Two or three recent articles in which military vets have challenged The Hurt Locker‘s accuracy have been counter-balanced to some extent by a 2.28 ABC News article — co-authored by Martha Raddatz, Richard Coolidge and Joel Siegel — that quotes two former bomb-deactivation specialists. Their view is that certain events depicted in the film are actually fairly dead-on.

Marine Tim Colomer, who de-activated “more than 150 bombs in Iraq” as a Marine explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) technician in 2006 and ’07, says that The Hurt Locker “took me back to Iraq almost immediately…it was tantamount to being there.” And Marine Staff Sgt. Gabriel Burkman, wounded twice during his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, says that a scene criticized by some vets — i.e., Jeremy Renner‘s Sgt. James removing his bomb suit before a defusing — is grounded in reality. “Sometimes the bomb suit is not applicable,” he says, “and some team leaders won’t use it.”

Colomer “says the movie takes some ‘artistic license,’ but he calls the bomb scenes realistic — and acknowledges that he took off his bomb suit once in a while, just like Renner’s character. ‘You are so slowed down in that bomb suit, especially if you’re getting shot at or there’s indirect fire — you can’t afford to be that slow,’ he says.”

Earlier Hurt Locker military-critique articles have struck some observers as curiously timed and most likely indicative of a take-down strategy on someone’s part.