As Commander in Chief I firmly believe the best path to guard our safety and our security lies in a tough, unforgiving, targeted, precise strategy th… - Joe Biden

I had hoped, when I became President, I would not have to do this again. Another massacre. Uvalde, Texas. An elementary school. Beautiful, innocent second, third, fourth graders. And how many scores of little children who witnessed what happened see their friends die as if they’re on a battlefield, for God’s sake. They’ll live with it the rest of their lives. There’s a lot we don’t know yet, but there’s a lot we do know.<p>There are parents who will never see their child again, never have them jump in bed and cuddle with them. Parents who will never be the same.<p>To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. There’s a hollowness in your chest, and you feel like you’re being sucked into it and never going to be able to get out. It’s suffocating. And it’s never quite the same.

I take responsibility for the decision. Now some say we should have started mass evacuation sooner and, "Couldn’t this have been done in a more orderly manner?" I respectfully disagree. Imagine if we’d begun evacuations in June or July, bringing in thousands of American troops and evacuated more than 120,000 people in the middle of a civil war. There still would have been a rush to the airport, a breakdown in confidence and control of the government, and it still would have been a very difficult and dangerous mission. The bottom line is there is no evacuation from the end of a war that you can run without the kinds of complexities, challenge and threats we faced. None. There are those who would say we should have stayed indefinitely, for years on end. They ask, "Why don’t we just keep doing what we were doing? Why do we have to change anything?" The fact is, everything had changed.

The only way I survived, the only way I got through it, was by staying busy and keeping my mind, when it can be, focused on my job.