This Memorial Day weekend, we look back at the extraordinary exchange between Telemundo anchor Arantxa Loizaga and Gold Star mom Coral Briceño whose son, Cpl. Humberto Sánchez (USMC) was among the fallen at the ISIS attack on the Hamid Karzai International Airport at Kabul, Afghanistan.
Briceño, in her immense grief, was gracious enough to come on Telemundo’s morning show and tell the story of her son. Watch the key exchange as it unfolded below, at the end of the interview:
ARANTXA LOIZAGA: Could you describe the moment when your son said to you: “Mom, I want to be part of the armed forces (of the United States)”? What did you feel when your son told you of his desire to be a member of our armed forces?
CORAL BRISEÑO: When he was in high school I told him that he was going down the wrong path, and I always encouraged him to join the U.S. armed forces, and he would say to me: “Do you want me to die? To get killed? And I´d say, “no, I know you´re going to do good.” So he´d always say no. But one day he came back from school, he was just about to graduate, and he said, “Mom, do you have something to do at 4?” And I said, “no”. And he said, “can you come to an appointment with me?” And I said, “What kind of an appointment? What are we going to do? And he said, “I enlisted in the United States Marines, and since I am a minor, they´re asking you to sign and can you come? I thought about it. I thought about it, and then I said, this is what I asked him (to do) – this was it.” And he said, “Mom, I want you to be proud of me”.
LOIZAGA: Ms. Coral Briseño, you are proud of your son but so are we. We are obviously grateful for Humberto Sánchez ´sacrifice. We will honor him here. Thank you for your time and we grieve with you. We´ll be back with more after the break.
From firsthand experience, I know that Spanish-language news media has a nasty little habit of always wanting to lace their coverage with footage of grieving mothers whenever possible. If they wail on air, even better. But this was not that interview.
We would later learn that Loizaga is herself the spouse of a combat veteran. As such, she handled the interview with the care, gravity, and empathy that it deserved.
We had not yet discovered the full scope of the debacle that led to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which led to the ISIS-K attack on Abbey Gate. At this point, we has only begun to learn of these 13 service members who had just given what President Abraham Lincoln described as their “last full measure of devotion.”
Everything else would come later. In many ways, we are still learning about the potential breakdowns that led to Abbey Gate. But this weekend, we pause to honor the sacrifices of those heroes, as well as their fallen brethren and sistren going all the way to the Revolutionary War.
As Loizaga so powerfully said, we honor them. And we embrace their loved ones as they grieve.
