A traumatic memory that has been dissociated can be partially reassembled by collecting the testimonies of others who were present, treating their recollections as evidence to rebuild one's own missing experience. The narrator has no direct access to what he did; he interviews fellow soldiers and witnesses, piecing together a self he cannot remember from the outside in.
The mind can manufacture a vivid, specific false image to occupy the place of an unbearable real event, and the fabricated scene feels fully genuine until it is checked against external facts. The narrator's recurring vision of rising naked from the sea off Beirut turns out to be a screen memory, a constructed stand-in for his proximity to the massacre.
During the 1982 Lebanon War, an Israeli soldier named Frenkel, under heavy fire on a Beirut street plastered with posters of the assassinated Bashir Gemayel, steps into the open and empties his rifle in sweeping circular motions as if dancing a waltz. The image captures combat euphoria and disassociation: a man performing grace inside lethal chaos.
Soldiers who do not themselves commit a killing can still be causally complicit by providing the conditions that let others do it, and that complicity registers later as guilt even without direct action. The narrator fired flares over Sabra and Shatila that lit the camps for the militia carrying out the massacre, making him a facilitator rather than a perpetrator.