Gold Star mother Karen Vaughn and retired Air Force Lt. Col. Alex Pelbath told Newsmax the Biden administration failed the 13 service members killed in the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan four years ago.
“I lost my son in 2011 to the same reasons that the young men and women died at Abbey Gate, and that was just a completely reckless withdrawal strategy, but also, going back, it was just failed and feckless leadership,” Vaughn said Tuesday on “The Chris Salcedo Show.”
“Now, we have people in place, [Secretary of Defense] Pete, Sec. Hegseth I should call him, who’s a very good friend of mine, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to see him or how supportive I was when I saw him stepping into this role, because we finally have somebody that’s not a politician, that actually has had boots on the ground, working alongside the president, and will actually care for the warfighters, the people he fought beside, and understands the territory much better than somebody sitting around a linen-draped table, drinking wine and talking about what we’re going to do with the boys,” she added.
Pelbath, who flew the last American plane out of Afghanistan, said that what he and his fellow service members experienced during the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021 was “the hardest three weeks of our lives.”
“We felt, even though we were on the front line serving, we feel the same things that so many Americans feel when you’re in a position like that,” he said. “We’re frustrated. We ask a lot of the same questions, like why are these decisions being made? We see solutions to these problems, and we are forced to sort of take these orders that we know are pretty terrible, that are political-based orders, rather than orders based on what is best for the country and then go carry them out to the best of our ability.
“What we saw when we got back was a complete dismissal of what happened,” he continued. “We were right back to our jobs. We were right back to flying other missions when we got back home, sort of in an attempt to just, it felt like to us, to just whitewash that whole thing as if that was all just another day.”
Gold Star families don’t “want a pity party,” Vaughn said, but they do need “accountability,” so other families don’t have to endure the same pain.
“We feel like we deserve accountability because until the ones who made these decisions that killed those 13 and, by the way, injured dozens and dozens of others at Abbey Gate, and the ones that made the decisions that led to the death of my son and the largest one-day loss of life in the history of naval special warfare, the largest one-day loss of life in the 20 years of war on terror, the shoot down of Extortion 17, until people are held accountable, history will repeat itself. That’s what we want as Gold Star families. We never want to see this happen to somebody else.
“Look, our sons and daughters, they sign up to fight,” she said. “We know what they’re going to do. We don’t whine and mourn because they chose the life they did. We mourn because leaders got them killed. It wasn’t their courage that cost them their lives. It was leadership. Their courage was there. They were ready to do the job. Leadership failed them.”
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