13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi (28 page)

Then Tanto saw a man drop to one knee.

Before Tanto and D.B. noticed the arriving cars and the approaching men, Tanto had called to ask if anyone had a spare pair of night-vision goggles for the DS agent on Building B. A case officer at Building C produced a pair and gave them to Tig, to bring to Building B on his rounds. On his way to deliver the goggles, Tig stopped at Building A to grab two cases of water from a front hallway.

He climbed the ladder on the side of Building B and dropped off the goggles. By then, Tanto, D.B., and the DS agent were already occupied watching the men nearing the Annex wall.

His rifle hanging loose on its straps in front of him, Tig
walked to the east side of Building C, toward the area the operators called their prison gym. He could see Oz in position at the northeast tower, some thirty yards ahead, so he lugged the water bottles that way. As Tig approached the workout area, something flew over the wall in his direction.

He couldn’t see what it was, but sparks sputtered from one end. It had a lit fuse.

T
IG WAS MID-STRIDE, APPROACHING THE OPERATORS’
prison gym, when the bomb landed at the far edge of the workout area. He had protection from his heavy Rhodesian vest and his body armor, but Tig’s head was bare. He’d accidentally left his helmet around the corner at Building C while talking with the Team Leader about the nosy neighbor. Tig froze, dropped the water he’d brought for Oz, and braced for impact.

His mind focused on a single thought:
This is gonna hurt.

But when the white light flashed and the boom sounded, the twenty-five feet that separated Tig from the explosion was just enough to save him. He took stock and, to his surprise, found himself intact and without a scratch.

Tig couldn’t be certain, but based on the sight and sound of the blast, and the absence of shrapnel, he believed
that the improvised explosive device lobbed over the wall was a small “jelly” or “gelatina” bomb. An easy-to-produce favorite of radical Libyan militias, gelatina bombs were cheap, moldable explosives made from gelignite, a material similar to dynamite but more stable and abundant. Benghazi fishermen used gelatina bombs to ease their labors, tossing them into the Mediterranean, waiting for the geyser, then collecting the fish that rose to the surface. The attackers seemed to be using the bomb for a similar purpose, to stun or distract the Americans before swooping in for the kill.

The moment the blast went off, the men who’d been sneaking toward the east wall opened fire on the Annex.

Tig sprinted to reach Oz at the northeast tower. He climbed on, stood to Oz’s left, and found his friend already engaging their enemies.

Before the blast, Oz stood on the steel platform looking forward to Tig’s arrival with the water bottles. He heard the
whoosh
of something flying over the east wall, but wasn’t immediately sure what it was. When the explosion hit and gunfire followed, Oz understood that the bomb was the attackers’ signal to begin their assault, just as the Americans sometimes used stun grenades or “flash bangs” to initiate an action.

From the laser spotting he’d done via radio with Tanto, Oz already had a general idea where some of the attackers were located, spread out in the dark among the trees and brush. He focused on those areas when the shooting began, watching for muzzle flashes and snatches of white shirts in
the moonlight. Whenever he spotted one, Oz fired in that direction.

As bullets passed overhead, Oz saw his enemies attempting to shoot out the lights illuminating the eastern exterior of the Annex.

The gelatina bomb apparently was the attackers’ signal to commence firing, but it wasn’t the only explosive they’d brought. Somewhere in the trees east of the wall, an attacker shouldered a rocket-propelled grenade and fired it toward the Annex. Tanto heard the signature sound of the launch, a sizzling gargle then a
whoosh
, followed a few seconds later by an explosion. The shooter evidently aimed too high, and the RPG flew over the Annex entirely, landing somewhere beyond the far west wall.

Yet Tanto’s hearing was so bad from the gunfight at the Compound that he still wasn’t entirely sure that an Annex firefight had just begun. Even after seeing the attacker take a knee, Tanto held a sliver of concern that the sounds he heard came from firecrackers.

“Dude,” he asked D.B., “did somebody just shoot at us?”

“Man, I think so,” D.B. answered. He radioed the Team Leader to ask if he knew whether 17 February militiamen were en route to the Annex, to be sure this wasn’t a friendly-fire incident.

“We don’t know,” the T.L. said. “But if you’re fired on, fire back.”

“Fuck this,” Tanto said. He began shooting.

D.B. did the same, targeting the armed men he’d identified earlier, even as he seethed about the Team Leader
remaining safely inside Building C. D.B. didn’t need anyone to tell him the rules of engagement, especially when that person wasn’t holding a gun. Angering him further, D.B. interpreted the T.L.’s “fire back” comment as a smartass way of responding, when all D.B. wanted was to be sure that he didn’t kill a good guy.

Tanto lined up the kneeling attacker with the infrared gunsight mounted on his assault rifle, but when he fired, he watched as the first few rounds splashed in the dirt as far as ten feet to the left of his target. Tanto didn’t have time to adjust his sight, so he corrected his aim using a method that shooters call “Kentucky windage,” fine-tuning where he shot by experience and feel. With his corrections made, Tanto watched as men that he and D.B. had targeted earlier began to flinch from being hit. Some of the injured attackers tried to conceal themselves or regroup. Some zigzagged as they limped back and forth through the trees and brush. The operators kept shooting, leaning their weapons on the rooftop parapet and aiming down at the attackers coming toward them from beyond the east wall.

While Tanto and D.B. engaged the shooters, the Tripoli-based DS agent did his job by covering the area to the south, beyond the Annex’s front wall. No one approached from a large open area in that direction, but the operators were covering the east and northeast, so they were happy to know that the DS agent was watching their flank.

Tanto found himself entranced by the sight of tracers and rounds whizzing into the dark. The night-vision goggles even picked up the heat signature of bullets. It looked like a laser light show, and Tanto felt like a kid inside a video game. After the frustration of being on the defensive at the Compound, Tanto sensed that the tables had turned.
The attackers were falling back in disarray, apparently having expected a repeat of what had happened at the Compound three hours earlier.

We’re fucking kicking these dudes’ asses
, Tanto thought.

The exchange of gunfire continued. Rounds zipped above the operators’ heads and pinged against the walls, gouging craters in the cinder block.

Standing alongside Oz on the tower, Tig turned sideways to the wall as he unloaded his assault rifle toward the attackers. During a volley of incoming rounds, Tig felt the wind get knocked from his lungs.

“Aw fuck, I think I got shot,” he told Oz.

Tig doubled over in pain and let loose a stream of curses. He snaked his right hand inside his shirt, beneath his vest and armor, but didn’t feel any blood or find any holes in his skin. He concluded that shrapnel must have punched him like a heavyweight, then bounced off his protective gear. Tig’s side ached but he wasn’t seriously injured, so he resumed shooting, answering muzzle flashes with rounds of his own. With his helmet back at Building C, Tig knew that he was lucky the shrapnel hadn’t reached him eighteen inches higher.

As Oz continued to engage, an incoming round hit the top of the wall directly in front of him. Stone fragments flew into his face just below his night-vision goggles. A stream of blood flowed from the bridge of his nose. Stunned, Oz composed himself and realized that he wasn’t shot or seriously hurt. He wiped away the blood and returned to the fight.

An enemy round hit an exterior floodlight to the right
of their tower position, shredding the bulb in an explosion of glass.

As they repelled the assault, the operators and DS agents kept their rifles set on semi-automatic, to conserve rounds and keep their aim true. Fantasy soldiers, video-game players, and young militiamen might favor the wild spray of bullets from a fully automatic rifle, but the operators considered that a tactical error and a waste of good ammo.

As the firefight continued, the shooting wasn’t constant. They shot in controlled bursts, one or two well-aimed rounds, then a pause, then one or two more. During a ten-minute period, several operators said, each shot anywhere from thirty to sixty rounds. They didn’t know how many attackers they hit in the dark.

Tanto and Oz couldn’t be sure how many men they faced overall. But from the silhouettes and white T-shirts they saw through their goggles, plus the number of flashes coming from different places, they estimated fifteen to twenty, possibly as many as thirty.

All the while, from their tower position Tig and Oz tried to keep track of the two shepherds and the sheep pens, to make sure no one was trying to sneak through the animals to approach the wall. The shepherds stayed out of the line of fire, but Oz thought they seemed oddly nonchalant about the bullets flying around them. He suspected that they were somehow connected to the men shooting at the Annex, but until they displayed a weapon Oz wouldn’t engage.

Neither he nor Tig had worn earplugs, and soon Oz’s ears throbbed from the thunderous noise created by the
two of them firing side by side on the small tower. During a break in the action, Oz tore off hunks of Kerlix gauze from a roll in his medical kit, balled them up, and stuffed them in his ears. He asked Tig if he wanted some, but Tig thought Oz looked too funny to emulate and just funny enough to ridicule.

“Oh, so that was a little too loud for you?” Tig asked with mock concern.