DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. — The remains of the first six service members killed in the war with Iran were carried off a dull-gray Air Force transport plane on Saturday as President Donald Trump and other senior U.S. leaders silently saluted.
It was the opening chapter in the story of an intensifying conflict that will bend the arc of the nation and Trump’s presidency. The outcome is still unclear: whether Trump will succeed in his quest to reshape Iran in a few tight weeks without more trips to Dover, the grim stop for fallen U.S. service members slain overseas — or whether the conflict instead resembles Middle Eastern wars that have dragged on for decades.
Trump on Saturday called the war a “short excursion” that will likely last just a few weeks, but he has also left open the possibility of it going longer. And though the military effort has so far been confined to airstrikes, the president also said in response to a question from The Washington Post that he would send in ground troops if there were “very good reason” — a far riskier move that could cost more lives and suck the country more deeply into war against a nation with a population twice that of Iraq.
Saturday’s ritual here brought Trump together with Vice President JD Vance, two leaders who have long declared their firm opposition to a generation of U.S. nation-building in the Middle East but who are now jointly presiding over an effort to depose the Iranian regime and pick its successor.
“It’s a very sad day, and I’m glad we paid our respects. It’s a tough situation,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One after the solemn event in Dover.
“I hate to do it, but it’s a part of war,” Trump said. “It’s a sad part of war. It’s the bad part of war.”
The other times Trump traveled here to witness the return of the remains of U.S. service members killed overseas, they died in wars he didn’t start.
But the six who were carried off the C-17 Globemaster on Saturday perished in Kuwait in a war of Trump’s choice — one that several of his predecessors considered and dismissed.
“This is a short excursion into something that should have been done for 47 years,” Trump said Saturday, comparing it to taking out a cancer.
Trump spent more than an hour on Saturday afternoon meeting with the families of the fallen soldiers, whose operation center in Kuwait was struck by an Iranian drone six days earlier. Then, in a dark blue suit, a bold red tie and a white baseball cap that said “USA” on the front in gold stitching, he saluted silently.
He was flanked by senior leaders of the administration, the military and Congress. Some were Trump’s age. Others, like Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, are members of a generation that not only fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, but could inherit whatever comes of this new war.
Trump and the dignitaries stood for more than 30 minutes as the soldiers’ remains were carried out in metal cases topped by the U.S. flag: Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert M. Marzan, 54, of Sacramento; Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien, 45, of Indianola, Iowa; Sgt. Declan J. Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, Iowa; Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minnesota; Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35, of Winter Haven, Florida; and Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Nebraska.
The soldiers’ families, some of them with small children, sat quietly during the solemn ritual known as a dignified transfer. A light wind blew across the tarmac. Geese called across the sky.
The soldiers are “coming home in a different manner from how they thought they’d be coming home,” Trump told Latin American leaders gathered in Doral, Florida, earlier on Saturday before departing for Delaware. “When it comes to war there’s always that, but we’re going to keep it to a minimum, I think.”
After previous deaths of service members, Trump could tell himself and their families that they had died in wars he was trying to end, not start. Now Trump is a wartime president — leading a conflict he has done little to convince the other side of the aisle was necessary.
He has offered conflicting visions about when the war would end and whether he might work with friendlier Iranian leaders who preside over the same regime apparatus, as he has done in Venezuela.
But he said Saturday that the end of the war could come “where they cry uncle, or where they can’t fight any longer and there’s no one around to cry uncle. That could happen too,” Trump said. “We don’t want to come back every five years or every 10 years and do this. So we want to pick a president that’s not going to be leading their country into war.”
His task in Dover was complicated. A president receiving Americans felled by war isn’t there as the head of a political party or one side of a polarized nation, but as the head of state, embodying the country as a whole.
Trump has acknowledged the difficulty of consoling military families facing loss, once describing it as possibly “the toughest thing I have to do as president.”
Sometimes he has connected with them, as he did with some of the families of troops killed during the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, which happened while former president Joe Biden was in office. (During the Dover dignified transfer for some of those service members, Biden was criticized for checking his watch.)
Other times the encounters haven’t gone as well. The president made his first trip to Dover just weeks into his first term, in 2017, when the father of Navy SEAL Senior Chief Petty Officer Ryan Owens refused to meet with him and condemned the raid in Yemen that killed his son. Trump didn’t return to Dover for nearly two years. A 2017 phone call with the widow of Army Sgt. La David Johnson also ended in bitterness when she said the president appeared to forget her husband’s name and was insensitive. Trump denied it.
Although Trump has been sharp in his rhetoric around his willingness to use force against U.S. adversaries, he has typically tried in his five years in office to employ military action in ways that kept troops mostly out of direct combat. Until last week, he hadn’t started any major new military campaigns, unlike many of his recent predecessors. When he previously launched military action, it was in the form of a one-off attack, not a weeks- or months-long campaign.
But his risk tolerance has been changing. The January raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was a quick operation that ended with no deaths, but had forces there managed to down a U.S. helicopter, it could have sparked a crisis.
Now, saying he was inspired by the success of the Venezuela operation, Trump has launched a new attack. But Iran has been far different in scale and ambition.
And there were signs Saturday that Trump was trying to manage some of the risks. Asked whether he’d consider taking action to blunt rising oil prices, he said he was conscious of prices and could tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. He said that he had told Kurdish leaders not to go into Iran as a fighting force that could dislodge the regime but also split the country into ethnic factions.
And, asked about a Post report that Russia is aiding Tehran with intelligence as it battles the United States, Trump first said that “I have had no indication of that whatsoever” before adding that “I guess they’d say we do it against them” in Ukraine.
“They can give all the information that they want, but the people they’re sending it to are overwhelmed,” he said.
Standing next to Trump on Air Force One, the president’s special envoy for peace efforts, Steve Witkoff, said that “we’ve strongly said” to Russia that they should not aid Iran.
“I hope they’re not,” he said.
Depending on how Trump defines success, the war could drag. The National Intelligence Council has warned in a February report that the regime was unlikely to be ousted through a large-scale assault, according to Post reporting.
U.S. and Israeli forces have launched thousands of strikes on Iranian targets, killing the country’s supreme leader and what Trump has called the first, second and third rank of potential replacements. Iran has attacked many of its Gulf neighbors, drawing them into the war, and has launched missiles at NATO member Turkey and European Union member Cyprus.
But as the days of fighting mount, Trump said that the visit to Dover had not changed his views about the war.
“We’re winning the war by a lot,” he told reporters. “We decimated their whole evil empire. It will continue, I’m sure, for a little while, but I’m very proud of the people.”
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