I received a surprising amount of comments to my blog post soliciting feedback on the importance of accuracy. I am very grateful to everyone who commented. There were a lot of thoughtful and insightful comments.
The consensus seems to be that accuracy is important for the reader if it is a topic of which they have knowledge. Since the author has no idea what knowledge the reader has or does not have then it seems that accuracy is in fact, very important.
It was also noted that errors could be overlooked in a well written, engaging story. In the story that I had used as an example, the author had placed a marine gunny sergeant in the army rangers. The fact that the story was unreadable due to spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors made forgiving the author for the initial military mistake impossible.
In my stories, I will continue to make them as accurate as I can. I am sure I will make mistakes but I am trying not to rely on my memory and actually look things up. I am currently writing a story in which I wrote that the MC enlisted to become a 96C, Field Interrogator. That was the designation when I was assigned to the United States Army Intelligence Center and School (USAICS) at Fort Huachuca about a hundred years ago. Googling this, I discovered that at some point the 96C MOS was changed to 97E and has been changed once again to 35M Human Intelligence Collector. Presumably because Human Intelligence Collector sounds so much kindler and gentler than Field Interrogator.