ISIS terrorists arrived at the hotel, fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the entrance, then stormed inside shooting AK-47 assault rifles.
Matt McAlpin of Annandale should have been standing in the lobby at that moment, but thanks to his driver arriving 10 minutes late to pick him up for a meeting that morning, he and a pair of co-workers were just entering the hotel complex by car as the attack began to unfold.
"We were heading over and I was kind of yelling at the driver for being late," McAlpin said by phone last week from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
Then his coworker’s phone rang with a call from a client that their security firm was working with.
"She said, ‘I need help, I’ve been shot. I’m in the Corinthia.’ That was all she said and then her phone went dead," McAlpin recalled. "Right after that we got a call from our project manager inside the hotel. He said, ‘There’s shooting in the lobby. Don’t come into the parking lot.’"
McAlpin, 43, a 1990 graduate of Annandale High School and the son of Mike and Kathy McAlpin, works for Team Exlog-Crucible, a security and logistics contracting firm that was based at the Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli, Libya, at the time of the attack around 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 27.
After the warning by phone, McAlpin and two co-workers parked the car a short distance away, grabbed a first-aid kit and ran toward the hotel, still not sure what was happening. No members of the group were armed. They were stopped by hotel security guards outside, but could hear gunfire from the terrorists inside.
As the shooting moved up the floors of the hotel one of McAlpin’s co-workers and several other drivers rushed into the lobby, found the client who had called asking for help, and carried her to a vehicle for transport to a hospital. She had been shot four times and struck by shrapnel from the RPG blast, but survived.
McAlpin and another co-worker moved into the guard shack while trying to establish contact with the company’s office on the 25th floor of the hotel. From that vantage point, protected by concrete and ballistic glass, McAlpin surveyed the scene.
"There were two cars parked outside the hotel where we always parked, about 50 meters away. The guards asked if we recognized the cars," he said. "Being there six months, doing what we do, we always looked at stuff like that. I said, ‘The Kia Sportage, I don’t recognize that. That car is new.’"
About 15 minutes later, as 30 to 40 Libyan militia members arrived and shooting continued inside the hotel, that vehicle exploded, killing a few Libyan security personnel in McAlpin’s immediate line of sight.
The contracting life
The road connecting McAlpin’s Annandale roots to that chaotic scene in Tripoli was a long one, and wound through some of the most dangerous areas of the world.
After McAlpin’s everyday career in construction product sales was cut short by the recession in 2007, he was looking for work.
Having spent six years in the Army Reserve, he ended up finding a job with a number of contractors working in Iraq. His first position was in project scheduling for a large military operation.
He ended up staying for five years, working on different projects with various employers.
In 2012 he went to Libya in the wake of the revolution that ousted Muhammad Gaddafi. He also spent time in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
"I love it. The work is good," McAlpin said. "It can be frustrating because you work with a lot of different nationalities and different people, but it’s that team mentality. You get with a group of guys. In Libya there were seven of us Americans. It’s kind of like back to the military days, being together and the camaraderie of it. You form some good bonds and some good friendships."
Though he still owns a house in Annandale, McAlpin only makes it home about one month out of the year. That kind of schedule is hard on a personal life, and in 2014 McAlpin resigned to come home and spend more time with his family, including children Brittany, 22, and Max, 16.
"I chose this work to provide a better life for my family. My kids are my life," he said.
Attuned to action, however, McAlpin eventually returned to work with Crucible after about six months off in September of 2014.
Libya adrift
Back on the job, McAlpin found a much different Libyan landscape than the one he had encountered two years earlier. A breakout of fighting between rival factions – including Islamic militants – in July had already forced most foreign embassies to close and businesses to leave.
"Libya is just a mess. At first in 2012 it was great. Everybody was happy and the revolution had just happened," said McAlpin. "But when I got back here in 2014 everything was way different. No government, no police, no real fire protection. Most of it was volunteer. The local neighborhood militias were taking care of their own areas."
Because most westerners had left the country, McAlpin and his associates were watched closely.
"We’d get followed and stuff like that. We weren’t armed. We couldn’t be armed. So you just had to keep a very low profile and change up what we did every day," he said.
Libyan rules prevented foreign security services from operating independently. So Crucible, which was providing security for an American power supplier at various generating sites, kept one security manager at each site with a trusted Libyan team. McAlpin worked out of the Tripoli headquarters coordinating the movement of items to and from sites.
Getting out
As the hotel attack continued to unfold, McAlpin and his remaining co-worker were eventually ordered to leave the site. They learned around 2 p.m. that the project manager they had been trying to contact from the guard shack had been shot and killed by the attackers on the eighth floor after leaving the relative safety of his 25th floor office to help the woman who had been shot in the lobby. Though unarmed, the man was an ex-Marine special forces operator, and his actions to protect a wounded client surprised no one.
"You knew he was going to do that," said McAlpin, explaining that the woman had also managed to call the office after she was injured. "That’s just the kind of guy he was. I’m not sure I would have ever done it, but we knew he would. He was trying to find her."
A number of additional clients were also sheltering in the Crucible office, and the last terrorist was eventually killed somewhere between the 21st and 24th floor of the hotel, according to varying news reports.
"That group of people, they got very lucky," said McAlpin.
Though the attackers had gone up floor by floor, forcing their way into any rooms they could, the hotel was mostly empty at the time and the death toll came to 10 total, including the single American contractor.
The Crucible survivors from the office were flown out to Malta the next day, and after stops at a few different safe houses McAlpin and others followed a few days later. From Malta, McAlpin set up an office to manage the exit of the company’s remaining personnel from Libya and to return his co-worker’s body to the United States.
He is currently working from Dubai to remove the remainder of the power company’s assets from Libya.
"When the Italian embassy leaves you know it’s bad, because the Italians have been in Libya since the 1930s pumping oil. The embassy and the big oil company from Italy have left," said McAlpin. "That’s a measuring stick for us. They left about three weeks ago."
Middle East insights
Though McAlpin survived a car bombing in Iraq that blew out the windows of his own vehicle, along with mortar and rocket attacks resulting in the death of around 20 Iraqi military guards, the ISIS raid in Libya marked the first time he has lost co-workers.
"People ask me where I felt safer, Libya or Iraq," McAlpin said. "I felt much safer in Iraq because at least in Iraq you knew who your enemies were, for the most part. In Libya, it could have been anybody down the street for $100. Libya is a lot more strict Muslim, and it was a very different feel. I never felt comfortable in Libya. We slept with a go-bags next to our beds just in case."
While it might be easy for those in the U.S. to write off both countries as lost causes, McAlpin said he felt more optimistic about Iraq.
"Being in it every day, yes, it’s a mess," he said. "Libya, I don’t know if they can come out of it. Iraq has a lot more hope. I spent a lot more time there – five years – and the people of Iraq were very good people. The Libyan people on a whole are good people, but the problem is they’re so tribalized. There are so many different tribes and they all want power. They all want money.
"If you talk to the locals, the majority of guys we worked with would say they need Gaddafi back, because he kept everybody in check. People said the same thing in Iraq with Saddam."
While the situation, especially in Libya, seems grim from afar, McAlpin said it has to be seen to be fully understood.
"It’s much worse than what the U.S. news portrays. I tell people not to watch the U.S. news, watch BBC, because they show the truth," he said. "I knew the ambassador who was killed here in Libya. I got to meet all those people, and what the U.S. news portrays is so sad. They just don’t tell the whole story. They don’t tell what’s really going on. They tell their perspective of it.
"If you look at BBC or Al Jazeera, they don’t have a bias. They just show what’s going on. I really enjoy watching the foreign news."
In a schizophrenic region where crossing a border can mean the difference between modern, prosperous communities friendly to westerners and medieval violence, McAlpin said it is the countries still led by monarchies – like Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain – that are the safe havens.
"Those countries are very safe because they’re more westernized. The UAE, I feel safer here than I do back in the U.S. There’s just no crime here," he said. "It’s actually almost too quiet compared to where I’ve been – no gunshots or mortars going off.
"It’s just a very different world over here."