You said — “Quit believing them.”
Including Jessica Lynch and the parents of Pat Tillman?
What about Tillman's parents? The Army confirmed that he was killed in combat. Within a couple of weeks it was announced that the Army was investigating the circumstances. Yah, so? Then the Army released their report that he'd been killed by our side. Unfortunate, and it sucks, but it doesn't change much. it doesn't change his service any.
I haven't seen where we, or Tillman's parents, were told some different Army-fabricated narrative before the facts were known. The media might have embellished things a little bit, but none of that came from the Army.
If there were individual Rangers that were there and had certain facts of what happened to Tillman, it would have been *wildly* inappropriate for them to talk directly to the media or Tillman's family before an Army investigation was completed.
Different people often witness events in very different ways. The whole story needs to be explored before one person's impressions prejudice the popular understanding. Imagine if some soldier believed it was some fact set with some gruesome details, perhaps even that it was a suicide or something-- and he turned out to be wrong-- but had already tortured the minds of the family with the wrong information. That would be wrong.
In neither story was "the truth" something that anybody in the Army sat on for any amount of time. There were reports. Some of the reports were wrong, some of them were right. The Army investigated and in a matter of a couple of weeks in each case publicly released a report that told the truth.
If you want to point fingers at people coloring the story to fit their own plot outline, look to the media. They had these red-meat stories that they really wanted to tell. So they told them before they really knew anything.