Most of the milbloggers and others who were calling Beauchamp a liar, as far I could tell, (and including me) weren't getting the "lie" vibes from the particular events so much as the context of them. I'd expect a morbid sense of humor. I don't figure a soldier never ran over a dog. There's a reason that there is specifically a rule against taking human trophies. And the story of the scarred woman was much easier (and I made that argument at least once) if it happened on the way *to* Iraq at a place where most people were transients. It's easier to be cruel to strangers.

Good writing tends to humanize soldiers, no matter how painfully. This might have been skillfully written, but in the end those getting "lie" vibes weren't getting them because they thought soldiers were saints. It was because they saw what the defenders of Shock Troops saw, which was proof that soldiers aren't human anymore, that this is how they all react, not because they are young or afraid or letting off some tension with gallows humor or some typical adolescent cruelty, but that their humanity had been stripped away.

The subtext was a lie.

The cost of war is enormous and I know more than one "burned" vet who still struggles five, ten, or more years after the fact. They aren't less human. They're more human if anything, more aware of human capacity for good and evil.

Some people would like to think they're numb to "human" anymore. And those people were blogging great emotional defenses of the ultimate truth of Shock Troops and Scott Thomas.

And it wasn't because they cared about the dog.