NBC’s Brian Williams recants Iraq story after soldiers protest

[Fred Sanders]

17. He was confused about being in the shot AT aircraft, not shot down...with the actual aircraft he was safely on?

"I was wrong," Williams said, according to the newspaper.

"I would not have chosen to make this mistake," he added. "I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another."

The crew members said Williams was on a different helicopter that arrived after the other aircraft made an emergency landing due to enemy fire.

...........

Could be confused I guess, but he found out quickly he was wrong...but stuck with the original mistake? For 11 years?

http://www.stripes.com/news/us/nbc-s-brian-williams-recants-iraq-story-after-soldiers-protest-1.327792

“The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG,” Williams said on the broadcast. “Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.”

Williams and his camera crew were actually aboard a Chinook in a formation that was about an hour behind the three helicopters that came under fire, according to crew member interviews.

That Chinook took no fire and landed later beside the damaged helicopter due to an impending sandstorm from the Iraqi desert, according to Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Miller, who was the flight engineer on the aircraft that carried the journalists.

“No, we never came under direct enemy fire to the aircraft,” he said Wednesday.

The helicopters, along with the NBC crew, remained on the ground at a forward operating base west of Baghdad for two or three days, where they were surrounded by an Army unit with Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams M-1 tanks."