13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi (36 page)

“Roger that,” Tig said. He reached to pick up the gun, but with his back turned to Ubben he quickly cleared the mag, unloading it so the wounded man couldn’t accidentally shoot him or any others who might come up the ladder to help. After returning Ubben’s gun, Tig ducked behind the parapet and looked around.

Off to his left, Tig saw someone lying motionless, facedown near the center of the roof. The man looked to be beyond help, and Tig wanted to prioritize men who might benefit most.

“Anybody else need help?” he called.

Tig heard moaning from the northwest corner. As he hustled that way, Tig passed a hole in the concrete bigger than his fist from where a mortar hit. As he darted toward the moans, he saw the shapes of two men, one moving, one still, next to each other in the northwest corner.

His frustration rising, Tig called again on his radio: “Hey, I got four guys down. I need help up here. Right now!” He began to suspect that no one wanted to leave the relative safety of Building C in case the mortars and gunfire resumed.

D.B. answered from atop Building B, his voice filled with rage: “I need to know if somebody is going up to Building C, because otherwise I’ve got to get down and get over there.” He couldn’t imagine why members of the Tripoli team hadn’t immediately run to Building C’s ladder to help. Tanto knew that D.B. had the best field of fire
to protect the Annex, so he told D.B. to stay on Building B and he’d go instead.

Before Tanto could move, someone from inside Building C told everyone to remain at their posts: “We got it. We’re coming up.”

To Tig, the wait for help felt like an eternity. Through a veil of pain, Oz heard Tig make the calls for more help. Still not fully comprehending that he was one of the four men down, Oz thought about the man lying next to him:
Shit, I’ve got to help Rone.

When he reached Oz seconds later, Tig forced him to focus first on his own injuries. “Hey man,” Oz told Tig, “look at this.” Using his right hand, Oz lifted his lifeless left hand to put it in its proper place. Then he watched as he let go and it flopped back down to an odd angle. “I think I broke it.”

“Dude,” Tig said, “stop doing that. You’re going to fuck it up even more.”

Tig grabbed the assault rifle from Oz’s lap and set it aside. He picked up the one-piece combat tourniquet that Oz hadn’t been able to apply, pulled the band around Oz’s upper arm, and twisted it tight to stop the bleeding. Tig knew that Oz needed a lot more care inside Building C and eventually a hospital. He helped him to his feet and asked Oz if he could walk to the ladder.

“I think I can,” Oz said as he took tentative steps forward. “I’ll make do.”

As Oz shuffled away, Tig dropped to his knees and rolled Rone onto his back on the wet rooftop. He ripped off Rone’s Rhodesian vest and his other gear, then raised his shirt to look over his bare torso front and back, to check for signs of bleeding. The only injuries Tig noticed were small shrapnel
marks on Rone’s forehead. Finding no open wounds needing immediate care, Tig pressed his fingers to Rone’s thick neck to search for a pulse from the carotid artery. Rone’s throat twitched momentarily, but Tig could find no pulse. He flipped up the red lens on his headlamp and shone the white light in Rone’s eyes. Rone’s pupils didn’t react. Tig pressed his ear against Rone’s chest but heard nothing. He put his ear to Rone’s mouth and felt no breath.

Tig worked in silence. The attackers who’d been firing from Zombieland apparently had pulled back. The mortars had stopped. Tig knew that that could change at any moment, but at present the only sounds he heard were trickles of water flowing from shrapnel holes in the nearby tank.

It pained him, but Tig knew that there was nothing he could do for Rone. He left his friend and ran to the man lying facedown near the middle of the roof. Tig had never met Glen, and he didn’t know that one of the Tripoli operators had climbed up to the roof. He thought the prone man with the scruffy beard was Jack.
What the hell is he doing up here?
Tig thought.

Then Tig remembered that he’d heard Jack’s voice on the radio, saying that there was no movement atop Building C. Tig rolled the man onto his back and realized that the fourth person needing help was one of the Tripoli operators.

Glen’s assault rifle was still strapped around him, so Tig pulled it off and threw it to one side. He went through the same steps he’d taken with Rone, with the same results. Again he found no sign of major trauma, only a laceration on the left side of the abdomen. Like Rone, Glen was unresponsive, with no pulse, no breath or heart sounds, and no eye movements under the white light.

By then, Tig had company on the roof. Joining him were the Benghazi GRS Team Leader, a Tripoli operator who was a medic, and the two Delta Force members, known to the operators as D-boys. One D-boy had helped Oz as he walked toward the ladder.

“Can you get down on your own?” the D-boy asked Oz.

“Yeah, I guess I’ll have to,” Oz answered.

The D-boy helped Oz step up on the box near the ladder. Oz knew that he’d lost a lot of blood, so he hooked his right arm firmly over one of the top rungs, as a precaution. Then Oz swung his right leg over the ledge.
Better be careful
, Oz told himself.
You survived all this, and now you don’t want to break your neck getting down.
But just as he feared, Oz’s feet slipped out from under him and his body slammed against the ladder. He caught his full weight with his right arm, pulled himself back up, and regained his footing to climb down.

At the bottom, Oz went around the building’s northeast corner and past the mossy pool. He ran into one of the operators from Tripoli, a medic who guided Oz the rest of the way into Building C.

Up on the roof, the D-boys struggled to get big Dave Ubben down the ladder without adding to his injuries. Ultimately, one of the D-boys used a one-inch nylon strap to bind Ubben across his back. He then carried the 250-pound DS agent down the ladder that way. Meanwhile, Tig moved from one rooftop fighting position to the next, collecting weapons and stacking them against the parapet.

When he reached Rone’s body, Tig looked around unsuccessfully for the missing machine gun, then grabbed
Rone’s pistol. Before he moved on, Tig stopped to say an impromptu prayer. He placed his hand on Rone’s chest and whispered: “God, watch over him. Guide him to where he needs to be. Take care of his family.” He went over to Glen, pressed his hand to Glen’s chest, and said the same prayer. Then he collected Glen’s weapons.

A case officer inside Building C came on the radio, asking for Rone to come down to help treat Oz’s wounds. “Rone, we need you in the CP,” he said, using shorthand for the Command Post. No one replied, so he repeated the call. “Rone, we need you in the CP!”

“Hey!” Tig said. “Rone’s gone. He’s not with us anymore.”

Weary and downhearted, but also livid about all that had gone wrong since the start of their ordeal, Tig dragged the bodies of the two former SEALs closer to the ladder, to make it easier to bring them down when it was time to leave.

Tig scooped up the pile of weapons, climbed down the ladder, and jogged around to the front of Building C. He went inside, dumped the weapons onto a couch, and looked over to where several people worked on Oz.

With a little help from the medic, the blood-drenched Oz had somehow walked into Building C under his own power. The medic applied a dressing on his neck wound and lay him down on a couch. Oz’s condition was serious but not immediately life-threatening, so the medic went back to the roof, to see if anyone was worse off. A clutch of case officers and other Annex staffers stood over Oz, none with much medical training. That’s when one called for Rone, only to have Tig snap back that Rone was gone.

Oz realized that he’d have to oversee his own care. “I’ve been hit. I know I’m bleeding,” he told them. “Somebody get some shears and cut off my clothes. You need to get me naked and check for bleeds, front and back.”

The female case officer he’d escorted to dinner ten long hours earlier ran to the medical area, but she couldn’t find shears. When Oz heard her asking for help finding them, somehow he remembered their exact location, on the third shelf of the first set of storage racks, and he called it out to her. The Annex deputy chief had already pulled out a big folding combat knife to start slicing off Oz’s clothes.

“Be careful with that,” joked Oz. “I don’t want to get stabbed, also.”

When he saw that Oz was in good hands, Tig hurried to the rear of the building. He struggled to raise a steel safety shutter that would allow him to open the back door, enabling the D-boys to bring Ubben inside without carrying him around to the front. But the mortars had damaged the shutter, making it a chore to lift. By the time Tig opened the back door Ubben was already inside, being treated for major wounds to his leg and arm. The Tripoli medic had also started intravenous fluids for both Ubben and Oz.

Tig still held Oz’s go-bag, so he went to the medical area to replace the supplies he’d used. The enormity of everything that had happened gripped Tig, and he tore open cabinets and rifled through supplies. When an Annex staffer asked what the hell he was doing, Tig was tempted to raise his fists. Instead he snapped: “I’m looking for tourniquets in case we get more mortars!”

He stormed back outside, intending to return to his
tower position. On the way, one of the D-boys told Tig he couldn’t go back there because it was too dangerous.

“Fuck you. I’ve been there all night by myself,” Tig said.

The Tripoli-based Team Leader for all GRS operators in Libya stepped in before it turned physical. He told Tig to stay near Building C so everyone could see each other’s location. Still boiling, Tig followed the order.
I’m standing here watching a wall
, he thought.
I can’t see nothing, can’t do nothing, can’t react if something happens. Great plan. They’ve been here five minutes, and they’re telling us what to do?

As he stood in an area he considered a no-man’s-land on the east side of Building C, Tig heard over the radio that a fifty-vehicle convoy with Technicals was on its way to the Annex, to guard the evacuation and escort them to the airport. That was quite an upgrade from the lightly armed ten-car motorcade that bugged out when the mortars hit.

Jack heard the radio transmission, too, and he believed that all the remaining Benghazi operators were thinking the same thing:
I hope they’re going to escort us to the airport and not attack us. We don’t know who’s friendly, who’s bad. There are militias out there, they all look the same, and some of them are trying to kill us.

If they had no choice, they’d fight a fifty-vehicle convoy of Technicals, with one hundred or more heavily armed men. But if it came to that, Jack felt certain that the Annex would be remembered as a twenty-first-century Alamo, with no American survivors.