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President Biden acknowledged Monday at a Memorial Day event that his late son Beau died from brain cancer and not while at war — 11 days after he wrongly told US troops in Japan that his son died “in Iraq.”
Biden told the grieving families of war dead at Arlington National Cemetery that his son didn’t die on the “battlefield” but that he believes his cancer may have been caused by exposure to toxic fumes from “burn pits” during a nearly yearlong deployment.
“Our losses are not the same. He 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 said, misstating by about five years the duration between his son’s return from deployment and death, though he later correctly stated the amount of time since Beau died.
The 80-year-old president has puzzled viewers by claiming at least three times since last year that his son died in Iraq.
Biden said in October that Beau “lost his life in Iraq” and claimed the following month that Iraq was “where my son died.” This month, he told a group of Marines during to a trip to the G-7 summit in Hiroshima that “we lost him in Iraq.”
Beau Biden, Delaware’s former attorney general, died in 2015 at age 46 from glioblastoma at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
