Like a lot of politicians, Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden loves to talk. And with political career stretching back to the '70s, he's got plenty of material to mine. According to the Washington Post, at a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire, he told a crowd of 400 people about trip he took to Afghanistan during his time as vice president. Biden visited the Kunar province to award a medal to a Navy captain who rappelled 60 feet down a ravine, under enemy fire, to retrieve the body of a fellow soldier. As Biden awarded him the Silver Star, the captain protested that he didn't deserve, saying, in Biden's words, "Do not pin it on me, Sir! Please, Sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!"

According to the Post, not a single detail of Biden's story was right. Instead, he seems to have cobbled together several different instances into a single story, then also got the time period wrong. Per the Post:

Biden visited Kunar province in 2008 as a U.S. senator, not as vice president. The service member who performed the celebrated rescue that Biden described was a 20-year-old Army specialist, not a much older Navy captain. And that soldier, Kyle J. White, never had a Silver Star, or any other medal, pinned on him by Biden. At a White House ceremony six years after Biden’s visit, White stood at attention as President Barack Obama placed a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, around his neck.

While long known as gaffe-prone, the former vice president seems to be making more than usual on the 2020 campaign trail, repeatedly referring to former British prime minister Theresa May as Margaret Thatcher, claiming he met with survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting when he was still vice president, and accidentally saying during a speech that "poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids." According to the New York Times, "In recent weeks, he has expressed frustration to allies that his candidacy will suffer if he is judged too harshly on the slip-ups, which he thinks he can do little to correct so long as he is being true to himself."

The most generous reading of those gaffes is that they were slips of the tongue as Biden was speaking off the cuff. While telling the medal story in New Hampshire, for dramatic effect, he repeatedly stressed that the story was true. "This is the God’s truth," he said at the end. "My word as a Biden."