Benghazi

The United States mission in Benghazi was a temporary diplomatic compound, not a consulate, in a city without a functioning police force. About a mile away was an annex run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

At twenty to ten on the evening of the eleventh, armed men came over the wall of the compound and set the main building alight with diesel. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and Information Officer Sean Smith were in a safe area inside it with a security officer.

The three of them tried to get out through a window into smoke. The security officer got out and went back in repeatedly. Sean Smith, thirty-four, was found dead of smoke inhalation. Stevens, fifty-two, was not found by the Americans at all; Libyans pulled him alive from the building some hours later and took him to a hospital, where he died. He was the first American ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979.

A team from the annex drove over and evacuated the survivors under fire. Among them was Glen Doherty, forty-two, a former Navy SEAL working as a contractor, who had flown in from Tripoli that night without being ordered to.

At about a quarter past five the next morning, mortars found the roof of the annex. Tyrone Woods, forty-one, also a former SEAL, had been on that roof with a machine gun since the attack began. Doherty had joined him there minutes before. Both were killed by the third round.

Four Americans died: an ambassador, an information officer and two security contractors. Neither Woods nor Doherty had been sent to that roof.