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Dr. Thomas Burke and his colleague from Massachusetts General arrived at Benghazi Medical Center in the morning. It wasn’t safe for them to travel at night, and there was little that they could have done in any event. When they arrived, they found the midnight shift at the ER shattered by grief. Intelligence agents had already come and commandeered an ambulance.

It was deemed too dangerous for the Military Intelligence convoy to stop at Benghazi Medical Center to retrieve Ambassador Stevens’s body. The officer in charge arranged for an ambulance to transport the remains to the military side of Benghazi airport. The Libyan NTC had urged the one military asset that it could trust to make sure the departure from Benghazi was without incident and with the utmost dignity and respect. The gunfire that followed the American presence throughout the night could not follow it to the tarmac.

Select personnel, and the severely wounded, were loaded onto the C-130. The aircraft took off at 0730 hours. The remaining CIA staffers, the DS agents, and the GRS personnel would head back to Tripoli on board another Libyan Air Force transport that the NTC had made available to the American government. R. was one of those who took the second Libyan Air Force flight; he needed to remain behind in order to positively identify the body of Ambassador Stevens. R. unzipped the black heavy plastic body bag and identified Stevens, silently weeping, overcome by emotions. The sense of failure for losing his principal was overwhelming. In the world of dignitary protection, the greatest sin, you are taught, is to lose a principal.

At 0845, air traffic around Benghazi came to a halt as the aircraft taxied for takeoff. A dozen or so Americans were on board watching over the bodies of Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty. The DS agents on board were numbed by the loss and silent in their sorrow. Their vacant stares were all that was needed to understand the hell they had just been through. The flight to Tripoli took all of an hour. For the men on board with the bodies of the fallen, it seemed to last forever. In addition to their loss, they were now in nothing less than retreat, not a desired end state for any warrior.

The flights from Benghazi were met by many of the staffers—DOD, DS, and CIA—from the Tripoli embassy. The U.S. embassy nurse triaged the arrival and tended to the agent who was blown off the ladder. In a perfect world, he would have been at the Shock Trauma Center at University of Maryland Medical Center. In Tripoli, the nurse was the shock trauma center. The injured were rushed to the hospital for emergency care, while the remainder were cared for, fed, and issued new clothes and documentation; many had had to leave their passports behind. It was imperative that the survivors from Benghazi be brought out of the country as soon as possible. Not only did all the personnel need to be debriefed, but there was always the concern that the Libyan government, bowing perhaps to internal pressure, would want to debrief or, possibly, prosecute the DS and CIA contractors for shooting Libyan citizens on Libyan soil. State Department agents involved in shootings are often urged to leave the country immediately after an event in order for the host government not to PNG, or deem them persona non grata, and declare their diplomatic status null and void.

The U.S. Air Force dispatched a behemoth C-17 Globemaster III transport jet to Tripoli to bring the Benghazi survivors, and much of the gear and material from the Annex, out of the country. Material from the U.S. embassy in Tripoli was also boxed and transported out. Nonessential staffers were ordered to leave as well. No one knew if the attack in Benghazi was but a first round in what would become open warfare on American diplomats, soldiers, and spies.

To augment security at the embassy, a fifty-man contingent of Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) marines arrived in Tripoli on the morning of September 12. The marines were greeted by a shell-shocked embassy staff on the shores of Tripoli, bringing to full circle the Marine Corps hymn and the words “to the shores of Tripoli.” Some cried, and others hugged the nineteen-year-old grunts; help had arrived, in the form of America’s finest. Loaded for bear, the marines did what they do best: setting up sandbag emplacements, stringing concertina wire, and tactically positioning .50-caliber machine guns and squad-support M249s on the perimeter of the mission. There would be no Benghazi-like attack on Tripoli. The visual footprint echoed intent and projected American power.

AFRICOM also dispatched a special hospital transport, a modified C-130, to fly the wounded to Ramstein Air Base in Germany for recuperation and debriefing. A small army of specialists would await their arrival. CIA debriefing agents, DS special agents, and various other nameless faces from the intelligence community were eager to pick the brains of men who had fought the battle of their lives in a city and country that were all too familiar with no-holds-barred combat.

For the dead, for the DS agents, and for the CIA staffers, the actual battle for Benghazi was finally and truly over. The real battle about Benghazi, though, had only just begun.