Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday rebuffed a news report that he has recently misrepresented an anecdote on the campaign trail about giving awards for valor to members of the military, possibly conflating three separate real life events.

Though Biden said he hadn’t seen the Washington Post article, he told a reporter for the The Post and Courier after a campaign event in South Carolina that he stood by his retellings of meeting with heroes of the Afghanistan war over the last decade.

According to The Post, Biden has told a shifting and increasingly dramatic account of a trip to Afghanistan while vice president to award a medal to a heroic soldier who initially resisted the honor out of guilt. The former vice president most recently told the story at a campaign event in New Hampshire last Friday.

But The Post found after conducting “interviews with more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders and Biden campaign officials, it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened.”

Though Biden said on Thursday that he was unaware of The Post’s reporting, he was confident that the “essence” of his stories was accurate. But in last week’s retelling in particular, the Post report found, Biden flubbed a number of details, including the location of the encounter, the period of time during which it took place, the act of heroism, the kind of medal awarded, his own role in the ceremony, and the recipient’s military branch and rank.

“I don’t understand what they’re talking about, but the central point is it was absolutely accurate what I said,” Biden told the Charleston-based Post and Courier. “He refused the medal. I put it on him, he said, ‘Don’t do that to me, sir. He died. He died.’”

Later on Thursday, Biden said in an interview with The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart on his “Cape Up“ podcast: “I was making the point how courageous these people are, how incredible they are, this generation of warriors, these fallen angels we’ve lost. I don’t know what the problem is. What is it that I said wrong?”

Biden’s numerous misstatements during this presidential campaign have come under heavy scrutiny as the septuagenarian frontrunner’s mental acuity has been questioned by President Donald Trump and even some Democrats. Trump, of course, has an extensive record of making misstatements and spreading falsehoods himself. And Biden dismissed concerns about his fitness for office as “ridiculous.”

While he allowed that there are two different stories of heroism on the battlefield that he likes to tell at events, Biden responded, “No, I don’t think so,” when asked on Thursday whether he could have conflated any of the details of those accounts.

“There was one that relates to the forward-operating base in Afghanistan that I went to and a separate one where I went on the streets of Afghanistan where a young man pulled someone from a burning Humvee,” Biden said.

The Post report details how Biden’s stories appear to have shifted over time, growing more dramatic since he began recounting them in earnest on the campaign trail for himself and other candidates.

But the former vice president denied “that there’s anything I said about that that wasn’t the essence of the story,” adding that “that’s the beginning, middle and end. The rest of you guys can take it and do what you want with it.”

The news of Biden’s war story flub broke on the second day of a two-day swing through South Carolina. Voters were unaware of the story, although reporters with the traveling press corps intended to ask the candidate about the story, which The Post and Courier did at an exclusive sit-down arranged by the campaign because it prioritizes local media.

Afterward, Biden’s campaign canceled a small meeting he planned at Oj's Diner, a Southern cooking restaurant in Greenville, where he would have come into contact with the national press corps and been asked about the issue on camera. But Biden’s campaign said that the candidate, who is frequently late to campaign stops, was stuck in traffic and had to skip the diner event because it was getting late in the day and the restaurant — which had set a place for him and where employees were excited to see him — was going to close at 5 p.m.

Biden did appear at his final event, at the Staunton Bridge Community Center, which he started late. He did not take questions from the news media.

Marc Caputo contributed to this report from South Carolina.