Hd13 Hours- The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi -
Years later, a journalist asked Oz Geist if he regretted going back into the burning compound. He looked at the scars on his arm and leg, then at a photograph of Rone Woods holding his daughter.
The turning point came at 1:50 AM. Rone Woods on the roof spotted two technicals cresting the north ridge, their machine guns winking orange. He opened fire with the Mk 48, stitching a line of 7.62mm rounds across the lead truck’s engine block. It exploded in a fireball. The second truck retreated.
As a Libyan militia convoy finally arrived to secure the area, the GRS loaded the wounded and the dead onto a C-130 evacuation plane. Jack Silva sat next to Rone’s body bag, staring at the floor. He didn’t cry. Not yet. That would come later, alone, in a hotel room in Germany.
From three directions, mortar rounds began walking in. The first explosion cratered the parking lot, flipping a Land Cruiser onto its side. The GRS took positions along the north and east walls. Rone Woods climbed to the roof of the villa—the highest point, with no cover—manning a Mk 48 machine gun. "I need eyes on the north ridge," he said calmly over the radio. "They’re setting up a mortar tube." HD13 Hours- The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
The GRS scrambled. Jack Silva was first to the armored Toyota Land Cruisers. "Let’s move!" he yelled. But the CIA’s chief of base, codenamed "Bob," issued a contradictory order: Hold. Wait for the local Libyan militia allies to secure the route.
At 12:05 AM, September 12, the second wave began.
They knew Benghazi was a powder keg. Every night, they heard the rattle of AK-47s and the thump of RPGs in the distance. But on the evening of September 11, 2012—the eleventh anniversary of 9/11—the air felt different. Heavier. Years later, a journalist asked Oz Geist if
The CIA Annex was bulldozed. The bodies of Rone Woods and Glen Doherty were returned to their families. And the surviving GRS—Silva, Geist, Tiegen—went back to quiet lives, their hands never quite clean of the smell of cordite and smoke.
The GRS had failed to save them. The weight of that failure would crush any other men. But the night was not over.
Minutes bled. The radio screamed: Ambassador Chris Stevens and Sean Smith, a communications specialist, were trapped in the burning safe house. The attackers—a coalition of al-Qaeda-linked militants and Ansar al-Sharia—were pouring through the gates, armed with PKM machine guns, RPG-7s, and diesel-soaked rags. Rone Woods on the roof spotted two technicals
"We can’t get to him!" Wickland coughed, blood on his lips. "The smoke… the fire…"
They searched the perimeter. They fought room-to-room in the burning annex building. But the fire was too intense. The roof began to collapse. Sean Smith was later found dead from smoke inhalation. Ambassador Stevens, separated in the chaos, had been dragged by Libyan "rescuers" to a hospital, where he was found dead of asphyxiation.
