Yes, of course. See below.

I think you made my idea do, here, about how to define "the thing," pretty well. You are too literal in some parts of your effort, and not always precise: Robinson did not say Vietnam was the reconciliation of freedom and the state. When asked about combat, he responded "with a lecture" on that topic. The point is to characterize what combat is without actually talking about it. A dissociation, one close to the permanent fundamental dissociative requirement for behaving towards another human being as though she or her were not like oneself. You can write about it, but you have to perform the careful analytical reflection on correspondences without limiting yourself to those correspondences. This constitutes a parallel with the problem of, as Clifford Geertz famously put it, "tacking" back and forth between ethnography and cultural interpretation, between trying to record the results of seeing the world as "natives" or informants see it, and trying to grasp what, from an interpretive point of view, it means.