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.”
It’s scary because I know that story-telling gets done and not intentionally. It just sort of builds over time and retelling.
Take the football ranger hero, Pat Tillman. Go here for a story that is so common in that the storyline had to be rebuilt any number of times.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/25/MNGD7ETMNM1.DTL
How many of us believe that fellow Rangers intentionally killed Tillman? I hope none.
Therefore, the Rangers who had been firing at enemies thought Tillman was an enemy. Their initial report would have been, based on assumptions, that he’d been killed in contact with the enemy. There are now so many stories and retelling of stories that it’s really hard to determine what exactly happened.
The point is this: what story do the Rangers involved that day tell? How many stories do they tell?
There’s also the Marine SOC unit that has been charged with killing civilians and not killing civilians. See here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1805834/posts
What do they tell? What is the real truth?
Here’s the truth — If we’re at different points of an intersection, and 4 of us see the very same accident, we’re going to tell something different simply because we all had a different angle on it. If you put us together, we’re going to compare notes and gradually develop a storyline that tries to take all the different perspectives into account. And, so, in the end, the final storyline is different than the initial reports and none of them are able to be called, “what really happened.”
Nazario and crew were in combat. Enemies were in houses. Lots of different jumbled scenarios. Enemies were killed.
MOST TELLING of all to me is that the owners of the house came home and found nothing amiss. That doesn’t seem to indicate that the house was later blown up by artillery or bombs, does it? Why didn’t they report dried blood all over the place? You don’t shoot 4 people in the head and then, in the middle of a firefight for your lives, clean it up and carry out the bodies. If Marine mortuary folks later cleaned bodies out of houses, why is there no report of that area with 4 bodies removed?
“If you win you get prosecuted, if you lose you get dead.”
Nazario is right on.