13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi (29 page)

Tanto saw some of the attackers turn and run toward the house where he knew the teenagers lived, near the parking area. He continued firing until they reached the house, then stopped. Although Tanto wouldn’t have been surprised if the family that lived there supported the attackers, he didn’t want to shoot anyone who wasn’t clearly a threat to the Annex. As far as he knew, the family might have been innocent bystanders whose house was commandeered by militants. When the attackers reached the parking area, Tanto saw two cars speed away north around the corner from Annex Road.

After he stopped shooting, Tanto double-checked his decision with D.B.

“Hey dude,” he asked, “should we keep firing?”

“Man, I don’t know if there’s still kids in that house,” answered D.B.

Tanto was tempted to lay waste to the house, but he knew that D.B. was right. If they shot one bystander, no matter how much good they might accomplish this night, they’d be censured or worse.

With D.B. shooting from four feet away, by the time the firefight ended Tanto’s left ear was ringing and almost
useless. “You motherfucker,” he told D.B., a smile softening his accusation. “I can’t hear for shit now. Thanks, man.”

“Hey,” D.B. answered, smiling back. “Casualty of war. Guess you shoulda worn earplugs.”

Tanto flipped him the bird.

Between the banter, both felt as though they’d turned a corner and begun taking control. If the attackers had expected this assault to follow the pattern set by the siege of the Compound, where they’d gained access to the Americans’ sanctum without dodging bullets, the operators wanted them to know that the Annex wouldn’t be such easy pickings.

About ten minutes after it started, the shooting from the attackers petered out entirely. When the firefight ended, Oz heard scuffling sounds and groans coming from the bushes where the attackers had tried to conceal themselves, perhaps one hundred yards from the wall. From atop Building B, D.B. heard moaning along with what he thought might be the sound of men trying to reload their weapons.

From radio calls among the various positions, the operators learned that other than the minor injuries to Oz and Tig, and a cathedral-full of bells ringing in their ears, everyone in the Annex was fine.

As they gulped water and Gatorade and tried to relax, letting the adrenaline reabsorb into their systems, the air around them reeked of the pungent scent of gunpowder.

To amuse his fellow operators, at around 12:45 a.m. Tanto called the Team Leader on the radio: “Well, I guess we’re not going to get that Spectre gunship, are we?” The T.L. didn’t answer, so Tanto filled in the blank: “Roger that. Just asking.”

Reflecting on the freshly won firefight, Tanto wished
that he’d been able to find the grenade launcher he’d searched for earlier.
A couple of those would have just killed all of them
, he told himself.

Because the attack came from the east side of the Annex, the men atop Buildings C and D were forced to remain on the sidelines during the firefight. They knew that they couldn’t shoot toward the east wall because they’d be firing at the backs of Oz and Tig on the tower and Tanto, D.B., and the DS agent on Building B.

Frustrated that he couldn’t participate in the fight, Jack kept close watch over the areas beyond the north and west walls. If the attackers wanted to open a second front, that might be their choice. Jack was particularly concerned with the narrow north-south pathway close to the Annex that the operators knew as “Smuggler’s Alley,” which ran between Annex Road and the Fourth Ring Road. During moves, he and Rone had driven on the dirt alley several times, to vary their routine in case someone was watching them. Jack knew that high walls on both sides made it almost a concealed corridor that attackers might use to approach the Annex from the back gate of the burning diplomatic Compound.

Jack scanned in the direction of the alley for signs of movement but saw none. Still, he knew his job was to remain vigilant no matter how bleary-eyed he might become. Occasionally Jack’s mind wandered to his family and the hope that he’d live to see his third child born. In the stretches of silence punctuated by gunshots, Jack also wondered how the praying mantis in the olive tree next to his post had fared amid the fight.

Several times Jack looked toward the southwest corner of the Annex, to a shack that housed a gardener who kept the property lush. Tall and thin, a clean-shaven man in his forties, the gardener repeatedly wandered outside his shack as the bullets flew, smoking cigarettes and dropping onto his knees to pray. Jack found it almost comical.
Here we are in a fight for our lives
, Jack thought,
and he’s just down there, hoping for the best, smoking a cigarette
.

During and after the firefight, Jack, Dave Ubben, and the DS agent on Building D imagined different scenarios for new or related attacks on their position. They worried especially about a four-story building under construction to the southeast. The building was a concrete shell that an enemy could use as a sniper position, with a direct view of the Annex rooftops. To the Annex defenders’ surprise it apparently remained empty. They felt grateful that their enemies seemed to be poorly trained in battle tactics and techniques.

Jack also watched a residential compound to the immediate northwest, with a large house only twenty-five yards from the Annex wall. As the firefight raged, two unarmed men walked out the front door and stood outside smoking cigarettes, as though it was just another Tuesday night in Benghazi. Jack passed word of the men over the radio, so no one mistook them for hostile attackers. The call was part of Jack’s straightforward battle mantra:
It’s all about communicating. If you communicate well and shoot, you’re ahead of the game.

After the firefight ended, Tanto reached for his night-vision goggles. But a screw that attached them to his helmet had come loose, and the goggles fell and broke.
You’ve got to be shitting me
, Tanto thought. He called over the radio to
see if anyone had a spare pair. When no one offered, Tanto climbed down to look for one.

On his way to Building C, eating a Snickers bar, Tanto decided to check on the three local men who’d been hired to serve as the Annex guard force. Tanto knew that Tig and Oz had placed them in fighting positions, so he figured he’d see if they needed ammunition or anything else. But when he reached the guards’ assigned places, they were gone. When he looked outside the Annex, their cars were gone, too. “They split,” Tanto told his fellow operators.

He went to the GRS Team Room in Building C, but couldn’t find an extra pair of goggles. An Annex security team member sought him out. “I’ve got these,” the security member said, holding out a pair. “I’m not going to need them.” The gift provided more evidence that the operators had won the staffers’ respect.

Tanto thanked him and attached the goggles to his helmet. He grabbed a handful of candy and rejoined D.B. and the DS agent on Building B. They sat in the white lawn chairs trying not to focus on how mentally exhausted they were. D.B. was comfortable with silence, but Tanto wasn’t the type to sit quietly for long.

“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.”