they didn’t know their way around. Commandeering vehicles wouldn’t be an option, especially on a night when it seemed to be open season on Americans.

Sometime after the firefight, D.B. heard the Team Leader say they also might get help from a Special Operations team coming from Italy. D.B. sensed morale rise with news about the Tripoli team and a possible second unit of reinforcements. D.B.’s combat experience had taught him a basic equation of military math:
Anytime you’re in a fight, you always want as many of your friends to show up with as many guns as they can.

Meanwhile, officials in Tripoli and Washington debated whether the Tripoli response team should go to the hospital on a rescue mission, or to the Annex to bolster defenses before all the Americans there evacuated. That decision depended primarily on whether an American man was in fact at the hospital, and if so, whether he was Chris Stevens. The biggest question of all was whether he was still alive.

ELEVEN

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