NPR called her out for this and gave it "mostly false" despite it being true but misleading and required a confirmation from the DoD. What did you want to happen? "Just a moment Vice President Harris, I need to get on the phone with Kirby to confirm this before we continue."
Who cares about NPR? We were talking about ABC's "live fact-checking".
Every American (and most of the rest of the world, too) who doesn't live under a rock (especially "journalists") knows that the US has had active duty military in combat zones since at least 2003—you don't need to call up the Department of Defense to fact-check that information.
Which is what NPR is saying, that Harris was being misleading by relying on technical terms that don't match people's real-life understanding of the words. Would you have been confident enough to call that out when even NPR after the fact can't get a definitive answer to whether her literal words were correct? They only checked like three things the whole debate that were unambiguously false.
https://www.wusf.org/politics-issues/2024-09-13/politifact-f...