A Marine injured in the deadly Kabul airport murder-suicide bombing during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan recounted a “weird” hospital visit from President Joe Biden.
Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews was among those wounded in the Aug. 26, 2021 bombing that killed 13 American servicemembers as the United States withdrew from Afghanistan while evacuating thousands of Afghans fleeing the Taliban. He testified in March before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March about the attack, saying it could have been prevented.
“Two minutes later, he walks in with him Jill Biden and a whole entourage of people, and like a photographer, and uh, right away, like remember him coming up to me and trying to shake my hand, like much trying to shake my right hand,” Vargas-Andrews, who lost his right arm in the attack, told Shawn Ryan. “And I looked at him and I’m like, ‘I don’t have an arm’ and my left arm is in this big-ass cast.”
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“I was like, okay, that’s weird,” Vargas-Andrews added later, after describing how Biden briefly grabbed the fingers of his left hand. Vargas-Andrews then said Biden talked about his son Beau, who served in Iraq and later died of cancer.
“My mom said she was like, ‘I don’t give a fuck what you guys say, I don’t care what you guys fucking do,’ she’s like ‘you better take care of him for the rest of his fucking life,’” Vargas-Andrews recounted.
Biden’s response to Vargas-Andrews’ mother’s comment left the wounded Marine “confused.”
“She said that and I’m sitting there and he comes over to me and he leans over me and I have a picture of this to prove it, I’ll show you this picture that I have and it’s a pretty funny picture, he leans over me and he’s like this close to my face and he’s like, ‘What do you want?’”
“I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘What do you want?,’ I’m just like confused and I just got blown up and just fucking saw my friends die next to me, like I just want to be myself.”
The botched evacuation led to calls for Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley to resign.
