President Joe Biden spoke Tuesday with the family of one of three U.S. service members killed in a drone attack last week, sharing his family ties to the military in a touching conversation.
Biden called the family of Specialist Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, of Waycross, Georgia, who was killed along with Sergeant William Jerome Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, Georgia, and Specialist Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, from Savannah, Georgia. in a drone strike Sunday on the Tower 22 base that sits along a U.S.-imposed demilitarized zone between Jordan and Syria.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq took credit for the attack. The president has sworn in retaliation but has denounced calls for a “wider war”“.
During the call with Sanders’ parents, Shawn and Oneida, recorded by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the president offered consolation and said that Sanders would be posthumously promoted to sergeant.
The Journal-Constitution reported that Shawn “promised her she’d move up the ranks if she stuck with it.”
The president also recalled his son Beau’s military service, saying, “My son spent a year in Iraq; that’s how I lost him.” Biden added on the call: “My son Beau, he (had) been near a burn pit in Baghdad and contracted stage four neuroblastoma, a brain tumor, and lost that too.”
Beau Biden, the president’s eldest son, served in Iraq in the Delaware National Guard from 2008 to 2009, including a seven-month deployment to a combat zone. He died in 2015 and was posthumously awarded the Delaware Conspicuous Service Cross, awarded for “heroism, meritorious service and outstanding achievement.”
However, he did not die in Iraq, which Biden created an impression from elsewhere. As the president said, Beau died of brain cancer, which he said was linked to toxic burns in Iraq, on May 30, 2015, at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
For more than a decade, the Department of Defense has acknowledged that the air at many military bases in war zones was contaminated by toxic smoke from burn pits, which are open-air incinerators the size of a newspaper. football field into which military contractors threw everything from body parts. and household waste to raw sewage and war-damaged vehicle parts, dousing everything with jet fuel and setting it on fire.
As stated in a Snopes Fact Check 2023While exposure to the pits has been linked by veterans groups to illnesses suffered by personnel, Biden has not shared evidence that his son’s death and the pits were linked.
Although we cannot say if Beau’s death was the result of exposure to the burn pit, he did not die in the line of duty.
Biden also mentioned to Sanders’ family the deaths of his first wife Neilia and daughter Naomi, who were killed in a car crash in 1972.
“I’m going to tell you one thing and you won’t believe it now, and I hope (you) won’t be mad when I say it, but the day will come… when you will drive past a park in which Kennedy played, or you open a closet and you smell the perfume of his clothes or something, and you smile before you cry.
“That’s when you know you’re going to get there. It takes a long time to get there, but I promise you you will. I know that’s no consolation now.”
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