NBC News anchor Brian Williams on Wednesday admitted that he was not on a helicopter that hit with enemy fire during the Iraq invasion in 2003, a story he has told numerous times, including last week.
Williams blamed the error on the “fog of memory,” but as Stars and Stripes pointed out, the NBC anchor told a different story in 2007 than he did in 2015.
In a blog post on July 19, 2007 about General Wayne Downing, Williams recalled his experience aboard a helicopter during an RPG attack:
On one particular occasion, he talked me into going on a “day trip” with an Army Reserve Unit — a flotilla of four twin-rotor Chinook helicopters on a mission we couldn’t discuss. Each chopper carried a heavy section of a military bridge, flying slowly and at only 100 feet above the desert terrain.
Williams noted that a helicopter in front of his was hit:
Not long after Wayne’s warning, some men on the ground fired an RPG through the tail rotor of the chopper flying in front of ours. There was small arms fire. A chopper pilot took a bullet through the earlobe. All four choppers dropped their heavy loads and landed quickly and hard on the desert floor.
After Williams’ most recent account of the story, crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook told Stars and Stripes that Williams was not on board the helicopter that was hit.
They said that Williams arrived an hour after the helicopter that was hit had landed. Williams did not specify in 2007 how far he was from the aircraft hit with enemy fire or when exactly the helicopter he was on landed.
Williams apologized on Wednesday for his error in a Facebook comment and then later on-air.
“I would not have chosen to make this mistake,” he wrote on Facebook. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.”
Read Williams full response to his error here.
Fu-fu-fu-fucking liar.
/Fargo
Dear Brian,
Time to pursue other interests. Like, maybe, the truth. Don’t let the door hit ya on the way out.
Sincerely,
'Murika
Who really cares?
He’s a “trusted” newsreader, and many do.
I haven’t for a while and it seems I was justified.
This is a story of corruption. We all tell tales of things we have seen, sometimes placing ourselves closer to danger than we were. But he is a newsman, cooking up stories in a war zone that was one big lie – weapons of mass destruction, shock and awe, mission accomplished. The news should be precious. For newsmen like Geraldo and now Williams to personally benefit from a scene in which actual people are actually dying – it’s shabby.
It could have been me inflating that incident. And maybe it makes him feel better about sitting at anchor desk, away from fire, to imagine a bullet coming close to him. The news has become corporatized and untrustworthy, and he has worsened the relationship.
I’ll also mention that Williams is way more show biz than previous top anchors, dropping in on John Stewart and Jimmy Fallon and making his ironic smirks. All that is fine if he tells the truth on a reliable basis. But here, we see that he does not.