Gold Star mother Cheryl Rex and wounded Marine SGT Tyler Vargas-Andrews told very similar stories about President Joe Biden — and neither were impressed by his apparent need to make every conversation about himself and his late son Beau Biden.
Vargas-Andrews was wounded in the suicide-bomb attack that rocked Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 16, 2021 — the same attack that killed Rex’s son, LCPL Dylan Merola, and 12 other American service members — and he said that Biden came to visit him while he was recovering in the hospital.
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Vargas-Andrews described the situation, explaining that he had lost his right arm and his left was all but immobilized, with just the tips of his fingers sticking out of a massive cast — and he said that Biden did not really greet him when he entered the room, opting instead to grab his exposed fingers like he was shaking his hand.
“I was like, ok, that’s weird,” Vargas-Andrews said. “And, you know, almost immediately starts talking, like, about how their son served in the military. Doesn’t say anything about what happened, just talking about how their son served in the military.”
Vargas-Andrews said that by then, his mother was “furious,” and told the president and his entourage that they needed to take care of her son “for the rest of his f***ing life.”
He said that the exchange got even stranger after that, explaining that Biden bent over to talk to him and asked, “What do you want?”
“I was confused. I just got blown up, saw my f***ing friends die next to me, I just want to be myself,” Vargas-Andrews recalled, saying that his answer appeared to baffle Biden. The remainder of the conversation — which he said was brief — avoided any mention of the explosion that nearly ended his life.
Rex, who spoke at Tuesday’s forum in California for the families of those killed during the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, recounted a very similar experience with the Commander in Chief.
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“When Joe Biden, our elected president, came into the room — when he approached me — 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,'” she recalled.
“My heart started beating faster, and I started shaking, knowing that their son died from cancer and that they were able to be by his side,” she added. “Also wondering how someone could honestly … sorry … be so heartless to say he knew how I felt a little over 24 hours in learning of my son’s death.”
Rex went on to say that, after that moment, she received no further correspondence from President Biden — and no indication that he had ever honored her son’s death or even spoken his name since he paid the ultimate price for what she believes was a failure of leadership in the final days in Afghanistan.
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