And sometimes, an hour is everything.
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. HD13 Hours- The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
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. And sometimes, an hour is everything
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. And the surviving GRS—Silva, Geist, Tiegen—went back to
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.
The GRS piled into two unarmored vehicles—the "War Wagon" (a battered Toyota pickup with a DShK heavy machine gun welded to the bed) and a Chevrolet Suburban. As they tore out of the Annex gates, the night erupted. Gunfire ricocheted off the asphalt. The smell of cordite and burning trash filled the cabin.
In the sweltering heat of Benghazi, Libya, the year 2012 felt like a held breath. The Arab Spring had toppled Muammar Gaddafi, but in its wake, a vacuum of power had been filled by militias, extremists, and exhausted revolutionaries. The American presence was tentative: a small, low-profile diplomatic mission known as the "Special Mission Compound" (SMC) and, a mile away, a covert CIA Annex called "The Globe."