13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi Read Online Free Page A

chiseled young sailor a shoo-in. He made it through the five-hundred-yard swim in the required time. Jack climbed out of the pool and far exceeded the requirednumber of push-ups, completing more than eighty in two minutes. Next were sit-ups, and he exceeded the standard there, too. Then came pull-ups. The screening test required applicants to do eight perfect, dead-hang pull-ups with virtually no rest between exercises. After weeks of slacking, Jack did six, then willed himself to a seventh. His muscles screamed. His lungs ached. His arms were on fire. Jack made it halfway up on the eighth but couldn’t get his chin over the bar.
    Jack hung there, refusing to let go but lacking the strength to pull himself higher. The veteran Master Chief SEAL giving Jack the test prodded him: “If I light a fire under your ass, can you get over the bar?” Jack tried again but couldn’t. When he dropped to the ground, his eyes filled with tears. Jack returned to his room and told his shocked friends that he’d failed.
    He’d remember it as one of the most traumatizing and motivating moments of his life. Instead of going through the legendary SEAL training program and becoming an elite special operator, Jack spent the next two years as a Navy airman on an aircraft carrier. When his next chance came, Jack destroyed every category of the SEAL screening test. By the time he finished SEAL training, Jack came to appreciate the yin and yang of what he’d experienced the previous two years. The humbling failure and its consequences gave him the strength and willpower to push through the brutal selection process and earn his Trident, the prized SEAL insignia, while scores of other would-be warriors quit.
    Jack didn’t talk much about his exploits, but during a decade in the service he spent time in more than twenty countries and carried out missions in Kosovo andthe Middle East. He left the SEALs to spend more time with his growing family and to try his hand at business. Jack bought and sold real estate, renovating and flipping properties while working to stay one step ahead of the tumultuous market.
    By the time Jack and Rone joined forces as GRS operators in Benghazi, the two former Navy SEALs had been friends for nearly a decade. They’d met when both served as instructors at the Naval Special Warfare training facility in Niland, California. One night not long after they met, Jack spent a night drinking at a local bar and didn’t want to drive home. He walked to Rone’s nearby condo, planning to crash there until morning. Not knowing who was at his door, Rone climbed out a window wearing only boxer shorts and carrying a pistol. He moved tactically around the corner to the front door, gun raised, to outflank the presumed intruder. When he saw it was a drunken Jack, Rone lowered the gun and laughed.
    When Rone wasn’t pointing a gun at him, Jack considered Rone to be smart and effective, a natural leader, and perhaps the most motivated and hardest-working person he’d ever met, no small praise among Special Operations veterans.
    Rone was forty-one, a twice-married father of three sons. A former high school wrestler, he liked fast motorcycles and muscle cars, especially Ford Cobra Mustangs. Rone had a weightlifter’s broad chest, light-brown hair, a meaty chin, and forearms like pile drivers. He’d earned his SEAL Trident in 1991 after twice going through Hell Week, a five-and-a-half-day torture test of mental and physical toughness, pain and cold tolerance, teamwork and determination, all on fewer than four hours of sleep. As a SEAL,Rone had served bravely in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where he received a Bronze Star with a “V” for valor. The citation described his “heroic achievement, extraordinary guidance, zealous initiative, and total dedication to duty” in al-Anbar province of western Iraq. He was a healer as well as a warrior, having become a registered nurse and a paramedic. Rone retired from the SEALs in 2010 with