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Originally posted by nostatic
And what did Bush do this weekend?
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Bush Pays Tribute to Past and Present Soldiers (Update1)
May 31 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. President George W. Bush commemorated Memorial Day by honoring soldiers of the past and the present, telling an audience at Arlington National Cemetery that the war against terrorism ``has brought great costs.''
In Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. soldiers have shown ``their decency and their brave spirit,'' Bush told an audience of military veterans and families gathered across the Potomac River from Washington. ``Because of their fierce courage, America is safer. Two terrorist regimes are gone forever, and more than 50 million souls now live in freedom.''
Throughout its history, the U.S. ``has gone to war reluctantly, because we have known the costs of war,'' Bush said.
He quoted from letters sent home by four members of the U.S. military who lost their lives in combat during his presidency. Given command of a 120-person combat unit, Army Captain Joshua Byers wrote to his parents, ``I pray with all my heart that I will be able to take every single one of them home safe when we finish our mission here,'' Bush said. Byers was killed in July when his convoy was attacked west of Baghdad.
``This is the quality of the people in our uniform,'' Bush said.
Tomb of Unknowns
Before his speech, Bush marked Memorial Day, observed in the U.S. every year on the last Monday of the month of May, by laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns.
On Saturday, he dedicated a new granite and bronze World War II memorial on the National Mall to honor the 16.4 million U.S. soldiers who served and the 405,400 who died in the world's biggest and most lethal conflict.
As of May 28, 802 U.S. service personnel had lost their lives in Iraq, 662 of them since the president declared an end to major combat on May 1, 2003, according to the Defense Department. The U.S.-led coalition authority is preparing to hand over control of the nation to an interim Iraqi government at the end of June.
``All Americans who have known the loss and sadness of war, whether recently or long ago, can know this: the person they love and miss is honored and remembered by the United States of America,'' Bush said in the cemetery's amphitheater, situated amid rows of uniform marble headstones.