Tributes have been paid in Georgia to the three Army Reserve troops who lost their lives in a drone strike on a U.S. installation in Jordan—Staff Sgt. William Jerome Rivers was laid to rest in Carrollton, Georgia, at the first planned burial ceremony. After joining as an electrician, Rivers spent over a decade serving in the military, traveling the world, and even serving a nine-month stint in Iraq in 2018. A funeral parlor in his hometown said in his obituary that he was gentle but with a fierce personality. They described him as a kind-hearted family guy.
Among the military officers seated in the front row were Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and his wife.
Darlene, who is Rivers’s wife, sat with their son and two stepchildren while wearing a cap and sunglasses. Canton, a little town northwest of Atlanta, is home to the Georgia National Cemetery for Veterans, where Rivers will rest after the funeral ceremony.
Rivers, Sgt. Breonna Moffett and Sgt. Kennedy Sanders were promoted posthumously after being killed in a drone attack on a U.S. military installation in Jordan on January 28. Their duty station was at Fort Moore in western Georgia.
At Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, President Joe Biden spoke with the families of the slain troops upon their return to U.S. territory earlier this month. Georgia is hosting a last homecoming ceremony for the fallen troops, and friends, classmates, and coworkers have come to commemorate them.
Shortly after the foreign assault, residents of Waycross, where 24-year-old Sanders worked as a pharmacy assistant and assisted with coaching youth basketball and soccer teams, met at a city park for a minute of mourning. Waycross, Georgia’s Ware County Middle School, will host her burial service this Saturday.
A further forty soldiers were wounded in the drone strike on Tower 22, a clandestine American military station in the desert that allows American operatives to get into and out of Syria incognito.
