One Gold Star mother accused Joe Biden of insolently equating her son’s death with the death of his late son Beau when the 13 US service members who died in an ISIS suicide bombing occurred during the catastrophic Biden administration’s departure from Afghanistan.
Cheryl Rex, the mother of Marine Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola who perished in the attack on August 26, 2021, at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, said she was incensed by Biden’s sentiment because she was well aware that Beau Biden passed away from brain cancer in America, not on a battlefield in a foreign land.
“His words to me were, ‘My wife, Jill, and I know how you feel. We lost our son as well and brought him home in a flag-draped coffin,’” Rex related her story at a forum held in Escondido, California, by the local representative, Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). “My heart started beating faster and I started shaking, knowing that their son died from cancer and they were able to be by his side.”
In the past, Biden has falsely stated that his son “died in Iraq.”
In reality, Beau died in May 2015 at the age of 46 at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. This occurred six years after Beau returned from an Iraq tour lasting a year in September 2009.
The president has stated that he thinks Beau’s exposure to poisonous burn pits during his service caused him to get the brain cancer that ultimately claimed his life.
Crying, Rex expressed her sorrow while asking “how someone could honestly be so heartless to say he knew how I felt a little over 24 hours” after she found out that her son had been killed.
“After this encounter. I have never had any personal correspondence, nor has my son been honored or his name spoken by this commander-in-chief or his administration on what I feel is because of their failures and poor planning to exit our troops from Afghanistan,” she added damningly.
Merola was one of the 13 service soldiers who lost their lives at the Abbey Gate of the Kabul airport while helping to evacuate thousands of Afghan allies and hundreds of Americans fleeing the war-ravaged country after the government backed by the West fell to the Taliban.
Nearby Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, several of the family members who attended Issa’s speech begged Congress to conduct a thorough probe into the choices that resulted in the disorganized and hurried pullout.
“In 1792, George Washington impaneled the first Congressional investigation of a failed battle; it is not new for there to be military mistakes,” Issa stated during the public discussion. “It is not new – but it is, in fact, a tradition that investigations don’t end until every question has been answered.
“And even though we spent a little over an hour here today with these families, we could have spent two, three, or four hours and not heard all the questions they have,” he continued, pushing for more details to be made public regarding the Biden administration’s choices that led to the catastrophic mission.
By the point that the last American soldiers left Kabul on August 30, 2021, Biden had only been in office for 8 months, but his administration has placed a lot of the fault on former President Trump for initiating the pullout agreement with the Taliban prior to Biden being in office.
The failure of the State and Defense departments to adequately prepare for the withdrawal has been criticized in various reports, but the White House has been reluctant to admit mistakes, frequently hailing the mission as successful because the US military evacuated over 120,000 individuals from the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee’s mother-in-law, Christy Shamblin, referred to the description as “an ultimate disrespect for the very people that deserve every ounce of respect.”
Shamblin said, quaveringly, “When our leaders, including the secretary of defense and our commander-in-chief, called this evacuation a success — as if there should be celebration — it is like a knife in the heart for our families, for the people who came back, and for every service member that served over this 20-year war.”
“I live every single day knowing that these deaths were preventable. My daughter could be with us today. And that wasn’t just one decision, it was many decisions – many times over it could have been stopped,” she continued emotionally.
Issa promised the families that they would be given further opportunities to be heard after listening to their remarks, and he left up the prospect that they would be asked to testify before Congress.
“Their story cannot end today,” the congressman declared. “There are many many questions unasked or unspoken today … that we will get to the bottom of.
“So for the families who came so far and said what they said here today, thank you.”
You can watch the entire deeply moving session below, and we recommend that you do, and that you share these powerful testimonies with everyone you know.
