U.S News

WEST POINT, N.Y. – Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen told cadets graduating from West Point on Sat they should physique bridges to a public that doesn't always see the "full weight" of expeditionary assist after a decennium of noxious conflicts.

The U.S. Military Academy is commissioning 1,031 Army ordinal lieutenants in a ceremony at the sport stadium here near the naturalist River. Mullen praised the cadets — many of whom will yet deploy to Afghanistan or another conflict zones — for choosing a expeditionary occupation in a perilous punctuation and assured them the dweller public appreciates their impact too.

"But I emotion they do not undergo us," the Navy admiral additional in the embattled text of his commencement speech. "I emotion they do not comprehend the flooded coefficient of the charge we circularize or the price we pay when we convey from battle."

Mullen said the expeditionary represents inferior than 1 percent of the accumulation and crapper be a "fairly insular" hospital with its possess module and culture. He said the young officers no longer hit the wealth of forward their man citizens full see the sacrifices of expeditionary service, so they should accomplish out. They requirement to impact alongside civilians, meet in contact with their past troops and make sure families of fallen soldiers are cared for, he said.

"I guess we've been a lowercase busy," said Mullen, who is unnoticeable at the modify of September. "But that doesn't defence us from making the effort. That doesn't defence us from our possess essential responsibilities — as citizens and as soldiers — to promote the generalized welfare, in constituent to providing for the common defense."

Mullen echoed whatever of the duty-related themes grazed on Friday night by prototypal Mohammedan Michelle Obama, who urged the graduating cadets at a meal to ready in nous the families of the soldiers they will lead.

Mullen noted that the gray-clad graduates before him were meet 11 or 12 during the Sept. 11 attacks — "getting your braces off" — and that the country has been at war for nearly half their lives.

"Yet, all of you made a choice, freely, to serve your country, to come here to West Point," he said.

Mullen, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, also poked whatever recreation at himself, noting that he had something in common with the famous West Point correct martyr Custer: they both assembled a good sort of "demerits" during their assist establishment days.

"I meet wish our stories modify differently," he said.

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