More than 5,000 U.S. servicemen and women have been killed since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Joseph Dunford said in a Memorial Day address on Monday.
“These statistics are compelling, but they don’t begin to capture the enormity of the sacrifice,” Dunford said at Arlington National Cemetery during remarks leading up to an address by President Obama.
“For the loss of each individual brings untold anguish and grief,” Dunford said. “Those statistics represent sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, good friends. Those statistics represent children who grew up without their mothers and fathers, those statistics represent lives shattered, hopes and dreams never realized.”
Dunford also noted that more than 1 million Americans troops have been killed in all the wars since the U.S. became a nation. But he urged attendees to focus not on their deaths, but on their lives.
“But I don’t believe our focus today should be on how these men and women died, it’s how they lived that’s important,” Dunford said. “It’s how they lived that makes us remember them.”
