President Biden once again brought up the death of his son Beau while trying to console a grieving military family this week — this time parents of one of the three soldiers killed in a drone strike in Jordan this past weekend.
The 81-year-old commander-in-chief shoehorned mention of his family tragedy into a call to Shawn Sanders and Oneida Oliver-Sanders, which was recorded by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
During the Tuesday conversation, Biden said that Army Spc. Kennedy Sanders, 24, would be posthumously promoted to sergeant.
“Oh wow, that is the best news I’ve heard today, thank you so much,” Oliver-Sanders said as she and her husband began to cry. “You don’t know how much that means to us.”
“Oh, well, I tell you what, it means a lot to me,” Biden replied before adding: “My son spent a year in Iraq; that’s how I lost him.”
Beau Biden died of brain cancer in May 2015 at the age of 46, nearly six full years after he returned from a seven-month deployment to Iraq. The president has previously explained that he believes exposure to toxic fumes from “burn pits” caused Beau’s fatal illness.
However, Biden has been slammed for likening his son’s non-combat death at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to the stories of servicemembers who perished on foreign fields.
This past August, Cheryl Rex, the mother of Marine Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola, who died in the Aug. 26, 2021, suicide bombing at Kabul’s international airport, recalled her interaction with the president.
“His words to me were, ‘My wife, Jill, and I know how you feel. We lost our son as well and brought him home in a flag-draped coffin,’” Rex recounted at a forum convened by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)
“My heart started beating faster and I started shaking, knowing that their son died from cancer and they were able to be by his side.”
During his time in the White House, Biden has puzzled observers with repeated claims that Beau “lost his life in Iraq” and that Iraq was “where my son died.”
However, the president had an apparent moment of clarity in May when he told Gold Star families at Arlington National Cemetery that “our losses are not the same.”
“[Beau] didn’t perish in the battlefield. It was cancer that stole him from us a year after being deployed as a major in the US Army National Guard in Iraq,” Biden acknowledged — though he still misstated the timeline of Beau’s later life.
Spc. Kennedy Sanders; Spc. Breonna Moffett, 23; and Sgt. William Rivers, 46, died in the drone strike by an Iranian proxy group at Tower 22, a US outpost along Jordan’s border with Syria.
Biden is scheduled to attend the dignified transfer of all three soldiers’ remains at Dover Air Force Base in his home state of Delaware Friday.
An American response to the deadly strike is expected at any time, with Biden telling reporters Tuesday at the White House he had already decided how to retaliate.