“There were Katyusha rockets passing just beneath the helicopter I was riding in,” he told a student interviewer from Fairfield (Conn.) University that year.
But Williams didn’t mention that in his own account of the helicopter trip, written on an NBC News blog in July the previous year.
In that version, he was in a Blackhawk helicopter “at 1,500 feet,” accompanied by “a high-ranking general in the Israeli Defense Forces” and that rocket fire preceded them rather than passed beneath them.
Williams wrote that the pilot reported “some shelling right now . . . They landed about 30 seconds ago.”
Williams wrote that he noticed “trails of smoke and dust” where rockets had landed in the countryside. “Then,” he wrote, “I noticed something out the window. From a distance of six miles, I witnessed a rocket launch. A rising trail of smoke, then a second rocket launch, an orange flash and more smoke — as a rocket heads off toward Israel.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member