“I hope I don't get killed by the studio for giving too much away,” Sorkin said, “but this entire movie is going to be three scenes, and three scenes only, that all take place in real time.”

Real time, Sorkin said, "is when a half hour for you in the audience is the same as a half hour for the character on the screen. There will be no time cuts. Each of these three scenes is going to take place before a product launch—backstage before a product launch. The first one being the Mac, the second one being NeXT (after he had left Apple), and the third one being the iPod."

Jobs’s launch of the Macintosh computer in 1984 effectively began Jobs’s meteoric climb; NeXT, in 1990, showed his efforts to begin anew after leaving the company he founded, and in 2001 the iPod singlehandedly changed the way that audiences consume media. 

Haider Khairallah is one of those translators. He joined Johnson at the summit to talk about his own experience in Iraq, describing how he got the job helping American soldiers: One day, he said, the troops showed up on his street. "I said, 'How can I help you, gentlemen?' They laughed. I said, 'Why are you laughing?' They said, 'You're the first person to speak English.'"

Khairallah was serious about helping. He went with the soldiers that day as they cleared the town of bombs, serving as their translator. Then he joined the troops permanently, making $5 a day. "I had this dream to rebuild Iraq. So this is where I can fit, rebuilding my country," he said. He described one night when the soldiers came under attack and he pulled one of them to safety, losing his leg in the process.

"People look at me and say, 'Why did you do it?'" he said. "It's just a human reaction. You work every day with these guys, they become like brothers, family. That's how I felt, you know—he'll stick up for me, I'll stick up for him."

In a focused and thought-provoking conversation with ABC News correspondent John Donvan, Castner—who served as an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) officer from 1999 to 2007, including two years in Iraq—insisted that throughout his service he was just doing what he was trained to do. “If we call people in general service to others heroes, we let ourselves off the hook. ‘Well, heroes do something extraordinary!’ But if we saved that term, maybe it would ennoble us to do more.”

Castner told Donvan that when he first joined the military he had wanted to work as an astronaut. But when he discovered EOD, he said, “there was this incredible brotherhood I wanted to be part of. I knew if I succeeded … I would’ve done something really hard that I could be proud of.”

That brotherhood has suffered its share of casualties over the past decade of war; Castner referred to a memorial with the names of EOD officers who have died in the line of duty, and said that more names were added to that memorial last year than in any year since 1945.

Steve Jobs, on the other hand, will make his debut in another Sorkin project, a film whose plot he revealed on Thursday: three real-time scenes about the creation of the Mac; Jobs’s following company, NeXT; and the iPod. Sorkin said he’ll consider the project a success if he can make people remember the iconic Mac ad: "Here's to the crazy ones."

"If I can live up to that ending ... I will have won,” said Sorkin.

Crumpton remembered one secret hero he had met during his time as a spy in Africa in the 1980s. The man, an African insurgent, came to the U.S. Embassy where Crumpton was serving undercover as a U.S. diplomat. Crumpton turned the young man into an asset, and he provided an immense amount of usable information. This is why, despite the huge amount of money spent on the technical aspects of the CIA, Crumpton says he “has a bias towards human intelligence.”

“What was remarkable about this source was his motivation,” said Crumpton. “We paid him a modest salary but he was really motivated by how he could help his people and he thought the U.S. was the route to that.”

Later Crumpton learned that the asset had been killed trying to cross a dangerous war zone in Africa. Crumpton said the man was an example of a hero that he knows the identity of—“but no one else will.”

"No American diplomat knew Libya better than Stevens did," said Crocker, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan over the past decade, pointing to the two years Stevens served as ambassador to the opposition in Libya before the death of Col. Muammar Gaddafi, one of the signature moments in the Arab Spring. “Chris was one of our very finest officers, fluent in Arabic. He knew the regions, and he knew the dangers.”

“It's very hard to be an ambassador behind the walls,” Albright said. She called Stevens, a career diplomat who worked at State when she was its first female secretary, “the kind of person we need to have…Chris wanted to get out from behind the walls and represent the U.S. in difficult places—to be the eyes and ears of the president and the American people.”

On Thursday, Greitens joined thee other military veterans onstage at Newsweek and The Daily Beast's Hero Summit in Washington, D.C., to talk about creative ways to give soldiers a second act.

Tawanda "Tee" Hanible, a gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps, was among them. Once a rebellious teen, she joined the Marines in a desk job, then later married and went to Iraq as a young mother. She's now the founder of Operation Heroes Connect, which links veterans with at-risk kids. 

She described one particularly difficult kid who was paired with a staff sergeant. "He stuck with this kid from day one," she said of the sergeant, who became a real mentor. "He just continued to be on his side." The boy got his GED and is joining the Army, she said—a win for both.

Lobello is one of thousands of military veterans who wrestle with the psychological wounds of war. During a panel discussion at Newsweek & The Daily Beast's Hero Summit on Thursday, William Nash, a combat therapist who served in Iraq, told the audience that the stress soldiers experience stems from what they feel is a failure to live up to deeply held values, to bring back fellow injured soldiers, and to cope with survivor’s guilt.

Nash told moderator Wolf Blitzer, CNN lead political anchor, that many warriors feel they let their units down. "They failed to live up to deeply held values and ideals," Nash said, which leads to "survivor guilt, moral injury, and feeling betrayed by leaders sometimes."

Nash added that there is a "hierarchy of shame" in the military in which those who were not wounded or shot at are deemed less worthy.

“I will bet my bottom dollar that Putin will not last six years,” Kasparov said on Thursday during Newsweek & The Daily Beast’s Hero Summit in Washington. But he cautioned something worse could replace the current Russian leader if the opposition does not present a credible alternative to the Russian people. “I’m not telling you it will be good,” he cautioned.

Earlier this year, Putin won Russian presidential elections despite earlier pledges not to seek the office. When President Obama came into office, the White House reached out to Dmitry Medvedev, the new Russian president, as Putin took a lower profile role as prime minister. This March, the two leaders switched places, securing another term for Putin’s party, United Russia.

Putin’s decision to run again for office reawakened a protest movement in Moscow and the emergence of a new generation of activists like the punk band Pussy Riot, which would perform impromptu concerts in public landmarks like Russia’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The new tactic made the group’s members a target of the police. They were arrested in March and their trial on charges of religious hatred and hooliganism began in July. Kasparov protested the trials and was beaten and arrested in August for protesting the pending guilty verdict.

Rascon, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Mexico, joined the army as a medic when he was 17. In 1966, he was working as a medic with his platoon in the Long Khanh Province of Vietnam when his unit came under attack. As soon as men became injured, Rascon—nicknamed “Doc” Rascon by his friends—jumped into medic mode, risking his life in the line of fire to revive his friends and at times throwing himself in front of hand grenades in order to shelter them.

“You’re afraid,” Rascon said of the attack. “Anyone who says you aren’t afraid, something is wrong with them.”

Rascon was shot from the hip through his shoulder and hit by hand grenades over four times, once directly to his face. “I thought I was going to die, I didn’t know how much face wounds bled,” he said.