This looks to me like a feeding frenzy among cannibals.
Admittedly, I have not scrutinized transcripts of each and every word the man said, but I caught part of the video of his appearance on Letterman where he described “several helicopters in our group were hit and we were forced to land.”
He didn’t actually say, “My helicopter was shot down.”
“Forced to land” sounds to me like the kind of thing that happens when the other aircraft around you are being shot at.
I don’t know, the hype seems disproportionate to the offense. So fifteen years later on late night TV he embellished part of a story.
When I set this against the folks at Fox News who have declared whole cities so-called “Muslim no-go zones” I have a hard time getting that worked up about it.
Out of curiosity, who at Fox got suspended for that?