Fullbore Friday

The silent professional who does not seek the light.

Just a small town North Carolina boy.

Via Gina Harkins at military.com;

On the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Jolly was about 600 miles away from Benghazi in Tripoli -- roughly the same distance between Chicago and Washington, D.C. Since Jolly and Halbruner were some of the only troops in-country, the operation was coordinated not by U.S. Africa Command, but the CIA.

Team Tripoli, made up of Jolly, Halbruner and five others, arrived in Benghazi at about 1:30 a.m. That was about four hours after the attack began, and two since Ambassador Christopher J. Stevens had last been seen alive.

The team was led by Glen Doherty, a Global Response Staff (GRS) security officer and former Navy SEAL, who was later killed. He was Team Tripoli's medic.

The plan, according to the person familiar with the mission, was to leave the airport and head to the hospital, where they believed Stevens was being treated. When they found out Stevens had died, the first ambassador to be killed in the line of duty since 1979, the team headed to the consulate to bolster the diplomatic security personnel and GRS, a group of private military contractors who were fending off the attackers.

"It could've gone really, really bad," said the source familiar with the mission. "It could've become 30 American hostages in North Africa. There were seven shooters going in to protect people who don't shoot for a living."

By the time they arrived, Sean Smith, a State Department foreign service officer, had also died. It was still dark, just after 5 a.m., according to a congressional timeline of the attack. Within minutes, the first mortar hit.

The attacks continued, with one witness estimating there were as many as 100 insurgents spotted surrounding their location in 20- or 30-man groups. It was a skilled enemy, one of the troops there later told members of Congress.

"It's not easy ... to shoot inside the city and get something on the target within two shots -- that's difficult," the witness testified. "I would say they were definitely a trained mortar team or had been trained to do something similar to that.

"I was kind of surprised," the service member added. "... It was unusual."

They were there a matter of hours, but at times witnesses said the team feared they wouldn't make it out alive. It began to "rain down on us," one of them told lawmakers.

''I really believe that this attack was planned," the witness said. "The accuracy with which the mortars hit us was too good for any regular revolutionaries."

In total, six 81-millimeter mortars assaulted the annex within a minute and 13 seconds, a congressional report on the attack states. Doherty and Tyrone Woods, another former SEAL with the GRS, didn't survive.

Dave Ubben, a State Department security agent, and Mark "Oz" Geist, another GRS member, were badly hurt. The men were defending the compound from the rooftop, determined to make it look like they had a lot more firepower than they actually did.

"There was a lot of shooting, a lot of indirect fire and explosions," the source with knowledge of the response said. "It was just guys being really aggressive and doing a good job at making it seem like their element was bigger than it was, like they were less hurt than they were."

Ubben -- who'd testified before a federal court in 2017 that he took shrapnel to his head, nearly lost his leg, and had a grapefruit-sized piece of his arm taken off -- was losing blood fast. Geist also had a serious arm injury that needed immediate attention.

Jolly and Halbruner were determined to save them. Amid the fight, they were tying tourniquets to the men's bodies.

Ubben is alive because Jolly helped move him from the rooftop to a building where diplomatic personnel were hunkered down. Gregory Hicks, who became the acting chief of mission after Stevens died, later described how the gunny did it during a congressional hearing.

"One guy ... full of combat gear climbed up [to the roof], strapped David Ubben, who is a large man, to his back and carried him down the ladder, saved him," Hicks said.

Jolly and Halbruner also went back out to the rooftop to recover the bodies of the fallen.

"They didn't know whether any more mortars were going to come in. The accuracy was terribly precise," Hicks said. "... They climbed up on the roof, and they carried Glen's body and Tyrone's body down."

It was for Jolly's "valorous actions, dedication to duty and willingness to place himself in harm's way" to save numerous unarmed Americans' lives that he earned the Navy Cross, according to his citation.

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