I was not exempt from the chewing outs. I figured I was going to lose my job. I am now the sole technical manager survivor from last year's Gulf of Mexico management team. All the others have been demoted. This industry is a cruel business and hard on people.
Intent is impossible to determine and in some sense irrelevent to whether the account is fact.
I can conceive of situations where the author makes something up and it turns out to be fact. The only example I can think of is the eery similarity of a book written early in this century about an unsinkable boat named Titan, which struck an iceberg and sank, This book was clearly intended as fiction yet the Titanic almost fulfilled the account.