From Just the News: Retired Army officer Joe Kent, a gold star husband whose wife Shannon Kent was killed in 2019 in Syria, writes in an OpEd that President Trump respects troops and showed it when he visited with Kent as he waited for his wife’s body to arrive at Dover Air Force Base.
“I’m so sorry for your loss. Shannon was an amazing woman and warrior,” Kent quoted the president as saying. “Shannon was the real deal, we are lucky to have people like her willing to go out there and face evil for us,” Trump told him.
The widower said that the president spoke with him and expressed genuine care: “Together, as we waited for the plane that would bring Shannon home, we spent another 20 minutes talking about my wife, our children and what an amazing mother, wife, and soldier she was,” Kent wrote. “It was clear to me that President Trump truly cared — not just that Shannon and three others had been killed in Syria, but about who Shannon and the three others were as people.”
Kent also said that Trump solicited his opinion about the U.S. military’s involvement in Syria.
“Then the president did something that I did not expect: he asked me what I thought about Syria and what we were doing there. He talked to me — a Green Beret and a combat veteran, not some expert at the Pentagon or a think tank — about the wisdom of leaving troops in harm’s way once ISIS’s territorial caliphate had been destroyed. It was clear to me that he was deeply conflicted about whether staying in Syria was worth the lives lost — Shannon and her three colleagues — on that day in January,” Kent wrote.
He said that at a later date he went to an event with the president and spoke to “members of his staff and family about foreign policy and Gold Star family issues, such as the casualty assistance officer program and changing Defense Department regulations in Shannon’s honor.“
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