Know what? He made a mistake a long time after the incident while trying to note and recognize an actual soldier and when the mistake was brought to his attention he publicly corrected himself. I'm not a particular fan of his and I don't watch his broadcast, but reading his response and knowing about how witnesses to and near traumatic events have a tendency to do that over time, I think the apology makes sense.
NBC noted that a "Dateline NBC" story in 2003 correctly reported that Williams learned after his helicopter had landed that "the Chinook ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky." Williams said he also wrote about the incident correctly in 2008.
"Because I have no desire to fictionalize my experience ... and no need to dramatize events as they actually happened, I think the constant viewing of the video showing us inspecting the impact area — and the fog of memory over the years — made me conflate the two," Williams wrote.
That's a fairly human experience related to stressful situations. Heck, people even do that when it's a positive, euphoric one. People who watched a memorable game, over time, become people in the bleachers, conflating that sort of tangential experience with a more immediate sense in memory. Now if it had happened last year or last month I'd have wondered. But it's something if known he'd also know could be easily refuted by any number of people and wouldn't add anything to his stature, his having been in danger and at a front more than once in his career.
Here's a
link to the more immediate reporting and it was done, unsurprisingly, correctly.
WILLIAMS: (Voiceover) We quickly make our drop and then turn southwest. Suddenly, without knowing why, we learned we’ve been ordered to land in the desert. On the ground, we learn the Chinook ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky. That hole was made by a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, fired from the ground. It punched cleanly through the skin of the ship, but amazingly it didn’t detonate.
The most likely way that sort of thing happens is that the general we (as in "I was in a group") becomes the more literal we over years.