13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (4 page)

As the referees made dubious calls, the crowd grew restless. When a loss seemed inevitable, something snapped. The humiliation of their cherished soccer club became a symbol of all that Benghazi had endured under Gaddafi, from public executions to relentless poverty amid spectacular oil wealth. Al-Ahly Benghazi’s head coach shoved the referee. Fans stormed the field then spilled into the streets. They torched the National Soccer Federation building and hurled stones at monuments to Gaddafi’s regime.

The penalties were predictably severe: eighty arrested, thirty sent to Tripoli to stand trial, and three sentenced to death. On September 1, 2000, on the thirty-first anniversary of Gaddafi’s coup, his security forces stormed the Al-Ahly Benghazi clubhouse. They smashed furniture, memorabilia, and trophies, then bulldozed the building. The club was suspended indefinitely.

Benghazi got its revenge a decade later, in 2011. After suffering countless more indignities and witnessing the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, the city became the cradle of the Libyan Civil War that ended Gaddafi’s rule and his life.

Jack’s arrival in Benghazi was the latest chapter in the adventurous life of a modern gunfighter. He grew up in Northern California, the only child of immigrants who worked long hours to send him to private school. As a boy Jack spent as much time as possible outside, building forts and imagining what it would take to survive if America’s enemies invaded his hometown. He excelled at science and math, but after a single day of college decided that he’d had enough formal education. Jack enlisted in the Navy with a single goal: to become a SEAL.

Jack was nineteen and had completed boot camp when he was sent to a ten-week Navy vocational training program. There Jack badgered his instructors to arrange a screening test for admission to the Navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition School, the first step in the yearlong process to become a SEAL. But when the opportunity arrived without notice, Jack had been enjoying himself so much in vocational classes during the day and partying at night that he’d let his physical training slip.

The screening test was only a fraction of what it took to become a SEAL, but it was tough enough to weed out candidates with no chance of making it. Jack’s friends considered the chiseled young sailor a shoo-in. He made it through the five-hundred-yard swim in the required time. Jack climbed out of the pool and far exceeded the required
number of push-ups, completing more than eighty in two minutes. Next were sit-ups, and he exceeded the standard there, too. Then came pull-ups. The screening test required applicants to do eight perfect, dead-hang pull-ups with virtually no rest between exercises. After weeks of slacking, Jack did six, then willed himself to a seventh. His muscles screamed. His lungs ached. His arms were on fire. Jack made it halfway up on the eighth but couldn’t get his chin over the bar.

Jack hung there, refusing to let go but lacking the strength to pull himself higher. The veteran Master Chief SEAL giving Jack the test prodded him: “If I light a fire under your ass, can you get over the bar?” Jack tried again but couldn’t. When he dropped to the ground, his eyes filled with tears. Jack returned to his room and told his shocked friends that he’d failed.

He’d remember it as one of the most traumatizing and motivating moments of his life. Instead of going through the legendary SEAL training program and becoming an elite special operator, Jack spent the next two years as a Navy airman on an aircraft carrier. When his next chance came, Jack destroyed every category of the SEAL screening test. By the time he finished SEAL training, Jack came to appreciate the yin and yang of what he’d experienced the previous two years. The humbling failure and its consequences gave him the strength and willpower to push through the brutal selection process and earn his Trident, the prized SEAL insignia, while scores of other would-be warriors quit.

Jack didn’t talk much about his exploits, but during a decade in the service he spent time in more than twenty countries and carried out missions in Kosovo and
the Middle East. He left the SEALs to spend more time with his growing family and to try his hand at business. Jack bought and sold real estate, renovating and flipping properties while working to stay one step ahead of the tumultuous market.

By the time Jack and Rone joined forces as GRS operators in Benghazi, the two former Navy SEALs had been friends for nearly a decade. They’d met when both served as instructors at the Naval Special Warfare training facility in Niland, California. One night not long after they met, Jack spent a night drinking at a local bar and didn’t want to drive home. He walked to Rone’s nearby condo, planning to crash there until morning. Not knowing who was at his door, Rone climbed out a window wearing only boxer shorts and carrying a pistol. He moved tactically around the corner to the front door, gun raised, to outflank the presumed intruder. When he saw it was a drunken Jack, Rone lowered the gun and laughed.

When Rone wasn’t pointing a gun at him, Jack considered Rone to be smart and effective, a natural leader, and perhaps the most motivated and hardest-working person he’d ever met, no small praise among Special Operations veterans.

Rone was forty-one, a twice-married father of three sons. A former high school wrestler, he liked fast motorcycles and muscle cars, especially Ford Cobra Mustangs. Rone had a weightlifter’s broad chest, light-brown hair, a meaty chin, and forearms like pile drivers. He’d earned his SEAL Trident in 1991 after twice going through Hell Week, a five-and-a-half-day torture test of mental and physical toughness, pain and cold tolerance, teamwork and determination, all on fewer than four hours of sleep. As a SEAL,
Rone had served bravely in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where he received a Bronze Star with a “V” for valor. The citation described his “heroic achievement, extraordinary guidance, zealous initiative, and total dedication to duty” in al-Anbar province of western Iraq. He was a healer as well as a warrior, having become a registered nurse and a paramedic. Rone retired from the SEALs in 2010 with twenty years of service. He bought a bar called The Salty Frog in Imperial Beach, California, and helped his wife in her dental practice.

While Rone and Jack were adapting to civilian life, US government agencies began increasing their reliance on Special Operations veterans willing to provide security to Americans in the world’s hottest spots. Jack and Rone each heard through the SEAL grapevine about openings at GRS for accomplished former operators. Both saw a chance to return to the camaraderie and the purpose they’d loved as SEALs. And then there was the money. Each trip by a GRS contractor generally lasted several months, and even with generous downtime between trips, contract operators typically earned more than $150,000 a year.

If challenge and money were the yin, danger was the yang. They worked undercover in small teams, in places where some locals saw the very presence of armed Americans as provocation. In December 2009, three GRS operators were among the seven Americans killed in Khost, Afghanistan, when a Jordanian triple agent working for al-Qaeda detonated a suicide bomb at a CIA compound.

Jack, Rone, and scores of other former special operators balanced the risk and rewards, then chose to join the
GRS. Among them was another of Jack’s close friends in the SEALs, a high-spirited, fun-loving operator named Glen “Bub” Doherty. Jack and Glen had become SEALs the same year, and now Glen also was a contractor for the GRS in Libya, working in Tripoli. Not surprisingly in the tight-knit world of former SEALs, Glen and Rone had also become friends.

More than fifteen years after Jack became a SEAL, he remembered a warning from one of their instructors: “Look around the room. In twenty years, half of you guys will be gone. Guys sitting next to you are going to be killed in training accidents or in combat or whatever.” The longer he remained an operator for hire, Jack knew, the more likely that prediction would come true. Maybe for himself, maybe for Glen or Rone, or maybe for them all.

At the dawn of the Libyan revolution, Benghazans expressed thanks to the Americans in their midst for the United States’ help in the fight against Gaddafi. In May 2011,
The New York Times
published a story that described how cab drivers, translators, and cafés refused payment from Americans. Benghazi youths waved the American flag alongside rebel banners. Some parents of newborn girls reportedly named their children Susan, in honor of Susan Rice, the Obama administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, for her support of a no-fly zone that grounded Gaddafi’s warplanes.

“Americans and, for that matter, all Westerners are treated hereabouts with a warmth and gratitude rarely seen in any Muslim country… in probably half a century or more,” the
Times
story gushed. “People smile and go out of
their way to say hello to them, and are almost shockingly courteous.”

But the cheerful story ended on a discordant note. The last paragraph described a bullet whizzing over the head of a foreign jogger, presumably the reporter: “The sound of the rifle’s report came a second later, as it would with a high-velocity round. Whoever fired it was not about to show himself, at least not yet.” It foreshadowed what lay ahead.

Little more than a year later, the Benghazi through which Rone and Jack drove in the pickup wasn’t waving American flags or offering them free meals.

After Gaddafi was dragged from a drainage ditch, sodomized, and killed by rebel fighters in October 2011, heavily armed militias that toppled the regime sought to expand their roles in a postrevolutionary Libya. With the approval of Libya’s weak transitional government, and in the absence of a strong military or police force, local militias shifted from revolutionary fighters to national guardsmen, ostensibly to prevent Benghazi from spiraling into chaos.

Some militias remained outwardly grateful to America. Members of one militia, the large and well-armed 17 February Martyrs Brigade, were hired to provide security and act as a Libyan “Quick Reaction Force” to protect the US State Department’s Special Mission Compound in Benghazi. Financed by the Libyan Defense Ministry, the 17 February militia had established bases and training facilities, assembled an arsenal of light and heavy weapons, and enrolled as many as thirty-five hundred members organized into battalions.

The United States’ relationship with and reliance on the 17 February militia was a classic example of how the quirks
of Benghazi led to strange bedfellows. The militia took its name from an incident on February 17, 2006, during which Libyan security forces killed roughly a dozen people during a violent protest at the Italian consulate in Benghazi. The protesters, who set fire to the consulate building and several cars, were enraged by an Italian government minister who wore a T-shirt displaying controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The militia’s name also referenced February 17, 2011, the start of the revolution to overthrow Gaddafi.

Questions lingered about how much the United States’ diplomatic corps could trust the 17 February militia, at least some of whose members were suspected of fierce anti-American sentiments. No such questions existed when it came to several other Benghazi militias, which were outright enemies of the United States.