Midnight Brian Williams Update: Williams Claimed to Have Looked Down the Very Tube of the RPG That Shot Down the Lead Copter in 2007
This scoop brought to you exclusively by Niedermeyer's Dead Horse (@mflynny on Twitter.)
Brian Williams stops by to brag on himself with the student reporters at Fairfield University in 2007.
Williams starts doing his Sergeant Rock shtick after a question is asked about what story has had the most impact on his life, starting at 1:42. Here is his answer:
"It gets me to thinking, I've been very lucky the way my life has turned out, I've been very lucky to have survived a few things that I've been involved in, at a perception a few minutes ago, I was remembering something I tend to forget, the war with Hezballah in Israel, a few years back, where there were Katuyshka rockets passing just beneath the helicopter I was riding in. A few years before that, you go back to Iraq, and I looked down the tube of an RPG that had been fired at us and it hit the chopper in front of ours."
So 2007 is a transitional phase in the telling of the story. He has not placed himself in the shot-down chopper as he would by 2013, but he is claiming explicitly that the chopper was right in front of him, and he witnessed its shoot-down.
Of course, he adds the whole new detail that he looked into the tube of the RPG launcher which took down the bird.
Also, we now hear of a chopper flight in Lebanon (or Israel) which was also menaced by rockets -- rockets passing just below his bird.
I don't know what he means by "at a perception." At reception? I don't know, none of it makes sense. In any event, that's not the key stuff.