President Joe Biden on Tuesday spoke with the family of one of the three American service personnel killed in a drone attack last week, sharing his family ties to the army during a touching conversation.
Biden made a call to 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, of Savannah, Georgia, in a drone strike on Sunday at the Tower 22 base that sits along a U.S.-enforced demilitarized zone between Jordan and Syria.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has taken credit for the attack. The president has vowed retribution 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 promoted posthumously to the rank of sergeant.
The Journal-Constitution reported that Shawn had "promised her she would climb 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 during the call: "My son Beau, he [had] been near a burn pit in Baghdad and came down with stage four neuroblastoma, a brain tumor, and lost him, too."
Beau Biden, the president's eldest son, served in Iraq with the Delaware Army National Guard from 2008-2009, including a seven-month deployment in a combat zone. He died in 2015 and was posthumously given the Delaware Conspicuous Service Cross, presented for "heroism, meritorious service and outstanding achievement."
He did not die in Iraq, however, which Biden has created the impression of elsewhere. As the president said, Beau died of brain cancer, which he believes was linked to toxic burn pits 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 air on many military bases in war zones was contaminated by toxic smoke from burn pits, which are football field-sized open-air incinerators into which military contractors disposed of everything from body parts and household trash to raw sewage and war-damaged vehicle parts, spraying it all with jet fuel and lighting it on fire.
As noted in a 2023 fact check by Snopes, while exposure to the pits has been linked by veterans groups to ailments suffered by personnel, Biden has not shared proof that his son's death and the pits were linked.
While we cannot say whether Beau's death was the result of burn pit exposure, he did not die in the line of duty.
Biden also mentioned to Sanders' family the death of his first wife Neilia and daughter Naomi, who were killed in a car crash in 1972.
"I'll tell you one thing and you won't believe it now, and hope [you] won't be angry when I say it, but a day will come...when you walk by a park Kennedy played in, or you open a closet and you smell the fragrance of her clothing or something like that, and you'll smile before you cry.
"That's when you know you're gonna make it. It takes a hell of a long time to get there, but I promise you you'll get there. I know that is no consolation now."
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