May 2, 2024
DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. (AP) — Grieving families gathered at Dover Air Force Base on a gray, chilly Friday to honor the three Georgia service members killed in a drone attack in Jordan.
A chaplain offered a short prayer before white-gloved, members of the Army carry team transferred the flag-draped cases holding the soldiers' remains from a C-5 Galaxy military transport aircraft to a waiting vehicle. The carry team after placing the last of three cases in the vehicle offered a final salute to the soldiers.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were among the Defense Department and administration officials who joined the families and President Joe Biden for the proceedings.
The service members killed Sunday were all 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 to sergeant rank.
The deaths were the first U.S. fatalities blamed on Iran-backed militia groups, who for months have been intensifying their attacks on American forces in the region following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war in October. Separately, two Navy SEALs died during a January mission to board an unflagged ship that was carrying illicit Iranian-made weapons to Yemen.
Sanders' father, Shawn, in a posting on Facebook on Friday morning said that “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 that was 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 years old just nine days before she was killed. She had joined the Army Reserves in 2019, but also 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 years old and went by Jerome, joined the Army Reserve in New Jersey in 2011 and served a nine-month tour in Iraq in 2018.
According to the most recent statistics available from the Defense Department, no other service members have been killed as a result of hostile action since 2021. Thirteen service members were killed during the fall of Kabul in Afghanistan, when a suicide bomber at the airport’s Abbey Gate killed 11 Marines, one sailor and one soldier. Nine service members were killed as a result of hostile action in 2020.
The U.S. government said this week that the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias that includes the group Kataib Hezbollah, had planned, resourced and facilitated the overnight drone attack. While Biden and White House officials have stressed that they don’t want a broader war with Iran, the administration has also warned that it will respond to the deadly assault.
More than 40 troops were also injured in the Sunday drone attack at Tower 22, a secretive U.S. military desert outpost whose location allows U.S. forces to infiltrate and quietly leave Syria.
