FRIDAY, AUGUST 30 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
a White House c eremony six years
after Biden’s visit, White stood at
attention as President Barack
Obama placed a Medal of Honor,
the n ation’s highest award for v alor,
around h is n eck.
The upshot: In t he s pace o f three
minutes, B iden got the time p eriod,
the l ocation, the h eroic a ct, the t ype
of medal, the military branch and
the rank of the recipient wrong, as
well as his own role in the cer-
emony.
One element of Biden’s story is
rooted in an actual event: In 2011,
the vice president did pin a medal
on a heartbroken soldier, Army
Staff Sgt. Chad Workman, who
didn’t believe he deserved the
award.
In a statement Thursday, B iden’s
campaign spokesman Andrew
Bates said Workman’s valor was
“emblematic of the duty and sacri-
fice of the 9/11 generation of veter-
ans.”
The campaign has not disputed
any of the facts in the Post report,
which was published midday
Thursday.
In a n interview w ith Washington
Post opinion columnist Jonathan
Capehart after the report was first
published, Biden suggested he was
telling Workman’s story in New
Hampshire, although almost none
of the details he offered matched
what actually happened to Work-
man.
“I was making the point how
courageous these people are, how
incredible they are, this generation
of warriors, these fallen angels
we’ve lost,” he said. “I don’t know
what the problem i s. What is it that I
said wrong?”
Biden, 76, has struggled during
his presidential campaign with
gaffes a nd misstatements that h ark
back to his earlier political troubles
and have put a spotlight on his age.
In 1987, Biden dropped out of the
presidential race a mid c harges that
he had plagiarized the speeches of a
British politician and others.
One big question facing candi-
dates and voters m ore than 30 y ears
later is whether President Trump’s
routine falsehoods have changed
the s tandards by which o ther presi-
dential aspirants, including Biden,
should be judged. From the begin-
ning of his presidency until the
middle of last month, Trump has
uttered more than 12,000 false or
misleading statements, The Wash-
ington Post has found. He has con-
tinued to add to that total since
then.
Biden has used war stories to
celebrate military sacrifice and at-
tack Trump’s version of patriotism,
built around ferocity and firepower.
The former vice president, like
Trump, n ever served in the military.
But Biden’s son Beau Biden, who
died of brain cancer in 2015, de-
ployed to Iraq a s an Army lawyer in
2008, and the candidate ends al-
most all of his speeches with the
refrain: “May God protect our
troops.”
Embedded in Biden’s medal sto-
ry are the touchstones of his long
career: foreign policy expertise, pa-
triotism and perseverance through
grief.
Biden’s first public recounting of
his trip to Konar province, made
shortly after his return in early
2008, was l argely t rue, but not n ear-
ly as emotionally fraught as the
versions he would later tell on the
campaign trail. In 2008, then-Sen.
Biden, along with Sens. Chuck Ha-
gel (R-Neb.) and John F. Kerry (D-
Mass.), flew by helicopter to For-
ward Operating Base Naray, not far
from Afghanistan’s border with
Pakistan. There, they watched as
Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez present-
ed a Bronze Star for valor to Spec.
Miles Foltz, who braved heavy Tali-
ban fire to rescue a wounded sol-
dier. Spec. To mmy Alford had been
manning his machine gun atop a
hill when a Ta liban bullet sliced
BIDEN FROM A1 through his jaw and neck. Foltz
pulled Alford b ehind a nearby rock,
stanched his bleeding and then
took over his friend’s weapon. Two
soldiers were killed during the am-
bush, but Alford survived and even
returned to the unit a few months
later to f inish h is combat t our.
“It was pretty ballsy, what Foltz
did that day,” said retired Col. Chris
Kolenda, who was Foltz’s com-
mander in Afghanistan. “It was
pretty a wesome.... He s aved a l ot of
lives.”
For Foltz, the memory of Biden’s
visit and the Bronze Star remain
bittersweet.
“I wrote about it for an English
class when I was going through
college,” he said. “I can’t remember
how I phrased it, but it’s like the
medal helps hold down all the guilt
for all the things I didn’t do that
day.”
Biden returned home from his
trip in 2 008 w orried t hat the United
States was losing the war and
moved by the battlefield award cer-
emony.
“I know it sounds a little corny,”
he said in a speech t o the C ouncil on
Foreign Relations, “but I don’t
think there was a dry eye in the
house.”
Biden seemed to stop telling the
story until the summer of 2016,
when the presidential campaign
was in full swing and Trump was
surging to the top of the polls. In
July of that year, h e told i t at a World
War II ceremony in Australia. In
this version, Foltz, a young soldier,
had been replaced by the apocry-
phal and much older Navy captain
who in Biden’s telling “climbed
down about 200 feet” into a ravine
and retrieved his wounded friend
who died. The Bronze Star was up-
graded to a Silver Star.
This time, Biden said he was the
one who pinned the medal on the
officer, n ot the g eneral. “Sir, w ith all
due r espect, I do n ot want it,” B iden
recalled the officer saying.
Months later, as the angry and
divisive 2016 presidential cam-
paign kicked i nto high gear, Biden’s
story of the medal ceremony grew
more harrowing and less accurate.
He told it at an October rally for
Democratic nominee Hillary Clin-
ton in response to comments from
Trump suggesting t hat some troops
weren’t mentally strong enough to
handle the rigors of combat.
“Where the hell is he from?” Biden
asked of Trump t hat day in Florida.
This time, Biden shifted the set-
ting from Afghanistan to Iraq. In-
stead of rappelling down a ravine,
an Army captain pulled a dead sol-
dier out of a burning Humvee.
“He died. He d ied, Mr. Vice Presi-
dent,” Biden r ecalled the officer say-
ing. “I d on’t w ant the m edal.”
Biden jabbed at the air with his
index f inger and yelled, “How m any
nights does that kid go to sleep
seeing that image in his head, deal-
ing w ith i t?”
The Pentagon h as no record o f an
Army captain receiving a Silver Star
in Iraq during the time period
Biden describes.
Three weeks later, stumping for
Jason Kander, an Afghan War vet-
eran running for the Senate in Mis-
souri, Biden told both the Iraq and
Afghanistan versions back to back
in a single speech. First it was the
Navy captain who rappelled down
the ravine in Konar. “He died. He
died. I don’t deserve i t,” B iden quot-
ed the medal recipient as saying.
Then he s egued t o the A rmy officer,
the burning Humvee and Iraq.
“This is the God’s truth,” B iden s aid.
“A s I approached him in a full for-
mation... ‘Sir,’ he w hispered to me,
‘Sir, please don’t. Please don’t pin
that on me. He died, Sir. He died. I
didn’t do my j ob. He d ied.’ ”
Then, on Friday, came New
Hampshire. The setting was a town
hall meeting about health care.
Someone asked a question about
mental health and Biden started
talking about post-traumatic stress
disorder and the heavy toll of the
wars in Iraq a nd Afghanistan.
He pulled his daily schedule
from the pocket of his blue blazer,
an American flag pin affixed to its
lapel. For the past 13 years, Biden’s
rundown has included a daily tally
of the dead and wounded from the
war z ones.
“I call every morning to the De-
fense Department — n ot a joke — t o
learn exactly how many women
and men have been killed in Af-
ghanistan or Iraq,” he told the
crowd. “Nothing bothers me more
than when someone says approxi-
mately 6,000 died. No, it is 6,883 as
of this morning.”
Then Biden told the latest, and
perhaps most i naccurate, v ersion o f
his A fghanistan story.
“I’ve been in and out of Afghani-stan and Iraq over 30 times,” he
said. (His campaign later clarified
that the correct number is 21.) He
talked about Konar province, the
Navy captain — “Navy, Navy” he
repeated for emphasis — the deep
ravine, the dead friend and the mo-
ment of reckoning when Biden
pinned the medal on the officer’s
uniform.
The version of Biden’s story
that’s true — and just as heart-rend-
ing — is one he rarely tells. The
setting was not Konar province, b ut
Wardak, just southwest of Kabul.
The medal recipient w as Workman,
35, who had run into a burning
vehicle to save his dying friend. By
the time Workman had pried open
the door and plunged into the
flames, it w as too late.“I never pulled him out because
he was melting,” Workman recalled
in a phone interview earlier this
week from Joint Base Lewis-
McChord near Tacoma, Wash.
Workman’s c ompany command-
er told him that the vice president
was going to pin a Bronze Star on
him for his heroism. “I tried to get
out of going,” recalled Workman,
who has since been promoted to
first sergeant. “I didn’t want that
medal.” Nevertheless on Jan. 11,
2011, a cold, gray day, Workman
stood at attention as Biden pinned
the m edal to his chest. The moment
is memorialized in a White House
photo and in a 2016 interview that
Biden did w ith National Geograph-
ic.
Here’s how Biden rememberedit: “You s ee t he look on his face — h e
says, ‘ Sir, I don’t w ant i t. I don’t w ant
it. He died. He d ied.’ ”
Workman’s version is the same,
but with one added detail. He re-
called Biden meeting his gaze.
Workman told the vice president
that h e didn’t w ant the m edal.
“I know y ou don’t,” B iden r eplied
softly.
Eight years later, Workman still
remembers how Biden looked at
him.
“He has t hat look w here his eyes
can see into your eyes,” Workman
said. “I felt like he really under-
stood.”
ma [email protected]
[email protected]Julie Tate contributed to this report.On trail, Biden tells a moving, yet incorrect, war narrative
COURTESY OF MILES FOLTZ (LEFT); DAVID LIENEMANN/THE WHITE HOUSE (RIGHT)LEFT: In January 2008, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), far right — with Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), left, and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) — visited Spec. Miles Foltz in Konar province, Afghanistan, where Foltz
received a Bronze Star for valor for pulling a fellow soldier to safety. RIGHT: In January 2 01 1, Vice President Biden awards a Bronze Star to Staff Sgt. Chad Workman at a base in Wardak province, Afghanistan.
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