President Biden on Thursday revived his vague claim that he has been “shot at” in danger zones overseas.
During a speech to State Department employees, Mr. Biden said he understands the hazards of their profession.
“I’ve been with some of you when we’ve been shot at,” the president said.
It’s a dubious claim, and one that Mr. Biden usually tells when he’s running for office.
For example, while campaigning in 2007 for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Biden referred to his visits as a senator to the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq.
“Let’s start telling the truth,” he said. “Number one, you take all the troops out — you better have helicopters ready to take those 3,000 civilians inside the Green Zone, where I have been seven times and shot at.”
Pressed for details of the episode, Mr. Biden later told The Hill newspaper that there were three incidents in Iraq in which, according to the paper, “he felt that he was shot at or might have been shot at.” One of them involved a “shot” landing outside the building where he and other senators were staying.
He conceded that a more accurate description might have been, “I was near where a shot landed.”
Another incident occurred while he and another senator were shaving in the building where they were staying. A mortar round rattled the building, he said.
And an aide said that a bullet narrowly missed the helicopter that Mr. Biden and others were flying in in December 2005 in Iraq.
In another incident the previous year, Mr. Biden was flying out of Iraq on a C-130 cargo plane when the aircraft’s anti-missile system triggered, indicating that it had been fired upon by a surface-to-air missile. The plane took evasive maneuvers to avoid a possible missile attack.
“The nuance of being shot at or shot near means nothing in a war zone,” a Biden aide said in 2007. “The point Sen. Biden was making is that Iraq is a dangerous place — for our troops, for Iraqis, for everyone.”
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
When he was running for vice president with Barack Obama in 2008, Mr. Biden also claimed that a helicopter in which he’d been flying in Afghanistan had been “forced down” on “the superhighway of terror.”
But it was snow, not enemy fire, that forced down the chopper, according to former Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who was aboard the same helicopter with Mr. Biden.
“It went pretty blind, pretty fast and we were around some pretty dangerous ridges,” Mr. Kerry said later. “So the pilot exercised his judgment that we were better off putting down there, and we all agreed.”
He said the senators waited for about three hours until a convoy with U.S. troops took them to Bagram Air Base.
“We sat up there and traded stories,” Mr. Kerry said. “We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn’t have to do it. Other than getting a little cold, it was fine.”
Critics said it reminded them of Hillary Clinton’s bogus tale of having landed in Bosnia under sniper fire in 1996.
“I remember landing under sniper fire,” Mrs. Clinton said as a senator. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
But CBS News video of the actual event showed Mrs. Clinton arriving on the tarmac in no danger, and taking time to greet a schoolgirl who offered her a copy of a poem entitled “Peace.”
Mrs. Clinton later said she “misspoke” about the sniper fire.
“So I made a mistake. That happens. It shows I’m human, which for some people is a revelation,” she said.
Mr. Biden also has claimed to have been within a quarter-mile of a deadly Amish school shooting in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania in 2006, saying he close enough to hear the gunshots.
He said he was on a golf outing at the time — but the nearest golf course to the school was eight miles away, and the shooting occurred inside the schoolhouse.
“I happened to be literally, probably it turned out to be a quarter of a mile, back in 2006, at an outing when I heard gunshots in the woods that we didn’t know where — we thought there were hunters,” Mr. Biden said.
Five girls were killed in the attack.