During the second World War an American bomber was struck by enemy fire over the English Channel. The gunner was hit. The pilot, rather than saving his own life by parachuting out, decided to stay with his young colleague as the plane plunged to the sea.
As the man who told the story put it at the annual convention of the Congressional Medal of Honour Society in New York in 1983: "He took the boy's hand and said, `Never mind, son, we'll ride it down together.' Congressional Medal of Honour, posthumously awarded."
Americans like war stories. The ability to tell them was one of the greatest assets of two popular modern presidents, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, and the only asset of Bob Dole, whom Bill Clinton trounced in the 1996 election. Reagan, for instance, told the story three times of the pilot and the gunner going down together during his 1976 and 1980 presidential election campaigns and as president in 1983. He claimed, when questioned, that he actually remembered "reading a citation" recommending a medal for just such a heroic act while he was in the army.
The most stirring part of Dole's wretched presidential campaign, meanwhile, was the stuff about how, during the second World War, he received the terrible wound which left him without his right shoulder and with a paralysed right arm. The story he told was that he got this dreadful injury fighting to liberate the picturesque Italian village of Castel d'Aiano, near Bologna.
He was taken there to recuperate and developed a close bond with the local people. On numerous occasions, often with television crews in tow, he went back to the village. When he was nominated as the Republican candidate in 1996, the villagers held a parade with tanks and parachutists, and erected a plaque on the very spot where he was wounded.
Reagan's story, and his personal memory, were of course pure fictions. What he was really remembering was a 1944 movie, Wing And A Prayer, in which the scene had unfolded much as he described, leading up to the memorable line "We'll take this ride together." Told that the Medal of Honour citations for the war recorded no such incident, Reagan's spokesman said: "If you tell the same story five times, it's true."
Dole's wounds, on the other hand, were all too real. But he didn't get them in picturesque Castel d'Aiano. The village was liberated more than a month before his injury. The military hospital where he recuperated was 35 miles away.
His only connection with the place was that, on a trip in 1962, he had stopped in Castel d'Aiano to ask for directions. This awkward truth didn't stop TV network after TV network, with the assistance of Dole's campaign, from running the story during the 1996 election.
But there is a bigger, bolder war story lodged in the collective consciousness of modern America. It is the story that the US stood up to the evil dictator Saddam Hussein, whupped his behind in Operation Desert Storm and will do so again soon. Like Reagan's tale of courageous comradeship or Dole's liberation of an idyllic hamlet in the Apennine Mountains, it has the texture of legend. It really ought to be true. But it isn't.
Saddam Hussein has been defying the international community, human rights conventions and plain humanity for a very long time. The issue behind the current crisis - his possession of, and willingness to use, weapons of mass destruction - was underlined in the starkest terms at least a decade ago. In 1988 and 1989 he used chemical weapons, including nerve gases, with horrific effects, on the civilian Kurdish population in Iraq, killing men, women and children.
The United States, and the rest of the international community, more or less ignored these atrocities. The US administration decided that there was no reason to change its policy of supporting Iraq. A National Security directive to that effect was issued in October 1989.
In January 1990 President George Bush signed an executive order certifying that to halt American loan guarantees to Saddam Hussein, then amounting to nearly $3 billion, would not be "in the national interest of the United States". The rest of the West, including, of course, Ireland, which was then using public funds to underwrite the supply of beef to the Iraqi army, followed the same path. Is it any wonder that Saddam simply doesn't believe the international community has really serious moral objections to his possession of chemical and biological weapons?
AND, of course, even after Operation Desert Storm, the US and its allies made a conscious decision to keep Saddam in power. He was not, in a real sense, defeated. In a cold calculation of US interests, it was judged better to leave his disgusting regime in place than to upset the regional balance of power or to risk the possibility of a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad.
That decision has not been changed. In all the current sabre-rattling, what is most certainly not in prospect is the only thing that could possibly lead to a peaceful, unthreatening Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Nor is it even true that the action currently being contemplated by the US and Britain, air attacks on Iraqi targets, would teach Saddam a lesson. The idea that a dictator who has twice provoked wars by invading his neighbours could be "punished" by dropping bombs on his country is absurd.
War is his element. It is his political programme. He wears a military uniform most of the time because he is engaged in an endless violent conflict, principally against his own people. When he has subdued his internal enemies, he looks for external ones. He has to have them. Giving him what he needs isn't a punishment, it's a reward.
Yet to say all of this, or to point out the idiocy of the idea that the way to deal with a dreadful stockpile of deadly biological weapons is to drop bombs on them, is to miss the point. For if the US does go ahead and bomb Iraq, it will not be launching a military operation with rational and achievable objectives. Americans will be making up a war story.
Whatever actually happens, whether the bombs hit military targets or just kill innocent civilians, whether Saddam's hold on power is undermined or underpinned, will be no more relevant than the fact that Dole didn't actually fight in the village he was supposed to have liberated.
As the Nation magazine pointed out, Desert Storm offered the US television networks "an outside production company able to organise a well-produced, subsidised total event that could be channelled to the American public at, relatively speaking, bargain basement prices".
Already the networks are gearing up for the next well-produced, subsidised total event, live from Baghdad. The bomb drops will be surgical strikes. The evil dictator will have his ass kicked. The future presidential candidates will perform heroic deeds in picturesque places. The American heroes will receive the Congressional Medal of Honour, posthumously awarded.
Fintan O'Toole is temporarily based in New York