Biden’s solemn salute as US fallen return
JOE Biden held his hand on his heart as he watched the bodies of 13 US troops killed in Afghanistan return to America yesterday.
The President and his wife Jill stood solemnly to pay their respects at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware as coffins draped in the American flag were unloaded from a C-17 military plane.
Mr Biden, the First Lady and others also took part in a minute’s prayer inside the aircraft.
Afterwards he met families of the troops, who were among 90 killed by a suicide bomb on Thursday at Kabul airport. The ‘dignified transfer’ has become part of the ritual of killed US soldiers returning home. Of the 13, eleven were Marines, one was a Navy medic and one a soldier. They were aged between 20 and 31, meaning the youngest were infants when the Afghanistan war began.
Before the bombing, no US troops had been killed in the country in 18 months.
Ahead of the event, Mr Biden said the 13 ‘were heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice in service of our highest American ideals and while saving the lives of others’. He was joined by Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Two families of the dead chose for their transfers not to be open to media coverage.