Friendly Fire Notebook

Ed Rasimus wrote:

On 23 Apr 2004 21:57:13 GMT, (BUFDRVR) wrote:

I think if you review your psych books you'll find that traumatic
experiences (near-death events) can either result in partial
amnesia--blanking of the unpleasantness; or at the opposite extreme,
near photographic recollection.

However, according to numerous psychologists (highlighted recently), chances
are much greater that you will not accurately recall information that occured
under stress. This has been highlighted recently in light of eyewitnesses to
crimes who have been used to put the wrong person in jail. I'm not a big psyche
guy, but I do watch Dateline

And, I stayed last night in a Holiday Inn Express. Seriously, the
eyewitnesses to crimes comparison isn't relevant with regard to the
recollection of details by an experienced combat operator. Certainly
on the first trip or so there might be some elements of "buck fever"
but the level of efficiency goes up and the tendency for tunnel
vision goes down over multiple exposures.

Oh, damn. Here I've been unable to reply for almost a week, and the discussion has
moved on so far, with so much back and forth, that there's no way I can ever get
back in sync with the rest of you if I go back and reply to old posts replying to my
old posts. My apologies to all who I haven't replied to (You, John, and anyone
else). I hate it when that happens.

I will say that personal perceptions are just that, and while training and
experience can influence their accuracy, so does an individual's biases and
outlook. "Rashomon" applies. There's a reason that accident investigators want to
see the recorded and physical data instead of relying on eyewitness accounts. The
latter are almost always wrong, wholly or partially so, no matter how experienced
the witnesses are. Kind of like when they installed gun cameras in fighters; they
were finally able to compare reported results as to target type, range, angle,
effects etc., with those captured on film; only the latter could be objective.

If eyewitness accounts were considered accurate, there would be little reason for
the elaborate recording devices found in modern combat a/c. Only when you have a
large number of independent accounts in essential agreement, FROM ALL SIDES, with
no opportunity for the witnesses to be influenced by other people's accounts prior
to giving their own, can you assume accuracy. Even then it should be considered
unverified if you lack direct hard evidence of the event. Once you add in the
further effects of time and outside influences on memory, the accuracy degrades even
further.

The one constant I've found when trying to correlate accounts of the exact same
occurrence is that if two accounts agree completely in all essential details, one of
them was based on the other. I could, for example, give you both Steve Ritchie and
Chuck DeBellevue's accounts of the same double kill mission (Paula 01, 8 July 1972),
with the two men separated by six feet or less; even so, their recollections of the
order of events, colors, spatial relationships etc. differ slightly, and the
accounts of each man change slightly depending on the audience and the passage of
time, no doubt influenced by hundreds of tellings, and hearing each other tell the
story. And that doesn't even get into the accounts of the 3 other U.S. crews
directly involved, or those of the Vietnamese side, etc.

I've heard some of the radio tape of Cunnigham/Driscoll's 10 May triple MiG kill
mission, as well as read their accounts. When it comes to timing of events, who
said what when, etc., the tape's 'memory' is completely accurate, the men's
perceptions and memories are of lesser accuracy. Why should this be a surprise?

OTOH, when I read Keith Rosenkranz' book "Vipers in the Storm", where he gives exact
times, radio calls, altitudes etc., I'm going to put the highest accuracy as far as
those items are concerned, because he had copies of his mission HUD tapes and used
them when writing the book; if you go to his website you can watch and listen to the
tapes yourself. Here's one from the big attack on the nuclear complex at Osirak:

http://www.vipersinthestorm.com/html/chapter_24.html

But anything that isn't on those tapes and which he didn't personally experience and
have 'non-volatile' evidence of, gets a much lower reliability rating pending
similar confirmation.

Guy