13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (42 page)

Jack climbed down, ran into his room, and rushed to fill a duffel bag with his laptop, cell phone, and everything else he thought might contain personal information. He grabbed the mesh bag with his driver’s license and credit cards, but in his haste, exhausted and grieving, Jack overlooked the little box with his wedding ring. It would remain behind in Benghazi, with so much else of Jack.

He went to the Team Room in Building C and filled
the remaining space in his duffel with weapons, radios, and other sensitive equipment. Jack walked outside and saw the flatbed truck. Rone’s body was there on the ground, so Jack and one of the D-boys lifted it and laid it on the steel bed as gently as they could.

Then Jack saw the second body. His eyes moved from the lacerated abdomen to the unmistakable face: Glen.

Jack fought to keep his knees from buckling. Two men he considered brothers had just been killed on a rooftop a hundred feet from where Jack had stood. Now he was loading their bodies onto the back of a flatbed truck. It pained him more than he could describe that he hadn’t even had a chance to greet Glen.

As the Americans prepared to leave Building C for a final time, the white marble of the living room floor was coated red with blood from Oz and Dave Ubben.

The door to Building C opened and staffers carried out stretchers bearing Oz, who remained alert, and Ubben, who was unconscious. Oz wore only his underwear, but rather than ask for clothes he called for someone to fetch the three things he needed to leave Benghazi behind forever: his wallet, his phone, and his passport.

Jack and several others lifted Dave Ubben’s stretcher into the back of a white hatchback. Even with the stretcher pushed all the way in, Ubben’s feet hung out the back. The Tripoli medic jumped in the back to care for the injured men during the ride. Before the stretcher-bearers loaded him into the hatchback, Oz looked up and searched for Jack.

“Rone shielded me,” Oz told him. “He saved my life.”

At about 6:00 a.m., the Benghazi GRS Team Leader called Tanto on the radio: “There’s another militia coming in, and it’s a big one. It’s about fifty vehicles and they’re Technicals, they’re heavy. ID them, to make sure they’re the good guys.”

Standing atop Building A, overlooking the front gate, Tanto thought about that command for a few seconds. “If they aren’t,” he answered, “how the fuck am I supposed to stop them?”

A short time later, the promised convoy rumbled down Annex Road, a nearly quarter-mile procession of dirty white Toyota pickups with mounted Dushka heavy machine guns, filled with hard-looking soldiers in hues of gray, brown, and tan camouflage. They bristled with RPGs, AK-47s, and other weapons.

Neither Tanto nor any of the other operators knew which militia they belonged to, or whether they were an official Libyan government force. But that wasn’t the Americans’ main concern. As long as these soldiers or militiamen were friendly and willing to escort them to the airport, the operators would have no complaints, except for one. As Tig told himself:
If these guys are friendly, why the fuck didn’t they get called in to help us at the beginning?

The moment of truth came, and Tanto lowered his weapon. He welcomed the convoy commander in the lead vehicle with a universal “hang loose” sign, curling the three middle fingers of his left hand and shaking his thumb and pinkie.

The Libyan militia commander smiled and returned the surfer greeting.

Tanto called the T.L. on the radio. “Yep, these are the guys.”

As everyone inside the Annex gathered personal belongings, Tanto caught the commander’s attention and made another hand gesture. He turned his hand into a finger gun, flipped it upside down, then pointed toward the field across the road. Among American soldiers, the motion signaled an enemy location.

The commander understood. He called up a Technical with a mounted Dushka and told its gunner to cover the field. Then he sent a four-man fire team to search for potential enemies. In short order they pulled out two men who’d been hiding in the brush.

Tanto watched with satisfaction as one of the friendly militiamen tightened flex-cuffs around the men’s wrists and marched them to one of the trucks. Tanto didn’t know how long the men had been hiding there. He also didn’t know if they were mortar spotters, a reconnaissance team, or otherwise linked to a hostile militia. But at least Tanto hadn’t been imagining voices coming from the field all night. He never learned what became of the men.

Sunrise on September 12, 2012, arrived at 6:22 a.m. in Benghazi, just as the surviving Americans made final preparations to leave the Annex. A half-dozen Annex cars lined up to drive out the front gate to join the big convoy, along with the hatchback bearing Oz and Dave Ubben. Tig got behind the wheel of the flatbed bearing the bodies of Rone and Glen; Jack rode shotgun. Sean Smith’s body remained in the Mercedes for the ride to the airport.

As everyone waited for the signal to move out, Jack watched an argument erupt between Bob the Annex chief and the Benghazi GRS Team Leader. Bob told the T.L. that he wanted to remain behind, to gather information and intelligence from locals about what had happened and who was to blame. The T.L. objected, but Bob held firm, smoking a cigarette outside Building C.

“You are relieved!” the T.L. told Bob. “Get in the fucking vehicle.”

Bob snuffed out his cigarette and complied, but he wasn’t done arguing.

When the Americans drove through the gate, they filtered in among their armed escorts, who made sure that the pickups with mounted machine guns covered each vehicle from the Annex on all sides. Several Technicals drove out front as a motorized wedge, to block off intersections so the Americans could roll through without stopping. Tanto felt concerned that they might be vulnerable to attack moving toward the airport in daylight, but then he decided that they were part of “the biggest, baddest thing in town.” Nobody in his right mind would mess with them.

As Tig steered the flatbed through the gate, Jack saw the gardener whom he’d watched smoking and praying outside his shack during the firefight. The gardener turned himself into a one-man honor guard, waving goodbye to his American employers.

Jack looked through the back window of the truck cab, to make sure the sheet-wrapped bodies remained secure. He noticed a perfectly shaped bullet hole through the glass and pointed it out to Tig. Then they returned to the silence of their own thoughts.

Jack thought about Rone’s wife, Dorothy, and the infant son who’d never know his father. He felt pangs of sadness as he recalled that Rone had told him Benghazi would be his final job as an operator, and how much Rone looked forward to getting home to be with his family for good. Jack winced as he remembered that Rone had extended this trip twice. One painful thought followed another. He felt crushed by the memory of Rone saying that he planned to surprise his wife with a trip out west to visit Jack and his family.
She doesn’t even know he’s dead yet
, he thought,
and she won’t know about that trip because it’s never going to happen now
.

Jack wished that someone else had met him at the airport five weeks earlier, that someone else had slipped the loaded pistol into his hand as a welcome gift, and that someone else had shown him the lay of the land so he’d do good work and stay safe in Benghazi. But Jack also knew that Rone never shied away from protecting others or from doing what he thought was right.

Jack also wished that Glen had never come from Tripoli to help them, and had never climbed the ladder to see Rone. But he knew that Glen wouldn’t have wanted anyone to have taken his seat on the plane to Benghazi. He knew that connecting with friends defined Glen’s life. And Jack knew that Glen’s actions fit the warrior code they all lived by: If his fellow operators were facing danger on rooftops, Glen would be there, too.

Sitting in the passenger seat of the flatbed cab, twisting his head backward to watch over the bodies, Jack felt devastated. His only solace was knowing that Rone and Glen had died as heroes.

When the convoy reached the airport, a militia guard team stationed there prevented it briefly from entering. But soon the convoy rolled through a gate to the noncommercial side of the tarmac and parked near the small jet the Tripoli team had chartered. Several Tripoli operators carried Dave Ubben toward the stairs up to the plane door. The operators had lashed him to the stretcher so they could turn it sideways to get the badly wounded DS agent through the narrow entrance. Ubben veered in and out of consciousness.

His fellow operators began to lift Oz’s stretcher, but he stopped them. “Hell no,” he said. “I walked into this country, and I’m going to frigging walk out of this town.”

Oz scooted to the edge of the hatchback and raised himself upright. Pushing through the pain, Oz steadied himself. Step by difficult step, he approached the plane with blood dripping down his left arm despite the tourniquet. When the plane’s uniformed flight attendants saw Oz coming, they went wide-eyed and ran to spread towels down the carpeted aisle and across a couch near the plane’s tail.

Oz climbed the stairs then lay down on the couch. The stretcher-bearers placed Ubben on the floor beside him. The Tripoli medic sat between the injured men for the flight.

Other Americans boarded while their baggage filled the cargo hold. As the loading continued, the militia that apparently controlled the airport challenged the presence of the much larger military convoy that escorted the Americans. Jack watched as dozens of combat-ready men screamed at each other on the tarmac.

This is going to be a complete massacre
, Jack thought.
If somebody starts shooting, there’s no cover, everyone is just standing around.
He held tight to his assault rifle as the argument raged. Jack said an operator’s silent prayer:
Please, nobody shoot.

Tanto watched the showdown and predicted the future:
The militia that runs the airport has, like, two cars here. Our militia has fifty cars. There’s no diplomatic solution here. Whoever has the biggest guns or the most guns is going to win.

When tensions seemed highest, a militiaman inadvertently fired his AK-47 into the ground near his feet. The operators braced for action, suspecting that the accidental discharge would trigger jumpy militiamen to start shooting. Instead it seemed to defuse the situation, as though the single careless shot reminded everyone how easily they could all be killed.