Editor’s Note: The following post is sponsored by our partner, Paramount Pictures. 

Here at NR, one of the better essays on heroes was written in 1998 by the late British writer, George MacDonald Fraser (the author of the acclaimed “Flashman” series). Actually, the title of his piece was “A Remembrance of Heroes Past.” Simply, Fraser believed, with exceptions, “this is not a heroic age.”

He wrote:

I was a child of empire, so my heroes were mostly people like Drake and Livingstone, Nelson and Kit Carson, Joan of Arc and Robert Bruce, Hereward and Harriet Tubman, the defenders of Rorke’s Drift and the Alamo, the Light Brigade, my own Highland ancestors, and those almost-forgotten fliers of the Great War—Bishop, Ball, Rickenbacker, McCudden, and others. Service as a foot-soldier in Burma in the Second World War did not alter my views, for the men of the XIVth Army seemed to be cut from the same cloth as my boyhood heroes. They were men of action who prized the same old-fashioned virtues, judged matters (more or less) by the same standards, shared the same hopes for themselves and their country, and had the same unspoken notions of loyalty and personal honor. But like my heroes of old, while grateful tribute is paid to them on anniversaries, they and their values belong to the past.

Agreed, maybe: as long as the past includes September 11, 2012 in Benghazi.

My colleague, Stephen Miller, has written a terrific review of 13 Hours. Read it. It may be the kind of review Fraser would have written. Had he seen it (I was fortunate to join with Stephen at a screening right after Christmas) he would have grimaced, but approved: a small band of men, left to their own devices, facing overwhelming odds, improvising, risking, risking again, prevailing, being tested, enduring. And his approval would have been right, because the six principle figures — a very real band of brothers — who fought through the violent Libyan night not were an echo of an age past, but a living (and dying) embodiment. Real heroes, in no less a sense than were the men at Rorke’s Drift. Heroes present.

This movie is awesome. Not in the valley-girl sense, but in the actual sense. Because what happened that night in Benghazi, in the scope of the relentless battle, and in courageous battling by these six America “secret soldiers,” were indeed awesome things. Heroic things. I’ve seen it, and can’t wait to see it again, with my friends, and my sons. Until then, get a taste of what #AHeroIs with the trailer: