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During a CBS News town hall, a man whose wife was among the first American service members to die in the U.S.-Iran war pressed Vice President JD Vance on whether the Trump administration will hold people accountable for “mistakes” and “fundamental failures.”
Master Sgt. Nicole Amor, a member of the U.S. Army Reserve from Minnesota, was one of six people killed in an Iranian drone attack on an outpost in Kuwait on March 1 — one day after the U.S. began striking Iran. It remains the deadliest attack on U.S. forces during the Iran war.
Since then, the families of people impacted by the attack have raised questions about whether the U.S. military did enough to protect Americans stationed at Kuwait’s Port of Shuaiba. CBS News has reported on concerns that the facility wasn’t adequately fortified and lacked capabilities to shoot down incoming drones, and that the Army chose not to rebase troops further from Iran and ignored a request to bulk up medical support.
Nicole Amor’s husband, Joey Amor, asked the vice president about the attack during a “Things That Matter” town hall hosted by “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil, which aired Saturday evening.
“Though the Iranian drone was the weapon that killed my wife, there were a lot of mistakes and a lot of fundamental failures that led up to that,” Amor said, adding that “my wife has told me things before she passed.”
He continued: “There’s a failure in the leadership. And I want to know how this administration is gonna start holding those leaders accountable for the actions and the deaths of the soldiers that we honor and that we love.”
Vance responded by calling Nicole Amor “a precious human being who served her country honorably,” and said, “I want to know about” any failures that may have taken place.
“Because if there were failures, and I don’t doubt there were, I just … literally the first time I’ve heard of this is this conversation, and I want to fix that stuff. I do not want this stuff to happen,” Vance told Amor, later adding that as vice president, “you live in a bit of a bubble” and “sometimes information doesn’t filter up to me.”
Vance promised to “figure out what exactly happened and what exactly we can do better.”
The vice president said some changes are already in the works.
He noted that cheap, easy-to-manufacture drones have transformed warfare, and “we have changed a lot of our tactics to try to suppress that drone fire, to try to protect our troops to make it so that more people don’t have to pay the ultimate sacrifice.”
Vance also acknowledged, “There are issues with … where troops were located that we realized was a huge mistake, and that we could do better on. And we have changed that.”
“Now, I’m not gonna get into the details, because God forbid, I don’t want the Iranians to learn something else [that] they’re gonna use to target somebody else’s wife or somebody else’s mother,” Vance said. “But man, I promise you, this is not something I’m gonna forget. And I want to talk to those soldiers, and I want to talk to you to better understand what we can do.”
Watch the full episode of “Things That Matter: A Town Hall With Vice President JD Vance” streaming on Paramount+, YouTube, CBS News 24/7 and CBSNews.com.
