I didn’t have time to read this Victor Davis Hanson essay when it first appeared on Friday in the National Review. But it’s a tour de force demonstration of what VDH does best, as he looks at John Kerry’s problems with his past through the prism of military history: The Fog of Battle.

Even in daytime fighters do not perceive anything; indeed, nobody knows anything more than what is going on right around himself.

So the fifth-century B.C. military historian Thucydides commented on the confusion of battle on the heights above Syracuse (413 B.C.), and, indirectly, on the inability of historians such as himself to sort out the conflicting accounts provided by veterans of all battles.

Fear, panic, noise, dust, motion, all the rare stimuli that so overwhelm the everyday senses, combine with the vagaries of memory both to inflate and to diminish what happens in those rare brief seconds when men’s lives are won or lost. Such are the usual burdens of military history, both ancient and modern. When investigating the death of my namesake on Okinawa, or reconstructing some of my father’s 39 B-29 missions, I was struck by the difficulty in reconciling all the oral remembrances of the combatants, both with one another and with supposedly “official” histories of the theater.

The commendable tact of Steven Ambrose’s popular oral histories of the American soldier lay in his diplomatic treatment of first-hand accounts that simply could not be reconciled with one another — or with other criteria, such as official histories and the unyielding facts of weather, machines, or topography.

The problem of reconstructing what happened at the battle of Salamis (480 B.C.) is not just the wide expanse of time that separates accounts in Aeschylus, Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus. Instead, the more fundamental problem is that the thousands of Athenians who rowed there and provided the primary sources of knowledge for these later chronicles almost immediately gave very different versions of what they saw and did.

The fog of memory does not mean that veterans intentionally fabricate or exaggerate — although at times, as humans, some do.