SAVANNAH, Ga. — During their last phone conversation, Spc. Kennedy Sanders told her mother that she wanted to take her military career to a new level when she returned to Georgia from the Middle East. She also revealed, much to her mother’s strict disapproval, that she was thinking of buying a motorcycle.
The 24-year-old Army reservist and her family were already looking forward to the summer, when Sanders would return to Waycross, the hometown where she helped coach football and basketball and worked at a pharmacy while taking college courses with the goal of becoming an X-ray technician.
Plans to celebrate the young citizen-soldier’s homecoming in June were shattered Sunday when military officers showed up at her parents’ home to deliver the worst possible news: Sanders was one of three U.S. Army Reserve soldiers from Georgia who died by a weekend drone attack on their base in Jordan near the Syrian border.
In addition to Sanders, the attack also killed Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, of Carrollton and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, of Savannah, the Defense Department said Monday. All three were reservists assigned to the 926th Engineer Brigade, based at Fort Moore, Georgia.
Sanders’ parents said Monday that she volunteered because she wanted a chance to see another part of the world.
“She was loved. She had no enemies. You could see her smiling the whole time,” Sanders’ father, Shawn Sanders, said in an interview Monday. “This is someone who just lived, enjoyed life at a young age and worked on a career.”
An outpouring of grief and support quickly spread in Waycross and surrounding Ware County, where 36,000 people live in southeast Georgia, about 100 miles southwest of Savannah.
City Hall decided on Monday to lower the flags to half-mast. The family’s congressman and state lawmakers called to offer their condolences. A local judge posted a photo of the young woman on social media after she volunteered for his campaign.
Sanders and her twin brother were the middle children of five siblings born and raised in the community. Her father served in the Marine Corps and her mother, Oneida Oliver-Sanders, served on the county school board.
Sanders joined the Army Reserve five years ago and served as an engineer with a unit in rural Tifton, Georgia, her father said. She loved to travel, her parents said, and saw the military as a way to see the world. She had previously deployed to Djibouti before volunteering to go to Kuwait, a trip that included a few months in Jordan, where the US operates a logistics support base along the Syrian border.
In her spare time, Sanders practiced jiu-jitsu and ran to stay in shape. She relaxed by knitting and coloring in coloring books. She called home almost every day, her parents said. And while she occasionally reported drones being shot down at the base, there was no immediate danger.
“She spoke to her mother the day before,” Shawn Sanders said. “It wasn’t like they were on high alert or in a secure bunker.”
Although some family members had seen the news on TV about the deadly attack in Jordan, Sanders’ parents said they were unaware anything was happening until uniformed military officers came to their door on Sunday. Shawn Sanders said he waited with the visitors for 20 minutes so he and his wife could be notified together when she got home from work. But he immediately suspected that his daughter was dead.
“I knew it, as a former member of the armed forces,” he said. “I wanted it to be something different. But then I knew.”
Sanders’ mother said her daughter had recently discussed becoming a full-time, active-duty Army soldier once her reserve contract was fulfilled. She was considering buying a house. And she was looking forward to more travel abroad and had studied Italian in anticipation of a visit to Italy.
“All these different things she had plans for were cut short in the blink of an eye,” Oneida Sanders said. “I just feel like someone like her, who is so full of life, it’s just unfair that she will never achieve the dreams she had.”
Shawn Sanders called the attack that killed his daughter “a senseless act of violence.”
President Joe Biden has promised that the US will respond. Shawn Sanders said he is confident Biden will make an appropriate decision. When asked what he thought would be the right answer, the grieving father declined to say.
“Out of anger at losing a child,” he said, “I just can’t do it.”