Trump receives the remains of the first US military killed in the Iran war | International

The president of the United States, Donald Trump, starred this Saturday in an image that he wanted to avoid at all costs: the photo of someone that was sold before the elections that returned him to the White House as a “president of peace” receiving the bodies of American soldiers killed in a war, the war in Iran, launched by himself, in collaboration with Israel.

The remains arrived on a military plane of cargo to the Dover air base, in the State of Delaware. It is a couple of hours from Washington and has served as the setting for these ceremonies since the 1950s. Waiting there were Trump, who was not dressed in mourning – he was wearing a blue suit, a red tie and a white cap, which he did not take off when passing the coffins – and his wife, the first lady Melania Trump, she was in black, as well as the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth and the Vice President, JD Vance, among other members of the Cabinet. The president flew from Miami, where hours before he had chaired a meeting of Latin American heads of state ideologically related to him to unveil something called the Shield of the Americas.

It was not the first time that Trump saw the coffins covered by the Stars and Stripes flag emerge from the belly of an aircraft in a ceremony of this style, but it was the first time in which he could not blame another president for those deaths.

The war in Iran began seven days ago. In it, at least six American soldiers have died, for the more than 1,300 Iranians who have died, according to data from the Red Crescent in that country. Among the latter are at least 175 people, many girls between 7 and 12 years old, massacred in a primary school in the town of Minab, in southern Iran.

Contradiction and crisis

The contradiction between his electoral promises and the mourning of the six families of those soldiers, with whom Trump met this Saturday in the base morgue, has already generated criticism from some of the most prominent figures of the MAGA movement (Make America Great Again). They blame their leader for betraying the ideals of the America First (America first) by embarking the country in a war thousands of miles away.

Authorities have identified those soldiers, five men and one woman, who died in a drone strike on March 1, as Jeffrey O’Brien, Robert Marzan, Cody Khork, Noah Tietjens, Nicole Amor and Declan Coady. They were natives of Iowa, Florida, Nebraska, Minnesota and California. And they were stationed at an operations center in Port Shuaiba, south of Kuwait City.

In his first presidency, Trump, who last December received the bodies of three Americans killed in Syria at the hands of a militia financed by Iran, spoke of the “hardness” of his visits to Dover, and at his rallies, in addition to boasting that he had not started any war, he often recalled the screams of parents who received the bodies of their children in Delaware.

For him, those ceremonies meant, as he has declared, a lesson about the consequences of the “endless wars”, such as those in Iraq or Afghanistan, that the United States has traditionally fought in places that many of their compatriots would not know how to locate on a map. The current offensive in Iran, which turned one week this Saturday, has no end in sight.

His predecessor in office, President Joe Biden, also had to go to Dover. In the summer of 2021, he did so to receive the bodies of the 13 Americans who died during the chaotic departure of troops from Afghanistan. Ordered by Biden, it was one of the lowest points of his mandate. In 2024, he repeated; So the dead were three reservists, also killed in the Middle East.