Brian Williams is sorry for misremembering — Transcript

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1. 0:00NBC's news anchor Brian Williams
2. 0:01apologized and admitted that he was not
3. 0:03on a helicopter forced down by enemy
4. 0:05fire in Iraq in 2003, but it's a story
5. 0:08he's told for years including this
6. 0:10incident to David Letterman.
7. 0:14We were in some helicopters. What we
8. 0:17didn't know was we were north of the
9. 0:19invasion. We were the northernmost
10. 0:21Americans in Iraq. We were going to drop
11. 0:23some bridge portions across the
12. 0:25Euphrates so the third infantry could
13. 0:27cross on them. Two of our four
14. 0:29helicopters were hit by ground fire
15. 0:32including the one I was in
16. 0:34RPG and and AK-47.
17. 0:37But the thing was after he told that
18. 0:39story again recently during a military
19. 0:41tribute last week some service members
20. 0:44called him out on his show's Facebook
21. 0:46page. So then here's what he said last
22. 0:49night about it.
23. 0:52On this broadcast last week in an effort
24. 0:54to honor and thank a veteran who
25. 0:56protected me and so many others after a
26. 0:59ground fire incident in the desert
27. 1:01during the Iraq war invasion, I made a
28. 1:04mistake in recalling the events of 12
29. 1:06years ago. It did not take long to hear
30. 1:09from some brave men and women in the air
31. 1:11crews who were also in that desert. I
32. 1:14want to apologize. I said I was
33. 1:16traveling in an aircraft that was hit by
34. 1:19RPG fire. I was instead in a following
35. 1:22aircraft.
36. 1:24With the military newspaper Stars and
37. 1:26Stripes says that Williams helicopter
38. 1:28actually arrived about an hour later.
39. 1:30And now Twitter and other social media
40. 1:33not taking this very well. The hashtags
41. 1:35Brian William Memories and Brian
42. 1:37Williams Misremembers those are
43. 1:39trending. Social media is not nice about
44. 1:41it. Here's one meme that put him on the
45. 1:43moon.
46. 1:44And that landing.
47. 1:46Well, in a Facebook post Williams
48. 1:47directly addressed the service members
49. 1:49saying he thinks that the constant
50. 1:51viewing of the video of the incident and
51. 1:54the quote fog of memory unquote made him
52. 1:56combine stories.