They’re old men now, one unable to dress himself without help, the other living with a transplanted heart. Old men with stories to tell and tailor for posterity, stories that might still bend history. When they were young men, they had choices to make, and those choices shaped what they said this week about an awful breach in American values.

John McCain was the impetuous one, though duty-bound by family to serve. He fought in the unpopular war, was shot down, captured by the enemy and tortured. Everything he knows about what coercion and pain do to the truth, he learned from personal experience in a cell in Vietnam.

Dick Cheney took a more calculated route. In and out of colleges, he dodged the war with five draft deferments; he said he “had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.” Early on, he learned how easy it was to evade responsibility.

This may be the last big fight of the two old men: a struggle over the accepted narrative of a time when a nation lost its way because of fear. It’s old news, you say. Torture again? Dog collars and waterboarding. Didn’t we see it all in “Zero Dark Thirty,” the film that implied — wrongly — that putting people in animal cages and stringing them up for days led to the break that caught the world’s most wanted terrorist?