‘Proud as hell’: Bidens channel late son Beau in Memorial Day remarks to troops

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden drew on their own family experience to celebrate America’s armed forces and their loved ones during a Memorial Day weekend kickoff event on Friday.

“The families of our service members and veterans, the caregivers who lift up our wounded and our ill and our injured, the survivors who grieve those we’ve lost — you may not wear a uniform, but military families are as critical to our national defense as a rudder is to a ship,” the first lady said when opening her remarks at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia.

She noted that supporting military families “is personal” to her and the president, given the service of their late son, Beau Biden, who deployed to Iraq in 2008 as a member of the Delaware National Guard. He died in 2015 of a serious brain tumor. His father on Friday said his son’s unit was based “downwind” from a “burn pit,” which some troops advocates have said caused such terminal and serious injuries in personnel who served there and in Afghanistan because toxic substances were often incinerated inside the pits. (The president noted that doctors never pinned his son’s tumor on an Iraq burn pit.)

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“Our hearts are with all the survivors remembering and celebrating someone they love,” she continued. “We owe them a debt we can never repay, and we must do everything we can to help them carry the weight of their need.”

The president opened his remarks by calling military members and their families the “backbone” of America before also reminiscing about Beau.

“He’s the only foreigner to have a war memorial named after him in Kosovo,” he stated. “He was proud as hell of his work.”

He commended his son for joining the National Guard, giving up his seat as the Delaware attorney general in the process, appointing a Republican replacement, and spending a year deployed in Iraq.

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“I shouldn’t be talking about my son so much, but I’m not going to apologize for it,” the president added.

“My message to all of you is quite simple,” he said in closing. “Thank you for choosing selfless service to your country.”

The president’s and first lady’s remarks in their entirety are below.