YEREVAN, MAY 31, ARMENPRESS. 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 U.S Arlington National Cemetery during remarks leading up to an address by President Obama, the Washington Examiner reported.

"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."

Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for remembering the people who died while serving in the country's armed forces. The holiday, which is observed every year on the last Monday of May, originated as Decoration Day after the American Civil War in 1868, when the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans founded in Decatur, Illinois, established it as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the Union war dead with flowers. By the 20th century, competing Union and Confederate holiday traditions, celebrated on different days, had merged, and Memorial Day eventually extended to honor all Americans who died while in the military service. It typically marks the start of the summer vacation season, while Labor Day marks its end.