Iowahawk says he found the first draft of Franklin Foer’s latest article for the New Repubic on the Scott Beauchamp scandal, in a dumpster behind Marty Peretz’ townhouse.

I don’t believe him, though. Judging from the length, this would have filled more than one dumpster: Misty Watercolor Memories, of the Fog of War.

For months, our magazine has been subject to accusations that stories we published by an American soldier then serving in Iraq were fabricated. When these accusations first arose, we promised our readers a full account of our investigation. We spent the last four-and-a-half months re-reporting his stories. These are our findings, as far as you know.

When Michael Goldfarb, a blogger for The Weekly Standard, left me a message on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-July, I didn’t know him or his byline. And I certainly didn’t anticipate that his message would become the starting point for a controversy.

It was a unseasonably cool day, as I remember it; when I pushed the “message” button on my phone, a Meridian M3903 Digital, I distinctly remember being distracted by the “pekka-pekka” of raindrops against my office window as I listened to the message. At the time I guess I just remembered it was from some guy with a Jewish-sounding name, from the Weekly something-or-other, who wanted me to return his call, and I suppose I must have thought it was about my 401-K or magazine subscriptions or whatever. Also, like everyone else at TNR I was making plans for my annual 3-month vacation, which this year was a snorkling trip to Barbados, where I took some awesome photo you should really check out on my Flick page.

Turns out, though, this “Goldfarb” person was calling about a short experimental creative writing piece that appeared in the The New Republic the previous day titled “Shock Troops.” It appeared on the magazine’s back page, the out-of-the-way “Diarist” slot, next to the ads for the Vermont Poetry Review and Bose Wave radios (which pack an amazing sound for a small room system, which you really check out) , and anyway, it’s sort of this little personal-meditation inside-jokey filler thing we do. Frankly, I remember being surprised that somebody was anal enough to actually read the piece, because it was really there as kind of minor “throw away” content, like the tiny Sergio Aragones cartoons that used to appear in the margins of Mad magazine, and unrelated to the magazine’s beefier articles like “Capitol Insider,” or “Don Martin’s One Day At The Dentist’s Office.”

Anyhoo, “Shock Troops” bore the byline Scott Thomas, which we identified as a pseudonym for a soldier then serving in Iraq. Thomas described how war distorts moral judgments. To illustrate his point, he narrated three wacky anecdotes, In one, he and his comrades held down a burnt amputee at a chow hall and gave her a “Cleveland Steamer.” In another, he and comrades held pinata parties using exhumed Iraqi infant corpses. A final vignette described US soldiers holding “Fast And Furious” tank-drifting races through Iraqi puppy kennels.

For anyone familiar with the gritty realities of the fog of war, or the fog-of-war-related experimental independent film series on HBO, there was nothing unusual or controversial in the Diarist’s claims. Thus we were surprised when we learned that Goldfarb — from the comfortable sinecure of his cushy Weekly Standard cubicle — was actually calling to demand “proof” of this pseudonymous soldier’s stories. Could the Weekly Standard actually stoop so low as insinuate our brave, tragic, dog-squishing troops are liars?

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