We discovered from doing the history of his battalion that they landed on Utah Beach. So what I tried to do is have conversations with Tommy, correct his misconceptions, and try to demonstrate those in the story without over-burdening the story with these corrections and not fictionalize the story. It is an ethical issue, it is an aesthetical issue. Clark said it is important to remember that memory can be fallible. Memory is fiction.
Memory is fiction.
We think of that in a moral way when we are trying to reconstruct a scene from the past. But we tend not to think of it when we are asking these Floridians what happened to you when you went into the voting booth. We are getting fictionalized versions of reality. He was also reassured by Tommy's memory at times. Tommy did tell me he was an Irishman, he had a license to blarney, and I went through the Internet and found the people in his battalion and they confirmed to me most of what he was saying.