#12Strong

[VIDEO] On Tuesday I saw 12 Strong which is  dramatization about the first American response after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It's a real life story about a squad of special forces soldier who were the first in Afghanistan to fight Al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban. And Al Qaeda thanks to the events of this film suffered a major defeat at the hands of Afghan rebels against the Taliban and these special forces soldiers.

BTW, on Al Qaeda I just had to tweet this out upon seeing a few captions at the end of this film. I have it in my head that while Radical Islam/Islamic Fundamentalism isn't entirely dead as a violent force Al Qaeda is largely a dying force.

#12Strong so Al-Qaeda considers the battle they fought in that film to be the worst one they lost and then I realize....There’s still an Al-Qaeda?

— Levois J (@levois) January 31, 2018

All the same I wanted to compare this with a similar film 13 Hours directed by Michael Bay and released just about two years earlier. 12 Strong and 13 Hours are similar movies in different contexts.

12 Strong was America's first response to a very deadly terrorist attack on NYC and the Pentagon. 13 Hours involved the death of an American ambassador and violent attacks on US diplomatic staff and a CIA operation. While the men who were fighting this battle weren't active duty military at that time, they were former special forces soldiers who just so happen to be contractors to help protect the CIA operation.

Oh yeah, this was this Benghazi you might have heard about during the 2016 campaign. Resultantly 13 Hours is a drama about survival against the very violent attacks of rebel groups in Libya after the fall of Col. Qaddafi. This movie unfortunately depicted the deaths of four Americans.

With this movie in a very untrustworthy or unforgiving environment of Afghanistan these 12 American soldiers were successfully able to provide the first victories in the emerging War on Terror. And while many Afghan rebels died fighting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, none of those 12 American soldiers depicted in this film were killed.

Between 2001 to 2018 what's changed? Well we're still concerned about Islamic fundamentalism (which could be called Islamofascism, Radical Islam). There were some terrorist plots or actual acts of terrorism in NYC last year - a car running down people similar to what happened in London and an attempted suicide bombing at a train station. It's still unfortunately a concern even if America did essentially eliminate Al-Qaeda as a force.

While we may still be fighting this dangerous ideology the front seems to have gone from the many battlefields in the Middle East to the issue of immigration. The need for extreme vetting, the need to limit undocumented immigrats in America.

Thankfully we've yet to see another attack on America as seen as 2001. Hopefully we can keep it that way.

12 Strong is a movie I would recommend seeing.