“I HAVE NEVER RECEIVED A RESPONSE”
by Pauline Boyle
(Mar. 20, 2018) — [Editor’s Note: The following letter was written by the widow of Thomas J. Boyle, Jr. to White House Chief of Staff Gen. John F. Kelly (Ret) after he spoke to the media last October amid a furor which arose from President Trump’s condolence call to the widow of Sgt. La David T. Johnson, who was killed while on a mission in Niger.
After graduating from high school, Mr. Boyle enlisted in the Marines, serving two tours of duty in Vietnam and earning the Cross of Gallantry, among other commendations. Upon his discharge from the military, he enlisted as a police officer at the Chicago Police Department, where he served for 31 years, retiring in 2000.
The 9/11 attacks on New York; Washington, DC; and Shanksville, PA enervated Mr. Boyle to again serve his country such that he enlisted as a private contractor with two companies and deployed to the Middle East.
His last employer was L3 Communications, now L3 Technologies.
Mr. Boyle lost his life on a U.S. Army base in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan on June 19, 2012 under circumstances which his widow, Pauline, is certain were later falsified to indicate that he was killed by an insurgent’s attack rather than by “friendly fire.”
Her belief that her husband’s death was an instance of accidental “fratricide” arose from anecdotal communications she received from soldiers in the unit after her husband’s funeral claiming that Mr. Boyle was shot by two soldiers who did not have proper control of their firearms in the seconds following the insurgent attack.
Mrs. Boyle has detailed to The Post & Email that records of the several insurance companies from whom her husband had purchased life insurance policies, other than Aetna, state that her husband was not covered at the time of his death because of an alleged “War Risk” exclusion, thereby denying her a payout.
AIG specifically denied her benefits claim because Afghanistan was reportedly not a country on the company’s “Designated War Risk Territory” list, while at the same time conceding that Mr. Boyle’s injuries were “accidental.”
In contrast to the other insurers’ records, Aetna’s file showed that Mr. Boyle’s cause of death was “accidental bodily injury.” The differences in Mr. Boyle’s reported cause of death have never been reconciled, and Mrs. Boyle believes that the U.S. military has engaged in a widespread “cover-up” to obscure the truth.
On Monday, when Mrs. Boyle sent us the letter she had written to Gen. Kelly, she simply said, “I never received a response.”]
