Nazario says it never happened, others say it never happened, others have ramblings accounts, the accounts don’t jive, others make statements and then clam up, and some simply get lawyers.
This sounds like a serious case of PTSD to me.
Something hazy happens in combat. You talk about it later and add a storyline to it out of suppositions and snippets. You get macho bragging making it into a taller and taller tale. You tell the story a few times and fix it in your memory as something that might have happened this way. In retelling and rethinking, you begin to believe the story constructed you created to describe something that was so hazy in combat that you’re not sure what it was.
It’s now a pattern that loops in your brain and gets triggered by sights, sounds, smells.
And it never necessarily happened, even though it’s a story you tell and you maybe believe it sometimes, because you’ve told it and remembered it.
What is the truth in it? The truth in it is that they cleared so many houses and shot so many people while hyped in the adrenalyn that accompanies fear for your life that they have jumbled many accounts into something that never happened.
McDermott pointed out that a comment made by a combat veteran self-medicating himself with alcohol at a bar “15 to 20 years from now ... ends up in federal court.”