"Shock Troops" Fact-Checked, For Real This Time

Remember this from this weekend?

Jack Kelly "fact-checked" a New Republic diary piece by Scott Thomas Beauchamp called "Shock Troops." My deconstruction of Jack Kelly is here, by the way. Jack characterized The New Republic piece this way:

But the issue is not whether Pvt. Beauchamp is a soldier. It's whether he's telling the truth or not. And his story stinks to high heaven. No one else at the base ever seems to have a seen a woman who fits the description of the woman in the chow hall. No mass graves have been discovered during the time Pvt. Beauchamp has been at FOB Falcon. It is physically impossible for the driver of a Bradley to see a dog to the immediate right of his vehicle.

Angular grammar aside, Jack's pretty much put it as plainly as possible: it's all a lie.

Too bad the facts say otherwise. Here's what was posted today at the New Republic.

All of Beauchamp's essays were fact-checked before publication. We checked the plausibility of details with experts, contacted a corroborating witness, and pressed the author for further details. But publishing a first-person essay from a war zone requires a measure of faith in the writer. Given what we knew of Beauchamp, personally and professionally, we credited his report. After questions were raised about the veracity of his essay, TNR extensively re-reported Beauchamp's account.

The account was of three separate incidents; the scarred woman in the mess hall, the digging up of the childrens' bones, and the Bradley Assault Vehicle being used to kill dogs. In their re-check, The New Republic found that all of Beauchamp's facts were correct. Except for one:

The recollections of these three soldiers differ from Beauchamp's on one significant detail (the only fact in the piece that we have determined to be inaccurate): They say the conversation occurred at Camp Buehring, in Kuwait, prior to the unit's arrival in Iraq. When presented with this important discrepancy, Beauchamp acknowledged his error. We sincerely regret this mistake.

So Beauchamp was wrong in where the conversation about the scarred woman occurred, not that it occurred. But still, a mistake's a mistake.

On the bones:

[T]wo witnesses have corroborated Beauchamp's account. One wrote in an e-mail: "I can wholeheartedly verify the finding of the bones; U.S. troops (in my unit) discovered human remains in the manner described in 'Shock Troopers.' [sic] ... [We] did not report it; there was no need to. The bodies weren't freshly killed and thus the crime hadn't been committed while we were in control of the sector of operations." On the phone, this soldier later told us that he had witnessed another soldier wearing the skull fragment just as Beauchamp recounted: "It fit like a yarmulke," he said. A forensic anthropologist confirmed to us that it is possible for tufts of hair to be attached to a long-buried fragment of a human skull, as described in the piece.

And finally the Bradley:

[O]ne soldier who witnessed the incident described by Beauchamp, wrote in an e-mail: "How you do this (I've seen it done more than once) is, when you approach the dog in question, suddenly lurch the Bradley on the opposite side of the road the dog is on. The rear-end of the vehicle will then swing TOWARD the animal, scaring it into running out into the road. If it works, the dog is running into the center of the road as the driver swings his yoke back around the other way, and the dog becomes a chalk outline." TNR contacted the manufacturer of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle System, where a spokesman confirmed that the vehicle is as maneuverable as Beauchamp described. [emphasis added]

Disgusting, but true. On that last incident, Jack Kelly was on Tucker Carlson's show on MSNBC and here's what he said about it:

It‘s physically impossible. The driver‘s hatch on a Bradley is on the left-hand side. Between it and the right-hand side of the Bradley, there is the cooling vent for the engine and it rises above the driver‘s hatch. The driver can‘t see anything to the immediate right of his vehicle.

He may be absolutely right about the hatch and the cooling vent, but he's also absolutely wrong about it being "physically impossible." There was a witness who saw it, remember?

Jack needs to do a better job on research.