When the mortar exploded on the roof, Oz had just finished reloading. He was rising out of his squatting position to resume shooting. The ear-splitting blast threw Oz back and off balance, knocking him to one knee. He somehow caught himself before going down completely. Through a cloud of black smoke Oz glanced left. The blast had hit Rone.
The former SEAL with the King Leonidas beard, who’d extended his stay in Benghazi to help protect Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who intended to retire from GRS operator trips to work with his wife, who was eager to raise his infant son and see his two older boys grow into men, who instinctively and compulsively watched over his fellow operators, who led the rescue charge into the Compound, who searched through a burning building for two missing men, and who answered the first two explosions by rising with a machine gun and returning fire, had absorbed the deadly concussive force of the explosion.
Oz saw Rone lying on his side, curled almost in a fetal position, motionless and silent. His machine gun was blown from his hands, broken somewhere on the grassy field below. Rone faced away from Oz, toward the parapet, so Oz couldn’t tell if he was conscious. But if Rone wasn’t rising to his feet and returning to the fight, Oz knew that he had reason to fear the worst.
Oz looked toward the northeast corner, but through the smoke he couldn’t see if Dave Ubben remained on the box near the ladder. Oz heard no sound from that direction. He knew that Glen Doherty was somewhere toward the south side of the roof, but he neither saw nor heard the Tripoli operator he’d met less than five minutes earlier.
Oz collected his bomb-scattered senses and focused on his training. He knew that before he could help anyone else, he needed to make sure they weren’t overrun. His first move would be to step up into Rone’s place, to prevent their enemies from thinking that the American defenders were beaten and that the Annex was defenseless.
Engage, Oz told himself. Get your rifle up and get into the fight.
He glanced again at Rone. If he’s badly hurt, press the fight until we can take care of him. Now get up and engage.
Oz clenched his assault rifle’s pistol grip with his right hand. But as he lifted his left arm to grab the black metal barrel, nothing happened. He tried again, but his left hand refused to answer his command. Oz looked down and saw his left forearm blown open about four inches from his wrist. He felt no pain, but as Oz held up his arm to inspect the damage, his hand and wrist hung at a gruesome forty-degree angle from the rest of his arm.
Not perceiving how badly he’d been hurt, and determined to resume shooting, Oz tried repeatedly to flip his left hand onto the barrel, but it flopped uselessly back down. Oz stared at it, in shock, not comprehending that the mortar had torn through the flesh of his left arm, blown away two inches of his radial bone, destroyed part of his radial nerve, and fractured his ulna. Blood bathed the pulpy mess.
Before Oz could react, another mortar hit the roof to his right, a fourth explosion in quick succession. It released a blinding white ball of light. Oz looked over his shoulder and caught a brief glimpse of Glen. The Tripoli operator faced the opposite direction, about four or five steps away. When the blast hit, it knocked Glen facedown onto the poured-concrete roof. At first Oz thought that Glen had gone down of his own will, to take cover. But then he realized that Glen hadn’t broken his fall. The explosion’s concussion had felled him like an ax-cut oak. Based on where Glen fell, it seemed plausible that he’d tried to return to the north parapet to help his fellow operators after the third explosion. He might have heard the incoming next rooftop mortar and turned to the south, in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid its blast.
However it transpired, the former SEAL with the infectious smile and abundant best friends, who served bravely in the Gulf War, who soared airborne on skis, surfboards, and good times, who came eagerly from Tripoli to help his fellow Americans, lay stationary and silent, arms at his sides, atop Building C.
Oz still didn’t know what had happened to Dave Ubben.
After the second direct hit on the rooftop, Oz remained hunched over, bleeding but not conscious of pain. He wheeled around to the north, to face Zombieland. Again he told himself that Building C had dropped out of the fight, and it was his job to change that, even before he could try to help Rone, Glen, or himself, or look for Dave Ubben.
Still refusing to accept his injury, Oz tried again to raise his weapon, lifting his left arm and awkwardly flipping up his hand, as though he were playing the child’s game of catching a ball on a string in a wooden cup. Each time he failed.
In came another mortar, the fifth explosive in perhaps ninety seconds, and the third to land squarely atop Building C. Oz heard the mortar approaching the roof. He turned away at the sound and caught only a glimpse of the blinding flash. When the flying bomb reached the bottom of its arc and exploded, Oz felt as though he’d been stung all over his body by a thousand metal bees.
Shrapnel cut into the right side of his neck, near the carotid artery. A jagged piece evaded Oz’s body armor to embed itself a quarter inch into his chest, between his pectoral muscles. Another piece pierced the left center of Oz’s abdomen, cutting into his diaphragm. Shrapnel entered his left side, six inches below the armpit, and more metal struck him in almost the same place on his right side. Eight to ten fragments struck his right leg, one high on his groin near the femoral artery. Four or five pierced his left leg, from his calf up to his thigh. Small, bloody holes dotted both shoulders and arms, as though Oz were a boxer whose opponent had put a nail in the thumb of his glove. One piece of shrapnel struck Oz’s right hip, sneaking between his beltline and the cell phone in his front pocket. Five small bits slashed his cheeks, just below his night-vision goggles, three under his right eye, two under his left. A piece sliced off skin from the tip of Oz’s nose.
Shocked by pain that seemed to inflame every nerve, oozing blood from more places than he could imagine, Oz dove for cover against the parapet at the northwest corner. He didn’t hear shooting from Zombieland, and he’d begun to accept that his hand was hopeless. He stopped trying to raise his gun. Instead, Oz dragged himself up to a sitting position and saw Rone nearby, still curled on his side.
Oz reached out for Rone’s leg. He was too weak to pull Rone toward him, so Oz quieted his mind of pain to search for a pulse from Rone’s femoral artery. He found none. Rone had made no sounds and no movements since Oz first saw him down on his side.
As he hunted for Rone’s pulse, Oz felt wetness all around him.
Oh shit, I’m bleeding out.
Oz reached down to the rooftop with his right hand and noticed to his relief that the wetness was cool to the touch. Fresh blood, he knew, would be warm and sticky. Oz realized that the roof was drenched not with blood but water. The mortars had punched multiple holes in a 250-gallon tank atop the roof. Its water drained around him.
He wasn’t bleeding out, but Oz knew that he might be soon. He looked down at the blood flowing from his damaged arm and told himself to staunch it. He remembered that he’d left his go-bag with his primary medical kit on the tower with Tig, but he had a smaller kit attached to the right side of his tactical vest. Inside were a one-piece combat tourniquet, Kerlix gauze, a chest dressing, and a nasal tube to create an open airway. Oz unzipped the kit and tried to apply the tourniquet to his left arm by using only his working right hand. The tourniquet was designed for one-handed application, but Oz was too weak or too deep in shock to use it properly.
Oz saw the dark outline of a man hop over the top of the ladder. Unsure if it was friend or foe, he dropped the tourniquet and looked around in the hazy twilight for his gun. Spotting the assault rifle near his feet, Oz reached out for it.
Alone at the northeast tower, Tig had spent much of the previous two hours acting as a remote shepherd, keeping watch over the sheep pens for approaching attackers. He’d also been eyeing the dirt pathways of Zombieland beyond the wall. His back ached. His lungs hurt from his searches inside the villa. His stomach growled from eating nothing all night as he subsisted o
n Gatorade and water. Tig sat in the lawn chair anticipating the evacuation, which couldn’t come soon enough. As he stared toward Zombieland, Tig heard a disturbing thunk from somewhere to the south, followed by an equally unnerving fffuuuvvv.
Mortar? No way, he thought. Seventeen Feb must’ve locked down the city by now. Right?
Mortars are classic siege weapons, typically projectile shells dropped into hollow metal tubes and launched in high arcs to land on remote targets. Tig had heard them many times in his military career. Others would say the first explosion of the third Annex firefight sounded like an RPG, but Tig felt certain it was a mortar. When it hit, he looked to the west and saw a flash of light silhouette the men atop Building C. Then he saw their fusillade of rounds hammer into Zombieland from the roof. As he prepared to join them, Tig heard a deeper and more ominous sound, something like fffuuummm.
Mortars were falling, and when the second explosion hit the top of the wall, Tig got the distinct impression that his tower would be underneath the next one. He knew that D.B. could cover his area of sheep pens and dirt paths from atop Building B. Rather than stay on his tower and risk getting slammed, Tig held tight to his rifle, grabbed Oz’s go-bag, and jumped down. He moved in a low crouch toward the workout area, in the direction of Building C.
When the third explosion hit, directly atop the roof, Tig looked up and for an instant saw a blinding flash. Then the entire roof disappeared in a shroud of black smoke. In quick succession, the fourth explosion rocked the roof, and then the fifth.
Rocky debris rained down on Tig and bounced like hailstones on the tin roof covering the prison gym. His thoughts sped to the men he was trying to reach. Oh shit. The shooting from Building C had stopped as soon as the first of the three mortars landed on the roof, so he knew that the men up there were hurt or worse. If there was one tiny bit of good news, the shooting also seemed to have stopped from their enemies in Zombieland.
As he ran toward the rear of the building to reach the ladder, Tig called on his radio: “Hey, guys on Building C, you guys OK? You guys OK?”
“Yeah,” came the Team Leader’s reply, from inside the building. “We’re fine in here, we’re good.”
“Not you!” Tig shouted. “The guys on top of the fucking roof!”
The T.L. didn’t respond, and neither did anyone on the roof. After a pause, Tig heard Jack’s voice fill the silence on the radio: “I see no movement.”
Atop Building D, Jack had been watching the neighboring roof intermittently since the first explosion. When the third, fourth, and fifth explosions hit Building C, he saw black plumes of smoke rise from where Rone and Oz had been firing into Zombieland only seconds earlier.
Jack couldn’t see the fallen men, who had dropped below the parapet and were blanketed in smoke. But in the quiet that followed, Jack thought he heard someone groaning in pain. Even that was more promising news than he’d feared. Jack considered it doubtful that anyone on Building C could survive a single direct mortar hit to their location, much less three. His heart had clenched when he saw the last two explosions.
As Tig climbed the ladder to the roof, Jack continued to scan for signs of life, even as he remained on guard for enemy action to the north or west. While Jack waited for word, he stewed over how accurate the mortars were. Three direct hits on a relatively small rooftop were as remarkable as they were lethal. They had to have somebody spotting them, he thought. Somebody was around, probably at an elevated position looking down at us. They hit the wall, and then they corrected and those last three were right on target.
It also occurred to Jack that the attackers had targeted the single most important and most crowded building inside the walls. Building C housed the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility and the operators’ Team Room, which logically made it the Command Post, and therefore the most likely place for Americans to have taken refuge. To be that accurate, Jack thought, that precise with those mortars, they had to have been very proficient, and they had to have known the exact location of that building.
Maybe their enemies had done it by dead reckoning, a product of trial and error with help from a concealed spotter. Another possibility was that the attackers had used latitude and longitude coordinates provided by a GPS device, perhaps in a car that drove up to the front gate, or on the smartphone of someone walking outside the Annex. It had occurred to D.B. that the man he’d seen walking outside the Annex might have employed a more primitive approach to target locating: estimating distances by pacing them off on foot.
The more Jack thought about it, the more he felt consumed by dread. Now that the enemy had dialed in the position of the Annex buildings, they might fire twenty or thirty mortars inside the walls. Every rooftop and walkway was vulnerable. Worse, Jack anticipated that the mortars were only the first wave of a full-on assault. As Jack envisioned it, first the attackers would soften up the American defenders by raining mortars on their positions. Then they’d move in on the ground with RPGs and heavy machine guns. Jack knew that he and his fellow operators would put up a ferocious fight, but eventually the Annex walls would give way. The outnumbered, outgunned defenders could hold out only for so long against an overwhelming force.
Considering what had already happened and the various ways the Annex might be overrun, Jack concluded that he’d reached the low point of not only the long night, but of his entire life. He feared that the men atop Building C were dead or dying, adding to the death toll of Chris Stevens and Sean Smith. Having somehow missed the radio call in which the T.L. said that everyone inside Building C was safe, Jack suspected that the mortars had penetrated the roof and killed some or all of them, too. It seemed only a matter of time before he and every other American in Benghazi were dead. He didn’t want to imagine what the radicals might do to their bodies.
Jack’s thoughts returned to the mortars. He thought about how powerless the Annex fighters were against bombs dropping from above. You don’t know if it’s coming, he thought. It’s not like you can defend against it. You’re just out in the open. You can’t shoot back towards it. It’s basically a lottery. If it’s your time, it’s your time, and death can come right out of the sky and kill you in an instant.
He heard the T.L. call on the radio for everyone at fighting positions to check in, by order of location. From Building A. Tanto called: “Roger, all OK.” D.B. reported that he was safe on Building B. Everyone waited to hear a voice from Building C. None came.
“Building C, check in.” Still nothing. “Building C?”
The silence confirmed in Jack’s mind that his worst fears had been realized for Rone, Oz, and Dave Ubben. It was hard to imagine that he could have felt worse, but that would have been the case if Jack had known that a fourth man was on the roof: His friend Glen “Bub” Doherty was up there, too.
Finally, Jack filled the empty radio space. “Building D, roger,” he said in a melancholy voice. “I’m OK.”
Like Jack, D.B. felt as though it was only a matter of time before more mortars hit them. He knew that he needed to cover the area east of the wall, but he also considered abandoning his post if he heard the thumps and whistles of incoming mortars. Then he told himself, That’s actually pretty stupid. Usually the mortar round that hits you is the one you don’t hear.
After the third mortar hit the roof, Tanto heard the squeal of tires from the area south of the Annex around the dirt racetrack. When no more mortars launched, he believed that some members of the ten-car motorcade had in fact gone in pursuit of the attackers and had chased them off.
At the same time, he wondered when he and the other Benghazi operators would get relief from the Tripoli team, all of whom except Glen remained inside Building C. He called to D.B. on the next rooftop: “Where the fuck are all these guys from Tripoli?”
Tanto returned his focus to a possible ground assault. Need to get ready, he told himself. He stared into the unfinished four-story building across the road to the south. Tanto told D.B. that he continued to hear voices in th
e field near the building, whispering and mumbling from among the weeds. D.B. tossed him a pair of binoculars across the narrow gap between their roofs, to help Tanto scour the building and the grounds nearby.
Between sweeps across his sector, Tanto called the T.L. to say that the ten-car motorcade escort had left. “It doesn’t look like they’re coming back,” Tanto said. “We’re gonna need another way to get out of here.”
As Tanto remained on watch, he felt as though he’d been prepared for everything that had already happened, and everything yet to come. You don’t have time to feel sorry for yourself, he thought. You don’t feel sorry for anybody else. You can feel sorry once you’re safe and you’re sitting back and drinking a beer, and you can howl at the moon. When everything’s done, you can feel sorry.
With each rung he climbed on the Building C ladder, Tig swiveled his head toward Zombieland, watching for muzzle flashes to see if anyone was about to shoot him in the back. The attackers had stopped shooting after the third mortar struck the roof, but neither Tig nor any of the other Americans knew whether their enemies would resume shooting, launch more mortars, or attempt to breach the walls and invade the Annex. They expected nothing less.
Tig leapt over the parapet and ducked low as he looked around the blackened roof. The sun still hung below the horizon and smoke still swirled, giving Tig only a few feet of visibility. “I need help up here,” he called on the radio.
The first man Tig spotted was Dave Ubben, propped against the parapet ten feet from the northeast corner, conscious but dazed, a pistol in his right hand. Tig knelt next to Ubben and grabbed the gun, worried that while in shock and pain the DS agent might mistake Tig for someone who needed to be shot. He tossed the pistol to the side and pulled out a headlamp from Oz’s medical bag. Tig flipped down a red lens cover to keep from painting a target for the attackers.
13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi Page 23
