Flopaganda: 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

 

I was writing about Stranger Things after I watched the entire series for the first time in the lead-up to the final season (‘s final season, I hate release schedules like this thanks Attack on Titan), but the whole thing stuck in my throat. It was too much of a bummer, it was all too mean, and exploring one problem led to explaining another problem which meant defining a third problem and it just started getting very… Youtuber-esque. Me and the team (me) decided to park that project and instead look at something that has been relentlessly fascinating to me since I was utterly repulsed by Zero Dark Thirty: the weird and wonderful world of post-Iraq-regret US military propaganda. 

This will be a fun little series to ring in 2026 with the halting and phlegmatic start it deserves, trying out a different format and maybe carving out a couple of repeated and focused niches that build into a cohesive body of work and not just “writing about a random piece of media and desperately trying to find a good font for the thumbnail at 3am”.

Pictured: me and my horrid little thoughts deciding not to publish Stranger Things things.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is a deeply strange film. 

Opening with a ghoulish half-documentary/half-dramatic re-enactment of the brutalisation of Muammar Gaddafi’s body, we follow John Krasinski’s journey into a profitably unstable Libya as one of the six special operators who fought in secret to defend American lives in the lead-up to and during the events that would become colloquially known as ‘Benghazi’. Shackled by an incompetent and devious CIA, the eponymous secret soldiers struggle righteously against the events of the true story, narrowly missing out on saving lives before eventually being backed into a corner inside the CIA annex where they fight tooth-and-nail throughout the night without any hope of relief. 

They kill a lot of guys, most of the Americans make it out, they go home, and the film ends. 

First of all, contextually, this film came out in 2016 - which was both ten thousand years ago and also potentially just yesterday. This places it in an odd space because the kind of pro-military/anti-state libertarianism that makes up the bedrock of the film’s clearly stated politics was, at the time, considered a valuable, serious, and respectable stance to have. Anti-state intervention in relation to an ongoing occupation, but pro-state intervention for whatever happened in the immediate past that got us stuck here.

In many ways this film isn’t just a eulogy for Benghazi, but a eulogy for a specific type of "serious" right-wing thought and for a specific type of American Dude, ostensibly armed and ready to water the tree of liberty, but utterly steamrolled by the new, aggressive weirdness of the American Right. Would the person who idolises the quiet, family-focused operators of 13 Hours get frothing mad over the Cracker Barrel logo? Would they jump from fad diet to fad diet, backed up by a weighty medicine cabinet of nootropics and weight-loss pills? Would they whole-heartedly support a government that is explicitly run by and for pedophiles? The type of American conservative this film was made for is gone, his self-image shattered into a million pieces, his essence scattered to the winds, and his absence keenly felt when examining a film so clearly tailor-made for him.  

Even the subject - Benghazi! - feels like a relic from an ancient time. Once the poster child for how the Obama admin and Hillary Clinton let down The Troops, turned into a guttering candle of an issue kept barely alive by the already-dead.

Rugged men doing rugged things, ruggedly.

13 Hours is an attempt to deliberately and nakedly mythologise Benghazi, crafting an extremely simple and straightforward version of events that confidently and effectively builds broad, unequivocally heroic characters for us to edify. 

From literally brandishing Joseph Campbell to literally telling the audience that this is The Alamo, there is an awfully cynical self-awareness to this story of the six operators and the thirteen hours they spent in the middle of the Benghazi debacle. We are watching heroes, the film repeatedly tells us, all-American heroes who didn’t want to be here (but they are getting paid), who were willing to give their lives to defend what was right, and who in no circumstances would ever - ever - kill civilians.

This last point they repeat a couple of times in sort of a “my t-shirt that says ‘I would never be involved in the killing of civilians’ is raising a lot of questions already answered by the shirt” kind of way. 

Why they repeatedly insist on this point, I truly do not know. 

The Libyans are presented as an amorphous, entirely unknowable, inhuman, (and therefore easily justified) fleshy targets to shoot with a series of fun weapons. There’s a videogamey unreality to 13 Hours, first person perspective shots and all, a jingoistic themepark version of a war film where the bad guys shoot American flags for fun and attack in scripted waves. This is your film industry on Call of Duty (a series which does indeed make a brief cameo here): rubbish propaganda raised on a diet of rubbish propaganda. In this world they might as well be killing civilians with abandon as well, there is no practical difference because the massively xenophobic brush it uses to paint with does not allow for the audience to see any civility or possibility of understanding.

As with its approach to interventionism, it loves the idea of violence, but hates the idea that there could be any adverse results from that violence. A thousand bad guys down is fun, they explode into cool bits on camera, our weapons are bigger and now they know not to fuck with America; one American gets scratched and it’s serious. He had a family, guys. He was a real person. He would have never killed any civilian, please stop asking what our definition of 'civilian' is.

The intelligence guys, the film repeatedly suggests, did not do their job properly. It goes further, insinuating they were fundamentally incapable of doing their job properly, separated as they are both physically and philosophically from the warrior wisdom of the titular secret soldiers who are nearly always correct, but rarely listened to. Visually this is presented in an incredible way: the int guys are out of shape, or if they’re in-shape then they are too suspiciously well-groomed, too immediately and identifiably effete to be one of the tough rugged operators. Our guys work out, they stay sharp, they’ve got like a hundred kids for some reason, they’ve got beards. In one scene, the CIA station chief shouts at one of them to stop working out (shirtless, obviously) because he’s annoyed by it! Every event in the film is broken down via this internal US conflict, the escalating series of disasters only halted or triaged when the warrior men are grudgingly given control by the flabby and unprepared CIA.

Buff Office Jim will return in..... that one fucking stupid CIA show he did

The climax of the film inside the CIA annex is presented as a heroic last stand against the mindless savage hordes, but it even sort of fails the heroic last stand test by neither being particularly heroic, nor a last stand? 

They leave with two or three on-camera American deaths, they blow apart hundreds of Libyans, our heroes mostly get to go back to their families in peace and our anonymised atomised assailants are dead for absolutely zero reason. We see shots of grieving, veiled women who go to the bodies of their families and friends in the daylight, but again I have to wonder why. What is the point in providing this tiny glimpse of humanity when the rest of the runtime has been spent blowing them up? Libya doesn't matter, the Libyans don't matter, what they were fighting for doesn’t matter - they were props to knock over or bugs to squash, and we get to the end of the film without it ever having the teeth or the guts to really talk about the events as anything more than a series of things-that-happened. We are divorced from any kind of empathy for the non-Americans in the film (and indeed we are so divorced from Libya as a setting that it might as well take place in space), yet in-between sick 360 frag montages we get some self reflection that war has a cost for both sides?

It is the core issue of 13 Hours: this is a film that has a hard commitment to half-assing it. It doesn’t ever seem to want to say anything without doubling back and making sure we understand that the opposite could be true or that there could be shades of grey here or we might possibly be wrong who knows. CIA bad but CIA maybe also good; war bad but war also kinda cool. The film is blind, and is casting around wildly for someone to blame and its greatest failure as a mythmaking tool is failing to find that special someone. It can never land the plane because it never commits to a good old fashioned pillory, so it just stumbles around second-guessing itself as the idea of Benghazi bounces around its incoherent political sphere making it angrier and angrier. Angry at what? A general... broad meaningless sense that an injustice has been done somewhere to Americans that hasn't been sufficiently restituted, in the opinion of the filmmaker?  

Instead of finding a point it ends up just shrugging its shoulders and says, a direct quote, “Your country has got to figure this shit out Ahmal.” Fuck off! Why are the secret soldiers IN THE COUNTRY what are you guys DOING HERE did the state dept. have ANYTHING to do with the CURRENT UNREST!

None of the events here were good, the film says, but to condemn any of them would require wrestling with what happened in Libya and why it happened - which this film cannot do because, again, it fundamentally agrees with the violence enacted by the US govt up to the exact point where an American is harmed in response. It is close to a perfect post-Iraq-regret slice of US propaganda - a loud, confident mess that doesn’t have the bravery to point at any issues directly or take any responsibility for the grotesque state of the world it depicts.

We love and support our troops, but we’re really not sure what they’re doing, or why, or even where. 

Also the secret soldiers of Benghazi - CIA contractors!! Isn’t that insane? “Oh they were probably marines or something” nope! They were ex-military guys doing contracting work!!