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Politics and Activism

Remember The 13 Hours

The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. How they lived and how they died.

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Remember The 13 Hours
Before It's News

I have told you how Hillary Clinton is responsible for four men's deaths. I’m now going to tell you about how they lived. Because it’s how we remember them. I’m also going to tell you how they died. You owe them the knowledge of how they died to fully respect and honor them to the utmost extent. You owe them that. You owe them.

Starting with Sean Patrick Smith, he was an only child and grew up in the Clairemont neighborhood of San Diego, California. He graduated from Mission Bay High School in 1995, enlisted in the United States Air Force in July 1995 and served for six years. He was a ground radio maintenance (2E1X3) specialist and was promoted to staff sergeant in August 2000. He completed his military service in 2002.

As a Foreign Service employee, he lived in The Hague, Netherlands, with his wife, Heather, and children, Samantha and Nathan. Smith was known as a leading player and former member of the Council of Stellar Management in the Eve Online gaming community (under the username "Vile Rat") and was a moderator on the Something Awful forums.

J Christopher Stevens was the U.S. Ambassador working in Libya. His mission: stabilize the country he was in. Chris was born on April 18, 1960, in Grass Valley, California, the eldest of three siblings born to Jan S. Stevens, a California Assistant Attorney General. His wife Mary J. Stevens was from a West Coast family of French, Swedish and Chinook ancestry. Stevens was raised in Northern California and had two younger siblings, Anne and Thomas.

Stevens was an AFS Intercultural Programs exchange student in Spain during summer of 1977 and graduated from Piedmont High School in 1978. He earned a B.A. in History in 1982 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a member of Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. From 1983 to 1985, he taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco. He graduated with a J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1989, and received an M.S. degree from the National War College in 2010. Prior to joining the United States Foreign Service, Stevens was an international trade lawyer based in Washington, D.C. He was admitted as an active member of the State Bar of California on January 26, 1990.

Stevens joined the United States Foreign Service in 1991. His early overseas assignments included deputy principal officer and political section chief in Jerusalem, political officer in Damascus, consular/political officer in Cairo and consular/economic officer in Riyadh. In Washington, Stevens served as Director of the Office of Multilateral Nuclear and Security Affairs, Pearson Fellow with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senator Richard Lugar, special assistant to the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, and an Iran desk officer and staff assistant in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.

He had served in Libya twice previously as the Deputy Chief of Mission (from 2007 to 2009) and as Special Representative to the National Transitional Council (from March 2011 to November 2011) during the Libyan revolution. He arrived in Tripoli in May 2012 as the U.S. Ambassador to Libya.

Glen Anthony Doherty was born July 10, 1970 of Encinitas was a native of Winchester, Massachusetts, and a 1988 graduate of Winchester High School.

Doherty was the second of three children born to Bernard and Barbara Doherty. He trained as a pilot at Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University before moving to Snowbird, Utah, for several winters and then joining the United States Navy. Doherty served as a Navy SEAL, responded to the bombing of the USS Cole, had tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and left the Navy in 2005 as a petty officer, first class.

After leaving the Navy, he worked for a private security company in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kenya and Libya. In the month prior to the attack, Doherty as a contractor with the State Department told ABC News in an interview that he personally went into the field in Libya to track down MANPADS, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, and destroy them.

Doherty was a member of the advisory board of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organization that opposes proselytizing by religious groups in the United States military.[21] Doherty was co-author of the book The 21st Century Sniper.

And last but not least Tyrone S Woods.Tyrone Snowden Woods. Born January 15, 1971 in Portland, Oregon. Woods graduated from Oregon City High School in 1989, south of Portland, Oregon, and served 20 years of honorable service in the U.S. Navy before joining State Department Diplomatic Security as a U.S. embassy security personnel, ostensibly working under a service contract. Since 2010, Woods had protected American diplomats in posts from Central America to the Middle East. In November 2012, senior U.S. intelligence officials said that Woods and Doherty were actually CIA contractors, not State Department security officers as had been previously reported, and that the two men, together with other CIA security officers, played a pivotal role in defending against the Benghazi embassy attack.

As a Navy SEAL in 2005–06, Woods was awarded the Bronze Star Medal with Combat "V" for valor in Iraq. He led 12 direct action raids and 10 reconnaissance missions leading to the capture of 34 enemy insurgents in the volatile Al Anbar province. He served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Middle East and Central America. He retired as a senior chief petty officer in 2010.

Woods also served with distinction at the Naval Medical Center San Diego as a registered nurse and certified paramedic. Having settled in Imperial Beach, California, for a year of his retirement he owned The Salty Frog bar there; he is survived by his second wife, Dr. Dorothy Narvaez-Woods, their one child, and two sons from a previous marriage.

That is how they lived. This is how they died.


To close, I remember a show I used to watch: Ghost Whisperer. Melinda had her moments, and this quote was one of them.

“As a matter of fact nobody ever dies. You wanna know why? Because you’re gonna…you’re gonna live inside of everybody who knew you - everyone you touched no matter how little and the people who love you…they’re never gonna stop thinking about you are talking about you. They’re never gonna forget you because that never goes away. You’re never gonna die because you were loved. You’re gonna live forever…we all will.”

Remember them so they will not die.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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