Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that the Islamic State is “on their heels,” even as he insisted that defeating the terrorist group is going to take a “long time.”
Biden and Jordan’s King Abdullah II, a key western ally, visited the Joint Training Center near the Jordanian city of Zarqa where U.S. troops have been helping to train Jordanian forces for several years.
While addressing U.S. troops in a mess hall at the center, Biden thanked them for their service and predicted that the U.S. and its allies would defeat the Islamic State over time.
“We are going to defeat ISIL,” Biden said, referring to the group by another commonly used acronym. “They are already on their heels. It’s going to take a long time. Going to take a long time.”
Biden quickly added that the group does not pose an “existential threat” to the United States “because we’ve got you and the people you are training, the finest military tactics in the world.”
He referred to the belief that the World War II generation is the greatest in history and said that the 9/11 generation of soldiers is just as “incredible.”
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, more than 4.7 million Americans have joined the military, “knowing with almost certainty that you are going to be deployed in harm’s way.”
“Over 2,800,000 of you deployed to that moonscape of Afghanistan or the burning sands out there in Iraq,” he said. “I’ve watched you. It’s incredible, incredible what you do.”
“You know, most of you are like my son Beau,” Biden said. “He accomplished a lot, but … the single proudest thing he ever, ever, ever had and cared about, until he took his last breath, was being a soldier. The proudest thing he ever did was don that uniform.”
Deployments during WWII were longer than those experienced by the 9/11 generation of servicemen and women but over the last 15 years, the multiple deployments were in some ways harder because troops had to go home then come back and leave families several times, he said.
“How hard is it to go home and come back out, leave your families again? Go home, come back. Go home, come back,” he said.
Some military families don’t live on bases so spouses and children are left to operate in communities lacking real support systems where the stresses of deployments aren’t really understood, he said.
“And everybody else thinks everything is normal, man, everything is absolutely normal, what’s going on,” he said. “But your kid sits there and looks at that empty chair on her birthday, or on her first communion or when they just won the basketball championship. And people, they care about you, they just, they don’t know.”
