"But he quickly found out, when the time came to write up the report for his superior, the precise adherence to the truth wasn't a strict requirement. In fact, his first detailed report of the event was turned back, he said, with the message, 'You can't write any of this. Change it.'"

When I was in Vietnam, I wrote an after-action report that was immediately classified at a very high level. Both LBJ and Nixon said there were no US troops in Cambodia, and who was I to contradict them? I couldn't re-write it and say I wasn't there, since the whole point of the patrol had been to see what was going on in that part of Cambodia; it was just made unavailable to everyone.

"In war, truth is the first casualty" -- Aeschylus