In Ajdabiya, Libya, We Watch the 'Hell of War'

AJDABIYA, Libya, April 12, 2011— -- In Libya, war isn't just hell. War is purgatory, too.

There is surely the savagery and relentless brutality of combat here, the human capacity for killing and mayhem that General Sherman saw straight and called hell. If you want to see that, one place to go is Ajdabiya.

Watch Terry Moran's full report from Libya

It's a dusty city on the desert road about 90 miles from Benghazi, the country's second largest city and the main stronghold of the Libyan rebels -- or freedom fighters, or opposition, however you like. (Unlike many, I don't find the term "rebel" pejorative; George Washington was a rebel.)

There have been several battles over the control of Ajdabiya in the last few weeks, the most recent was last weekend. My crew and I were there.

View a slideshow of "Nightline's" Terry Moran and his crew's journey through war-torn Libya.

In a field hospital outside of town, a fighter was rushed in with a bullet wound in his hip. He was bleeding, conscious, and praying as the doctors worked on him. Outside, his friend and comrade -- who had brought him to the hospital in his own car, the backseat now soaked in blood -- told us what happened.

He said the young man was from Zintan, far away from this city. He had just joined the uprising, rushing to the front with no orders, no training, no coordination, no equipment aside from the gun he'd gotten somewhere in the chaos of this conflict.

He was like so many of the shabab, the Arabic term for all the high-spirited young men who make up so much of the rebel forces, racing around in their pick-up trucks or old sedans, game for battle.

This young man wanted to fight, to free his country from the tyranny of Gadhafi. And now he had a hole in him the size of a baseball, a doctor said.

It was a quiet scene. The doctors worked calmly with the rapidity and focused tenderness of emergency physicians. The young fighter held his pain.

There was no shelling or gunfire around us at that time, but the hell of war was there on the table. Not in the blood, though there was plenty of that. Not in the torn skin and broken bone. It was in the face of his friend--slender, dark-skinned, soft-featured, with close-cropped curly black hair, light brown eyes, and a long face that tapered to the chin of a child.