Jamiah Gonzalez-Swinton, wife of Sgt. Michael Swinton (YouTube Screenshot)
A bereaved new widow could not gather the will to respond to news that the Pentagon had still not replaced the names of her husband and three other soldiers to the public casualty count of soldiers killed during President Donald Trump’s Iran war last weekend.
The Pentagon’s official online list of service member casualties did not include the four soldiers despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday. CNN anchor Erin Burnett reported on Friday that a day after the Pentagon suddenly changed its casualty count in the Iraq war, the websites that tracks war casualties still had the wrong number posted with just 14 fatalities listed, despite 18 service members being killed in the Iraq war since Operation Epic. Fury began.
Jamiah Gonzalez-Swinton, wife of Sgt. Michael Swinton, could barely offer reactions to the news, however, on CNN’s “Erin Burnett Out Front.”
“Now, the Pentagon does say it's a glitch,” Burnett told Swinton. “Has anyone spoken to you about this or told you anything about it?”
After a long pause while gathering her nerve, Swinton replied: Um, nobody. Nobody has reached out yet.”
“Um. Wow. Um. I kind of don't have words for that,” Swinton added after another visible effort.
Earlier in the interview, before collapsing into emotion, Swinton described Sgt. Michael Swinton as “a big mush ball” for his new daughter.
“It was beautiful to see their bond. Their bond was so strong,” she said, adding that her last video with her husband was three days before his death, but that the conference “felt different.”
“He just sounded different,” she told Burnett. “Like, I don't want to say he sounded scared, but the way he spoke, he, you know, he said that he loved me. He wanted to talk to our daughter, and he was asking me if I was okay. And the conversation didn't even last a minute. And I just I was like, man, even the time of day that he called was really early in the morning for him. And it wasn't like him to call at that time. So, it just, the whole thing just felt off.”
“I know that you said in those final days he sounded exhausted. Do you think that that he knew that things really had just become so much more dangerous in these past days,” Burnett pressed.
“Um, I didn't share this yet, but he had sent me a message and he said, ‘you know, if I die, just make sure that my kids know that I love them.’ And that was maybe a month before this happened. So, I think we all knew that things were getting pretty serious. I just didn't think this would be the outcome. I don't think any of us did,” Swinton said.
Trump, who unilaterally started the war with Iran, has himself ducked the draft and military combat during the Vietnam War through numerous educational and then medical deferments. After graduation in 1968, he avoided military service with a 1-Y medical deferment, which he said was due to a problem with his foot, earning him the name “Captain Bone Spurs” among critics.