For an American president, it is the gravest of responsibilities: witnessing the country’s war dead return home for what the military calls a “dignified transfer.”
President Joe Biden will attend his second as commander in chief on Friday, honoring the three American soldiers killed in a drone attack in Jordan last weekend as their remains arrive back on US soil.
“They risked it all,” Biden said a day ahead of making the trip to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
No, the occasion isn’t a “ceremony,” according to the military’s language. Nor are the flag-draped boxes that arrive to Dover “coffins” — they are “transfer cases” loaded onto trucks for processing at the base mortuary, the largest in the country.
The precise vocabulary, briefed to reporters who attend the transfers, is an extension of the mournful precision that unfolds nearly identically on the tarmac every time a US service member dies in service of the nation.
Dictated by ritual, dignity and utmost attention to the needs and wishes of grieving families, the transfers are a searing reminder for a president of the consequences of his decisions and the weight of the job. They have become rarer as the US winds down the foreign wars that defined the first decades of the century.
Biden will witness the transfer Friday of Sgt. William Rivers, 46; and two Army specialists who were posthumously promoted to the rank of Sergeant: Kennedy Sanders, 24, and Breonna Moffett, 23. All are from Georgia.
The US has yet to retaliate for the drone attack in Jordan that left the three Americans dead, though it has pinned blame on an umbrella group of Iran-backed militants in Iraq. A multiphase counterstrike is expected soon, officials have said.
On Friday,…
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