As Brian Williams’ career is scoured for more made-up or exaggerated stories, initial reports indicate one about SEAL Team Six may not be accurate.
Talking to David Letterman in 2012, Williams said he flew to Baghdad with SEAL Team Six and described being told not to make eye contact or talk with them.
But as Williams' history is being investigated following his admission that his helicopter was not fired on in Iraq, the chronology of what he said about SEAL Team Six doesn’t seem to match up.
"The Iraq War invasion begain on March 19, 2003. Three days into that invasion was March 22, 2003,"
Breitbart wrote. "The chronology of Williams’s account does not match up with what we know about where he was and what he was reporting. We know, for instance, that the mission in which he claimed the ‘Chinook ahead of us’ was hit by RPG began on March 24, 2003 and ended on March 26, 2003, when he filed his first reports about it with NBC."
A former SEAL, Brandon Webb, told The Huffington Post, "My initial reaction is it sounds completely preposterous. There's a healthy dislike towards embedded journalists within the SEAL community. I can't even remember an embed with a SEAL unit. And especially at SEAL Team Six? Those guys don't take journalists with them on missions."
And from the U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Ken Mcgraw, the Post heard this, "We do not embed journalists with this or any other unit that conducts counter-terrorism missions.”
Williams also has claimed that members of the SEAL team stayed in touch with him and that one sent him a memento, “a piece of the fuselage of the of the blown-up Black Hawk in that courtyard,” Williams said in the Letterman interview.
To that claim, Mcgraw told the Post, “We don't have any idea what someone could have sent Mr. Williams and what kind of claim that person may have made. But, while the details of the raid remain classified, I can say the aircraft was not blown up until after U.S. forces had left the compound."