WASHINGTON — In an exchange CBS News aired on Saturday evening, Joey Amor pressed Vice President JD Vance over what he called “fundamental failures” before the Iranian drone strike that killed his wife. “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 told him, adding that “my wife has told me things before she passed.”
Nicole Amor, an Army Reserve soldier 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, CBS News reported. The network describes it as the deadliest attack on U.S. forces during the Iran war. Joey Amor said he wanted to know “how this administration is gonna start holding those leaders accountable.”
Vance called Nicole Amor “a precious human being who served her country honorably.” If there were failures, he said, “and I don’t doubt there were, I just … literally the first time I’ve heard of this is this conversation.” He added that as vice president “you live in a bit of a bubble” and “sometimes information doesn’t filter up to me.”
Vance also acknowledged, according to CBS News, “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.” He said he was “not gonna get into the details” because he did not want the Iranians to “learn something else” they could use “to target somebody else’s wife or somebody else’s mother.”
Questions about the facility predate the town hall. CBS News reported in July that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the drone a day after the strike as a “squirter,” and that Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a post on X that the secure facility “was fortified with 6-foot walls.” An injured soldier told CBS News in April that the unit was “unprepared to provide any defense for itself.”
A review of the attack was completed in July and Army leaders briefed families on its findings, CBS News reported in August. Sources familiar with the briefing said officials described the findings but did not assign blame or comment on any decision-making mistakes. For weeks, CBS said, the Pentagon had refused to disclose the findings, which sit in a report of more than 350 pages. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, wrote to the head of U.S. Central Command asking him to “immediately release the findings of that investigation publicly.”
Vance promised to “figure out what exactly happened and what exactly we can do better,” and said he wanted to talk with the soldiers and with Amor. TEH has not seen the Army report, and the latest account of its status that TEH could verify is CBS News’s from August.
