I take your thoughts seriously, and so I'm not willing to blithely assume that I didn't get carried away in that discussion and become one of the assholes without a clue. I'd like to interpret your response in a reassuring way, but I can't be sure.

But Real Life does take precedence, so I guess we must add this to that list of things that you and I are going to discuss "someday".

I can well understand that this is a sensitive subject, and I wouldn't presume to agree that you're being oversensitive. In fact, that sensitivity, shared with so many other vets, seems to me a good argument for seeing if we can't heal some old wounds...if those awful tales from 3-4 decades ago can legitimately be debunked.

A "revisionist history" isn't necessarily a false history; sometimes you have to revise accepted history to get closer to the truth of what really happened. I think this may be one of those cases--"everyone knows" what happened, except that a search for hard evidence comes up oddly empty-handed. Maybe what we all know is analogous to an implanted memory.