13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi

by Mitchell Zuckoff

Tig saw that Ubben had suffered major injuries to his lower left leg and serious wounds to his left arm below the elbow. Tig pulled out both tourniquets from Oz’s medical bag. Just as Rone had demonstrated days earlier during the medical refresher course, Tig applied the first tourniquet to Ubben’s badly damaged leg. As he worked in the darkness, Tig accidentally raked his hand across the edge of one of Ubben’s protruding bones. The razor-sharp bone sliced through Tig’s skin, but he’d worry about it later. He moved to Ubben’s arm, tightening the second tourniquet just below the armpit. As he worked, Tig offered a steady stream of reassurances.

  “Hang in there, dude.… You’re gonna be OK.… We’re gonna get you down.… It’s gonna be all right.… We’ll get you out of here.” Tig reached back to his days as a Marine and pulled out a motivational nickname for the toughest among them: “Hang in, Devil Dog.” Ubben could only mumble a reply.

  When both tourniquets were in place, Tig began to move away from the DS agent to see who else needed help. Ubben roused himself: “Hey man, I need my pistol!”

  “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.

&
nbsp; 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.

  Someone drove a white flatbed truck with wooden side rails to the front of Building C, to transport the bodies of Rone and Glen. By coincidence, Rone had used the same truck weeks earlier, on the day when he and another operator collecting supplies from the airport had faced off with a group of hostile militiamen.

  Tig moved toward the Building C ladder to help bring down the fallen men. He told the D-boys that he knew where to find a heavy strap that would help them lower the bodies from the roof. The D-boys weren’t interested, or they didn’t want to take the time. “We got this,” one told him. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Tig watched as they climbed the ladder to the roof and lifted Rone’s body onto the parapet. Tig knew what would happen next, so he turned away to avoid seeing it. Afterward, Tig couldn’t shake the sickening sound of Rone’s body hitting the marble patio at the bottom of a fifteen-foot fall.

  Jack watched from atop Building D. He’d missed some of the radio calls, so he still didn’t know all that had happened. He saw a D-boy lift a limp body, and Jack knew that it was Rone. He recognized Rone’s khaki cargo pants and his button-down orange plaid shirt. The King Leonidas beard removed any doubt and extinguished any hope. He turned away.

  After Rone, the D-boys took the same approach with Glen. His body hit a bush on the way down, slicing open his abdomen. Disgusted and angry, Tig told himself that both men deserved better. No one was shooting at them, the mortars had stopped, and a huge friendly convoy was supposedly en route.

  The most Tig could do for Rone now was to grab his cold hands, while a D-boy took Rone’s feet. Together, they carried him to the side of Building C. Two others from the Tripoli team carried Glen.

  THIRTEEN

  Convoy

  WITH EACH PASSING MINUTE, THE SUN EDGED CLOSER to the horizon, bathing the Annex in dim light. With the huge convoy en route, the Benghazi GRS Team Leader called for all remaining rooftop defenders to climb down and collect any last personal items. The T.L. stood outside Building C when he made the call. Looking down from the Building D roof, Jack caught his eye. The T.L. nodded, his face etched with sadness. Jack knew that Rone was gone, but he still didn’t know about Glen.

  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.