President Biden again mentioned his son Beau’s death this week as he comforted grieving military families. This time, they were the parents of one of the three soldiers killed in a drone strike in Jordan last weekend.
The 81-year-old commander-in-chief made a point of mentioning his family’s tragedy in a phone call to Sean Sanders and Oneida Oliver Sanders. Recorded by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
During a conversation Tuesday, Biden said that Army Special Forces: Kennedy Sanders, 24, was to be posthumously promoted to sergeant.
“Wow, this is the best news I’ve heard today. Thank you so much,” Oliver Sanders said as she and her husband began to cry. “You have no idea how much that means to us.”
“Oh, well, let me tell you, it means a lot to me,” Biden responded, adding: “My son spent a year in Iraq. That’s how I lost him.”
Beau Biden died of brain cancer at the age of 46 in May 2015, nearly six years after returning from a seven-month deployment to Iraq. The president previously said he believed exposure to toxic gases from a “burn pit” caused Beau’s fatal illness.
But Biden has come under fire for likening his son’s non-combat death at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to the stories of soldiers who die on foreign battlefields.
In August of this year, Dylan Merola, whose mother Cheryl Rex, a Marine corporal, was killed in a suicide bombing at Kabul International Airport on August 26, 2021, reflected on her interactions with the president.
“His words to me were, ‘My wife Jill and I know how you feel.’ We lost our son, too, and we brought him home in a flag-draped casket.” Rex said at a forum convened by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
“Knowing that their son had died of cancer and they were able to be there for him made their hearts beat faster and start shaking.”
During his time in the White House, Biden has baffled observers by repeatedly claiming that Beau “lost his life in Iraq” and that Iraq is “the place where my son died.”
But the president apparently had a moment of clarity in May when he told Gold Star families at Arlington National Cemetery that “our losses are not the same.”
“[Beau] He didn’t die on the battlefield. “It was cancer that took him from us a year after he deployed to Iraq as a major in the U.S. Army National Guard,” Biden acknowledged, but still incorrectly stated Beau’s subsequent chronology. .
Special Kennedy Sanders Special Representative Breonna Moffett, 23, and Sgt. William Rivers, 46, was killed in a drone attack by Iranian proxies on the US outpost Tower 22 along the Jordan-Syria border.
Biden is scheduled to attend the dignified transfer of the remains of all three soldiers Friday to his hometown of Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The U.S. response to the deadly attack is expected at any moment, and Biden said He told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that he had already decided how he would retaliate.
