Because of the highly politicized swirl around ‘what happened in Benghazi’, I expected that a good portion of Mitchell Zuckoff’s narrative would be rooted in Washington.
It is not. Instead, the author works with the surviving members of the Annex Security Team to provide a blow-by-blow account of how the events went down, along with significant and what appears to this reader to be highly responsible interpretation of their meaning in the moment.
Although one can discern a certain casual lethargy ‘back home’, the only person who comes in for consistent derision is ‘Bob’, the on-location CIA base chief who for reasons highly related to his ongoing cellphone conversations would not allow the Annex Security Team to do its belligerent job as soon as the lightly secured U.S. Diplomatic Base in Benghazi—within earshot just a short distance away—was breached with lethal intent.
That incursion eventually spread to the team’s home-base Annex itself, leaving additional American casualties, bitterness, and a lot of unexplained delay in its wake. Zuckoff wields an exceptionally concise and attentive pen, the result being that this book is likely the clearest widely available accounting of ‘Benghazi’ to be had.
Readers who come to it with concerns that are geopolitical, US-political, historical, diplomatic, or tactical will all find 13 HOURS a valuable source and resource.
Sadly, real people—those who loved and were loved by the diplomats and warriors who fell in those hours—lack the luxury of laying this fine book aside as simply a good read. So, as we read, we remember.
Canter Bridge 
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