The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Brian Williams should resign
In Korea on a summer night in 1954, I was opening a can of cherries one of my buddies had received in a package from home, when my hand slipped and I cut the tip of one finger on the sharp lid.
A new guy, a medic, had recently joined the 12 of us on top of the high mountain where we operated a lost aircraft direction finding site. An enlisted man like the rest of us, the medic left the card game he had been enjoying, joined me in the other B2 hut (there were but two) and bound up my profusely bleeding wound. I remember he did a nice, neat job.
I can’t think of his name and don’t know if I ever knew it. We called him Doc. I thought of him, though, every time I ate canned cherries or cut a finger after that.
In later life, whenever I discussed my year in Korea with the U.S. Air Force, with other veterans or neighbors or relatives who quizzed me about it, I’d say, “Korea? Yeah, I was there and I was wounded there.” This would evoke scornful laughter from my kids and other relatives or friends who knew the real story and, gleefully, they would (and still do) tell uninitiated listeners, “He didn’t even get to Korea until the fighting had been over for six months. And the only wound he suffered was self-inflicted. He cut finger while stealing cherries from another guy’s tin can.”
The joke lives on, and it’s interesting that I remember the incident clearly after 62 years. Although I don’t know “Doc’s” name, I can recall the names of almost all of the men I served with up on that mountain – Tarp, Lombardo, Coleman, Dick, Pops, Gilmore, Walker, Harris, Cook — well that’s a start.
And I can remember details of life on the mountain, too. The air drops, the ration runs to Chunchon, the basketball games, the card games, cooking up eggs deep in the night when Pops was asleep, listening to the World Series over Armed Forces radio and the rest. Good memories, mostly because of the good guys.
I’ll bet the other guys remember the details, too, and I hope they remember me as I do them.
Considering this, I find it astonishing that Brian Williams, NBC’s once highly-regarded news anchor could have forgotten that the helicopter in which he was a passenger in Iraq on that day 12 years ago, was NOT hit and forced down by enemy fire.
No, that happened to the chopper in front of his. His helicopter arrived at the scene at least a halfhour later. He was never in danger and didn’t suffer so much as the threat of a cut finger.
Williams dishonored himself. His original false claim was exposed by military men, real men, who were there. They came forward to remind Williams and set the record straight. And little Bri-Bri, shamefacedly, had to recant, claiming he had gotten his facts mixed, and by Golly, now he remembered how things unfolded that day. Oh, yeah!
If his NBC employers do not have it in them to do the right thing and fire Williams, he should show that he has at least some integrity and resign.
He has already apologized, kind of obliquely, I thought, but his credibility has crumbled.
I love the military and I love veterans and I love this country, so I feel very strongly about this, as I did about Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s Vietnam fiction, Hillary Clinton’s silly story about landing in sniper fire in Bosnia, and husband Bill’s flat-out lies about the Monica affair.
I won’t even bring up our current president, who said, “You can keep your doctor.”
But I can tell you this — I did suffer a cut finger when I was in Korea, and I remember it as if it happened yesterday. You can take that to the bank.