13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (21 page)

Jack’s contact lenses had finally cleared enough for him to see straight, but in the confusion of the firefight he
momentarily lost his bearings. He called to Tig: “Is the gate on the left or the right?” Tig told him it was on the right, and Jack reoriented himself. Tig had his own vision problems, caused by the weather. The temperature had reached 84 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, and the night was only a dozen or so degrees cooler. As Tig’s body overheated from exertion, his goggles fogged so much he found them useless and lifted them to his helmet.

About 150 yards down the street, the three operators came across an unarmed man in his forties talking on a cell phone. Wearing long pants and a polo shirt, the man seemed to have wandered out of one of the homes to see what was happening, as though a parade was passing by.

“Get down! Get down!” the operators shouted.

The man pointed to his phone and kept talking. The operators concluded that he might be a threat to himself, but not to them. Shaking their heads and shooting him dirty looks, they kept moving.

Jack and Tig heard voices speaking Arabic in clipped, urgent tones. They glanced to their left and saw movement on the opposite side of the street, fifteen or twenty yards behind them.

Fuck
, Jack thought.
Who the hell are THESE guys?

With a quick look, he realized that the three men posed no danger. To the contrary, they were the operators’ self-appointed backup. The men were the militiamen who’d returned fire at attackers from the northeast corner of the intersection. Now they were shadowing the operators’ movements on the opposite side of the street. Jack and Tig noticed that the militiamen learned from the Americans as they went, slipping in and out of construction sites and entranceways as they sought cover moving east.

Jack didn’t know how useful the trio would be, but at least they were there. After all the uncertainty, at least five members of the 17 February Martyrs Brigade had fulfilled their promise to support the American Quick Reaction Force: three on the gravel road and two searching for a sniper location with Tanto and D.B.

Ahead the three operators saw a large mound of dirt outside a construction site, about one hundred yards from the Compound gate. Jack and Tig looked to the peak, more than fifteen feet high, and had the same thought: vantage point.

Having a sniper in position from the street as they moved into the Compound would provide them with cover fire and a tactical advantage. They hoped that the dirt pile was firm, but as soon as Jack and Tig began to climb, they felt like they were scaling a sand dune. Their legs sank to their knees as they trudged higher. Each man carried forty or more pounds of weapons, ammo, body armor, and equipment, and the weight seemed to grow with every step.

“Son of a bitch,” Tig said, his breaths growing labored.

Jack felt winded, too, and he assumed that he was worse off than his partner. He knew that Tig’s workouts included long runs around the Annex, so Jack blamed himself for focusing on his upper body strength and neglecting his lower limbs.

“Man,” Jack said halfway up, sweating buckets and huffing for breath. “I need to do more legs.”

But Tig felt equally smoked. His long runs had left his leg muscles sore.

“Man,” he panted, “I should be running a lot
less
!”

Both coughed out a laugh.

As they reached the top, Jack and Tig discovered that
they weren’t high enough to see inside the Compound walls. They’d climbed the mound for nothing. Doubling their frustration, as they slid down, the ammo drum on Tig’s belt-fed machine gun fell off. They had no time to reattach it, so Tig went “Rambo-style.” He broke off more than a hundred rounds from the lost drum and split them in two, leaving half dangling from the gun and draping the other half over his shoulder.

Tig knew that their goal was to save lives in the Compound, but that wasn’t foremost on his mind as he moved closer to their destination. His first thought was survival. With each footfall, his eyes darting left and right, he clutched his machine gun tighter. The former Marine replayed a single existential thought:
Is somebody going to engage us?

While Tig and Jack scaled the dirt mound, Rone had kept moving forward toward the gate. He hunched down behind one of the concrete traffic barriers to the right of the Compound entrance, waiting for his partners. Rone radioed Tanto and D.B. to say they’d reached the gate and were getting ready to move in.

First to join Rone were the three militiamen, who took cover positions nearby at the barriers. Before them stood a concrete archway some twenty feet wide and fifteen feet high, painted a friendly shade of pale yellow. Deep inside the archway were the Compound’s heavy gates, their wrought-iron balusters backed by solid steel plates, to prevent anyone from ramming them open, climbing over, or shooting through. Normally closed except when vehicles entered or exited, the gates were thrown wide open.
Someone had taken the time to latch the bottom of the gates to fixed anchors in the driveway, to keep them from swinging closed. Also open was the adjacent steel pedestrian gate.

When Jack reached the Jersey barriers, he noticed that one of the militiamen crouching nearby had not only an AK-47 but also a rocket-propelled grenade launcher strapped across his back. Jack momentarily worried that the man might be a threat to Rone, so Jack watched him, gun up, ready to shoot if the militiaman aimed his gun in Rone’s direction. The militiaman showed no sign of being a threat, so Jack concluded that he must be one of the good guys. Jack scuttled forward, dropped in, and kneeled to the man’s left. Six inches separated their shoulders as they looked toward the gate.

A few yards away, Tig continued to struggle with the
ammunition for his belt-fed machine gun. He fought to get his second drum out of an improvised canvas pouch. Tig wanted the drum clipped securely in place on the weapon, so he wouldn’t run out of rounds when the shooting started. He radioed the Annex: “We’re moving onto the Compound.”

Rone took Tig’s radio call as a signal. Without warning his companions, he sprang to his feet and quick-stepped around the concrete barrier. Rone rounded a corner of low hedges and ran headlong through the gate into the Compound, his assault rifle pointing the way forward.

Jack had expected that they’d make eye contact or otherwise communicate before moving. But when he saw Rone move, his training kicked into gear. A bedrock rule among SEALs and other Special Operations fighters is that no one goes in alone, ever, regardless of whether they’re entering a room or an open space. Rone had been trained the same way, so Jack knew that when he led the charge, Rone felt confident that Jack and Tig would have his back.

Jack popped up, stepped around the barrier, and sprinted into the Compound.

Tig was wrestling with his weapon when Rone and Jack moved. He was on his feet seconds later, but that brief gap was just enough time for someone to begin shooting at him from farther east down the gravel road. The shots came from an intersection with a street the operators called Adidas Road because a sporting goods store was located there.

Tig dropped flat onto the ground behind a barrier as a round zipped above his head. He pressed the talk button on his radio: “Hey base, I’m taking fire, but I’m not hit!” Pinned down, Tig looked up and saw flashes of gunfire passing over him. One of the 17 February militiamen
jumped to his feet about ten feet to Tig’s left. He let loose with his AK-47 on full automatic, firing in bursts at a rate of six hundred rounds per minute. His magazine spent, the militiaman dropped down to reload. Tig pulled his night-vision goggles over his eyes and stepped into the fight. He brought up his fully loaded machine gun, resting it atop the barrier.

As Tig prepared to fire, an unarmed man rushed toward him, hands raised, from the darkened street.

“Friendly! Friendly! 17 February!”

Still ready to blast away, Tig caught the eye of the militiaman reloading his AK-47.

“Friendly!” the unarmed man yelled again. “17 February!”

Tig and the armed militiaman exchanged quizzical looks that Tig translated into universal soldier language:
Who the fuck is this nut?

Tig exhaled. Whoever had been firing at them from up the street had run off, or was dead or wounded from the AK-47 barrage. Either way, the incoming gunfire had stopped. Tig pointed two fingers at his eyes, pantomiming to the armed militiaman to keep watch on the new arrival. The militiaman nodded.

Tig rose. His machine gun up and ready, he sprinted into the Compound to catch up with Rone and Jack.

D.B. took the lead as the sniper/observation team approached the eight-foot wall near the corner of Gunfighter Road and the gravel road leading to the Compound. He climbed over, then dropped to one knee, to provide cover for the two 17 February militiamen and finally Tanto as they joined him on the other side.

Ahead was the tall building they hoped to use as their perch. But before they moved that way, they wanted to be sure no one was waiting to ambush them. Next door to their chosen building was a cinder-block house under construction. Tanto provided cover while D.B. and the two militiamen made sure it was empty.

When the trio returned, the squad moved toward the tall building. But as they got closer, Tanto and D.B. realized that even if they reached the top, they’d be too far from the Compound to see much. They changed plans and kept going, one taking a knee as the others reached cover, then moving again, using the property walls as shields as they hopscotched steadily from one lot to the next. Each time they reached a corner they couldn’t see beyond, Tanto or D.B. used a tactical technique called “slicing the pie” or “pieing the corner.” The lead man approached the corner close to the wall. A few feet from the corner, he took small, sideways steps away from the wall with his gun up and ready. With each outward step he cleared a “slice” of the dark area on the far side of the corner, allowing him incrementally to determine that no one was there, without exposing himself all at once.

As Tanto held one corner, he heard the radio call from Rone asking whether it looked safe for the operators to move up the gravel road. After telling Rone that he couldn’t see but didn’t hear any gunfire, Tanto moved ahead to the next corner.

They made their way from one lot to the next, studying the shadows and the unlit passageways to see if anyone was hiding. Like their fellow operators on the street, they expected gunfire in their direction at every moment. The two operators and their militiamen shadows tried to
remain quiet and unobserved, not knowing whether a large force of attackers was waiting to engage them at the next lot or on the far side of the Compound. Yet as they balanced moving fast against remaining safe, they found themselves cheating toward speed because they knew Americans were in danger inside the Compound.

As they led their team down the block, Tanto and D.B. realized that most of the buildings were single-story homes that wouldn’t do them any good as sniper/observation towers. But through their goggles they saw a building under construction a hundred yards ahead that might work.

“Let’s get on top of that and see what we can see,” D.B. said.