Evan and Jack are joined by Aaron and Carlee from the Hit Factory podcast to discuss Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, the 2016 film that sent John Krasinski off on an action hero deployment from which he has yet to return. The story of a group of GRS security contractors hired to protect US diplomats and CIA operatives in Benghazi, two of whom were killed in an insurgent attack on September 11, 2012, Bay's 13 Hours is, like many of our films, a tall tale only partially based in the dirty truth. Jack, Evan, Aaron and Carlee look at how GWOT cinema refashions the warfighters of the post-9/11 era into modern day working class heroes, hard men doing hard jobs that few understand, struggling against a thickheaded bureaucracy and lacking union protection. Bay's talents shine in the economy of action and quick characterizations, but his purposeful lack of context elides the Punisher culture politics that arose from Obama-era deployments abroad and pervaded the real-world fallout from Benghazi.

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Schlock and Awe is back. Evan and Jack are home from the wars (their day jobs) with a look at Ang Lee’s 2016 adaptation of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a coming-of-age movie set during one heady day at the Dallas Cowboys stadium, as an army unit is pulled out of their deployment to Iraq to do a propaganda tour in order to support a flagging occupation. Joining us is podcaster, writer and Army veteran Nate Bethea, who shared his experiences managing large numbers of 19 year old Army infantrymen. The lads dive in to a muddled, chaotic film that succeeds as much as it fails, and does both in spectacular fashion, encapsulating some of the most surreal moments of the Global War on Terror and a B-plot love triangle between a brother, a sister, and a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

The boys are joined by writer Séamus Malekafzali, who's too young to remember 9/11 but old enough to stand face-to-face with director Peter Berg and challenge him to a blinking contest. Séamus, Evan and Jack take on Lone Survivor, Berg's 2013 sufferpalooza, which heavily fictionalizes a real-life and extremely unsuccessful Navy SEAL counterterrorism raid in Afghanistan in 2005. The boys examine Berg's Americana fetish, how the Friday Night Lights creator valorizes combat as a form of extreme sports, and the way Lone Survivor — like many a GWOT film — lies about what happened to create false stakes for its characters.