President Bush on Monday paid respects to the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers buried at Arlington National Cemetery, urging the nation to ensure the Iraq war “justifies the sacrifices made by those who fought and died in it.”
“From their deaths must come a world where the cruel dreams of tyrants and terrorists are frustrated and foiled, where our nation is more secure from attack, and where the gift of liberty is secured for millions who have never known it,” Bush said, standing before a crowd of thousands gathered on the marble amphitheater benches.
After a brief wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns, the president took the podium that morning to honor the more than 300,000 dead buried at the cemetery and the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He addressed the families of slain soldiers, telling them, “nothing said today will ease your pain.”
Bush’s speech came just days after Congress passed a revised $120 billion Iraq war spending bill without the troop-withdrawal date Democratic leaders had sought earlier this year. The most recent bill was viewed as at least a temporary victory for Bush and war supporters.
While he made no direct mention of the ongoing troop-withdrawal debate, the speech echoed Bush’s long-standing opposition to setting a timeline to end the war.
“Our enemies long for our retreat,” he said. “They question our moral purpose. They doubt our strength of will.”
The cemetery’s 5,500-capacity amphitheater was packed shoulder to shoulder with families, military personneland veterans. One of them, Bernie Kipperman of Silver Spring, remembers crossing the English Channel in 1944, en route to one of the most crucial battles of World War II.
He didn’t quite make it there.
“They told us we going to join the Battle of the Bulge, which was fine,” said Kipperman, 83, who served as a radio operator and installed communication lines with the Army’s 3188th Signal Service Battalion. “They took away everyone’s pencils and everything else, gave us ammunition. We get aboard the ship the day after Christmas in ’44, get in the middle of the English Channel, and we got torpedoed.”
His ship went down with 50 men and nearly all their equipment and guns, preventing them from aiding in the Allied defense of Hitler’s last major offensive. Rescue ships brought him ashore in France, where he spent the next six weeks with little food.
