For its own ends? Hardly. The initial story 1) came out before many facts were known, and 2) was tailored so the victim was portrayed in an inaccurately positive light. No family wants to hear about how their very junior soldier son did something stupid and got himself creamed by friendly fire. If, instead, you tweak the story so that he was more senior, and leading brilliantly and courageously, the family is less pained about the loss. The Army had nothing to gain or lose either way. Telling the story one way or the other made no difference to the massive bureaucracy. Cynicism would have been telling it as friendly fire and a stupid mistake, and not caring about how badly the family grieved over that truth.
(sigh) I've just seen so many cases where the Navy has gone absolutely overboard to beat people up over stupid mistakes that I can't manage to believe that the Army is really any different. I mean, one of the boats missed test depth by a few feet, and the CO, XO, and COB were all relieved of their duties immediately on their return to port. Remember the SFO, the one that hit the uncharted seamount? After months of hunting, someone discovered that there was, in fact, a chart somewhere that might have had that seamount on it -- so the CO was sent home in shame. Remember the Japanese fishing vessel sunk by a surfacing submarine? Yup, that CO got fired too.
But we'll focus on a case where the Army told a more polite version of the story to a grieving family, and use that to extend into the idea that the Army is full of liars, and can't be trusted to ever do the right thing, and assume that all soldiers everywhere are working in their own personal best interests and blah blah blah. It just begins to sound like the same verbal diahrea after a while, Stu, except your logic is worse this time.
