Problems reverting (includes reverting a merge)

["jenny w" <veganjenny@gmail.com>]

Someone made a few commits that I'm trying to revert. There are three
commits in a row, the middle of which is a merge. There are presently
no commits following the ones that we want to revert.

I tried git revert on the latest commit and that worked fine.

The second latest commit was a merge, so I had to use the -m switch.
I'm not exactly sure what the parent-number refers to, so I created a
separate branch to try things out. Since it expects I a number, I
started from 1. That was kind of a disaster, so I deleted my branch
and made another off of master, and then tried doing the same command
with -m 2. This worked fine.  However ...

I then tried to revert the next commit. This said there's a conflict.
Since there are no other commits after the ones I'm trying to revert,
this makes me think I'm doing something wrong ... shouldn't it just be
able to roll back?

What I'd really like to do is just zap the last 3 commits ... is there
another way to just make things the way they were before these patches
were applied?

Any help with any of the above would be greatly appreciated!