Observed

Dakota L. Meyer was there. The Kentucky native was in the middle of the death-defying chaos and carnage of Sept. 8, 2009. Yet, Sargeant Meyer may be the least reliable source of the facts or truth of what happened during the Battle of Ganjgal.

What happened? can be a dangerous question.  For example…

• Criminal defense attorneys depend on their ability to poke holes in our hazy “eyewitness” recollections.
• Polemicist and filmmaker Errol Morris has created a entire genre out of casting doubt on what images really depict.
• Stieg Larsson used interpretation of an old newspaper photo as the key MacGuffin in his crime-solving novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

And, now, there’s Sgt. Dakota L. Meyer, USMC (ret.), and what happened Sept. 8, 2009, near the village of Ganjgal, Afghanistan.  That’s when and where Meyer was a 21-year-old Marine corporal serving as a scout-sniper with Embedded Training Team 2-8.

The clear consensus is that Meyer earned the Medal of Honor that day.  Accounts of what he actually did, however, vary…despite the testimony of several eyewitnesses and the rigorous review and vetting by the Marine Corps and others.

A McClatchy Newspapers correspondent embedded with Meyer’s unit, for example, has agreed that the young Marine richly deserves the Medal of Honor.  Nevertheless, in a Dec. 14, 2011, story based on the reporter’s findings, the paper declared that the official account of Meyer’s actions was “marred by errors and inconsistencies, ascribe actions to Meyer that are unverified or didn’t happen and create precise, almost novelistic detail out of the jumbled and contradictory recollections of the Marines, soldiers and pilots engaged in battle.”

So, once again, I am reminded of the fog of war.  The phrase — coined by 18th-century Prussian soldier and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz and popularized by Robert McNamara in Morris’s 2003 documentary — most likely captures Dakota Meyer’s frame of mind that fateful day…and since.

The concept of the fog of war helps explain the difficulty we humans have in discerning either facts or truth, especially under stressful circumstances.  And always will.

What could ensure a more accurate portrayal of What Happened than having someone there?  Someone who was there and felt what it was like to be there.

That’s what I read when I learned this morning that the United States Marine Corps has an artist in its ranks, a painter deployed to capture combat scenes.  “We have somebody who was there who can tell the story,” according to Col. Robert Oltman, USMC, referring to Sgt. Kristopher J. Battles, the lone remaining Marine combat artist.

Why not photography?  I’ll let the New York Times answer that one. (more…)

That’s what Gen. James N. Mattis, USMC, said, according to an article in this morning’s New York Times.   He’s the Joint Forces commander in Afghanistan and was speaking earlier this month at a military conference in North Carolina.

I agree.  Less is more.