Biden wrongly says late son Beau ‘lost his life in Iraq’
President Biden incorrectly told an audience in Colorado on Wednesday that his late son Beau “lost his life in Iraq.”
Biden was in the middle of describing one of the Army 10th Mountain Division’s feats during World War II when he erroneously implied his offspring was killed in action.
“American soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division scaled that 1,800-foot cliff at night, caught the Germans by surprise, captured key positions, and broke through the German defense line at a pivotal point in the war,” the president said. “Just imagine — I mean it sincerely — I say this as a father of a man who won the Bronze Star, the Conspicuous Service Medal, and lost his life in Iraq. Imagine the courage, the daring, and the genuine sacrifice — genuine sacrifice they all made.”
Beau Biden passed away in May 2015 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., at the age of 46. He returned from a yearlong deployment to Iraq in September 2009, where he served as a military lawyer in a Delaware National Guard brigade.
Joe Biden has said in the past that he believes Beau, who also served as Delaware’s attorney general, developed the brain cancer that killed him because of exposure to toxic burn pits during his deployment.
“In my view, I can’t prove it yet, he came back with stage 4 glioblastoma. Eighteen months he lived, knowing he was going to die,” Biden said during a 2019 speech.
It’s unclear if the president was making a reference to the alleged effects of the burn pits when he claimed Wednesday that Beau died in Iraq or if it was yet another mental slip.
The president has struggled with public misstatements for decades, and they have increased in frequency during his term of office.
Last month, in a jaw-dropping gaffe, Biden tried to recognize an Indiana congresswoman at an event — forgetting she had died earlier this year.
“Are you here? Where’s Jackie?” the president asked during a Sept. 28 nutrition event in Washington, referring to Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski, who was killed in a car crash Aug. 3.
“I didn’t think she was — she wasn’t going to be here,” Biden added
The gaffe came even after the president had put out a statement mourning Walorski’s death and ordered the White House flag lowered for two days at the time of the fatal crash.
“Mr. President, we can tell you where Jackie is. She’s in heaven with Jesus,” Walorski’s 83-year-old mother told the president after he apologized to the family two days later, according to an account provided to The Post by the late lawmaker’s brother Keith.
In July, Biden suggested that he was suffering from cancer during a speech about climate change.
“You had to put on your windshield wipers to get, literally, the oil slick off the window,” said the president, recalling how nearby refineries affected his childhood neighborhood in Delaware.
“That’s why I and so damn many other people I grew up have cancer,” he declared.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates tried to wave the comment away by pointing to “non-melanoma skin cancers” that Biden had treated years ago. But Bates could not explain why his boss used the present tense to say he had cancer — or why Biden previously used the oily-windshield explanation to claim that he had asthma.
Days earlier, Biden told an audience in Israel that “we must … keep alive the truth and honor of the Holocaust” before correcting himself to say “horror of the Holocaust.”
Moving on to Saudi Arabia, Biden said during a speech: “We’ll always honor the bravery and selfishness — selflessness of the — and sacrifices of the Americans who served, including my son, Major Beau Biden, who was stationed in Iraq for a year.”
The president invoked the memory of his late son during a ceremony declaring the Camp Hale Continental Divide, the training ground of the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division, a national monument.
