Joe Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, joined grieving families at Dover air force base in Delaware on Friday as they honored the three American service members killed in a drone attack in Jordan last weekend.
Biden met privately with the families of those struck down, before the solemn ritual of the transfer of remains of fallen troops upon arrival back on US soil.
“They risked it all,” the US president said on Thursday. He did not speak at Friday’s event.
The defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, and Gen CQ Brown, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, also attended.
All three service members killed last Sunday were from Georgia: Sgt William Jerome Rivers of Carrollton, Sgt Kennedy Sanders of Waycross and Sgt Breonna Moffett of Savannah.
Sanders and Moffett were posthumously promoted from specialist to sergeant.
The deaths were the first US fatalities blamed on Iran-backed militia groups amid the current violence in the Middle East, which for months have been intensifying attacks on American forces in the region following the onset of the Israel-Gaza war last October.
Separately, two Navy Seals died during a January special forces mission to board an unflagged ship carrying Iranian-made weapons to Yemen.
Biden said earlier this week of the three killed last weekend: “These service members embodied the very best of our nation: unwavering in their bravery. Unflinching in their duty. Unbending in their commitment to our country – risking their own safety for the safety of their fellow Americans, and our allies and partners with whom we stand in the fight against terrorism.”
Sanders’ father, Shawn, in a post on Facebook on Friday morning, said that a “kindness and outpouring of love” was “the only thing holding me up” since his daughter’s death.
“This is not the homecoming for Kennedy I dreamed about,” he said in the post. “Now, I can’t stop reliving this nightmare.
Rivers, Sanders and Moffett hailed from different corners of Georgia but were brought together in the same company of army engineers based in Fort Moore.
Sanders and Moffett, in particular, were close friends who regularly popped in on each other’s phone calls with their families back home.
Moffett had turned 23 just nine days before she was killed. She had joined the army reserve in 2019, and worked for a home care provider to cook, clean and run errands for people with disabilities.
Sanders, 24, worked at a pharmacy while studying to become an X-ray technician, and coached children’s soccer and basketball. She had volunteered for the deployment because she wanted to see different parts of the world, according to her parents.
Rivers, who was 46 and went by Jerome, joined the army reserve in New Jersey in 2011 and served in Iraq in 2018.
Sanders’ mother, Oneida Oliver-Sanders, wept and said on a phone call with the president, when he told her that her daughter was being posthumously promoted: “That means a lot.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
