President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden paid a night visit to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on the outskirts of Washington, a week after the ISIS-K terrorist attack at Kabul International Airport that killed 13 members of the American service and injured 20 more.
The president’s motorhome arrived at Bethesda Hospital, Maryland, shortly before 8 p.m. after making the short drive from the White House. The White House press office issued a single-line statement saying the bidens were visiting “wounded warriors.”
The Marine Corps Times reported Wednesday that 15 Marines who were injured in the blast in front of the abbey door at Hamid Karzai International Airport were being treated at Walter Reed. Major James Stenger, a spokesman for the corps, said at the exit that one of the injured Marines was in critical condition, three in serious condition and the other 11 in stable condition.
The wounded service members were initially sent to Germany for treatment at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest U.S. military hospital on foreign soil, before being sent to the United States for further care.
Landstuhl’s commander, Colonel Andrew Landers, told Military.com that most of the wounded were hit by shrapnel or suffered fractures and penetration injuries “according to what is seen in any kind of explosion.” . Air Force doctor Colonel Peter Kim, chief physician of Landstuhl, told the premises that some members of the service suffered gunshot wounds.
The suicide bomb blast killed 11 U.S. Marines, a Navy seamstress and an Army soldier.
On Sunday, Biden went to the Dover Air Force Base in his home state of Delaware to participate in the dignified transfer ceremony of the 13 service members who died. Prior to the ceremony, the president held a tense meeting with family members of the fallen.
“He talked a little more about his own son [Beau Biden] than what my son did, “Mark Schmitz, whose son Jared died in the blast, told Sean Hannity of Fox News Monday night.” And that didn’t sit well with me. “
“When he kept talking so much about his son, it was just: my interest was lost in that. I was more focused on my own son than on what happened to him and his son,” Schmitz told Washington. “I do not try to insult the president, but it did not seem so appropriate to devote so much time to his own son.”
Roice McCollum, whose brother Rylee was another victim of the attack, told the newspaper that Rylee’s pregnant widow, Jiennah, heard the president show “a total ignorance of the loss of our Navy – the our brother, son, husband and father “when Biden spoke to her in Dover.
“You can’t do as badly as him and say I’m sorry,” Roice told the Washington Post. “This did not have to happen and every life is in their hands, the thousands of Afghans who will suffer and be tortured is the direct result of their incompetence.”
The president was also criticized for checking his watch during the ceremony, which Roice McCollum said Biden also did while talking to his widowed sister-in-law.