As a user new to Arma II without any experience in earlier Arma editions, I share a lot of the feelings of the original poster. I do have quite some experience in flight simulators, the usual tool there to learn from your errors is some way to review what you have doen, including what the enemy did. In flight simulators this ranges from full-blown ACMI simulation to "track" recording with at least the possibility to review your actions from another perspective later.
Up till now I have not seen anything like that for ARMA II; there is not even a message telling you who actually killed you. Am I missing something or is it simply not there? I would imagine that in real life military simulators the instructors also want to review missions with their students, so I would expect something like that also in ARMA.
