Memorial Day In Baghdad - TOO MANY DEAD Names To Read - Plans Altered

[matcom]

<snip>

BAGHDAD -- They had planned to read the name of every American soldier who fell in Iraq, but at the last minute they decided it would take too long.

It would take an hour to read more than 800 names, and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US-led occupation forces in Iraq, and his staff had just 30 minutes to observe Memorial Day before getting back to the business of war.

So in a towering marble palace, once Saddam Hussein's hunting lodge and now part of Sanchez's headquarters complex dubbed Camp Victory, the general and several hundred soldiers gathered around the traditional symbols of a fallen soldier -- a pair of boots, a helmet, and a rifle -- and reflected on the troops who, Sanchez said, ''laid down their lives so that the proud people of Iraq could enjoy freedom."

As the United States celebrated its second Memorial Day in Iraq, Iraqis are free of Hussein's oppressive regime, yet further from stability, prosperity, and representative government than they or US officials had envisioned. And for the soldiers, who yesterday remembered the more than 1 million American war dead in the country's history, the war has lasted longer and claimed more lives than they expected.

After the ceremony, Lieutenant General Tom Metz, who commands the multinational forces' everyday operations, recalled that last Memorial Day, he didn't expect that so many US troops, 138,000, would still be in Iraq a year later.

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2004/06/01/troops_remember_fallen?mode=PF