What’s a good story if you don’t embellish it?

Which of us hasn’t embellished our best stories with a little poetic licence – the old fisherman’s tale, the one that got away, the near miss with disaster, the celebrity meeting?

Our best stories get better as the years go by – the goal that never was, the tackle that turned a game, the extra honour in the Leaving Cert.

When we’re young we add a pint or two to our drink capacity; when we’re married we lob one or two off the final total.

Ditto, you spend the first half of your life pretending you’re older than you are so that you can get into pubs and clubs and impress members of the opposite sex – and the second half taking a year or two off as you cling to your youth with the grasp of a desperate man.

So we shouldn’t be too hard on NBC News anchor Brian Williams whose tall tale looks like it has now cost him his 30 year career at the top.

Brian had dined out for a long time on his war story, recalling his brush with death during a reporting spell in Iraq in 2003 when he was on board a Chinook helicopter that was forced to land after it was hit by enemy fire.

Only it turned out Brian wasn’t on any chopper hit by fire or anything else for that matter – Brian was in a later helicopter that was under less pressure than Joan Burton at a water protest.

If Brian had only told the story once and got on with it, things might have been fine. But Brian couldn’t help himself and his brush with death became the stuff of legend.

During an August 2006 appearance on Jon Stewart's Daily Show, he recalled how he was in an Israeli military helicopter over northern Israel when Hezbollah rockets flew ‘just beneath’ them.

He repeated his dramatic experience – with added whistles and bells – on the David Letterman show. And it would seem that soldiers who saw those clips on the internet later finally had enough.

In the end it was the flight engineer of that Chinook helicopter in Iraq who had enough of this nonsense and blew the whistle on Williams with a comment on the NBC News Facebook page.

“Sorry dude,” wrote Lance Reynolds. “I don't remember you being on my aircraft. I do remember you walking up about an hour after we had landed to ask me what had happened.”

And then – like a helicopter hit by enemy missiles, it just spiralled out of control from there.

The US military publication, Stars and Stripes, brought it into the wider domain – and from there the story snowballed.

Eventually Jim had no option but to recant – although his bizarre explanation only added fuel to the fire.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.