A group of Texans were touring the Pentagon recently when we came onto a memorial that silenced us all.

We had been walking through long hallways filled with displays dedicated to past military campaigns. Some in the group had been peppering our soldier escorts with questions about those historic campaigns and the outstanding soldiers that led them, like Black Jack Pershing and Dwight Eisenhower.

But when we came upon a memorial devoted to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Pentagon, everything grew quiet. Real quiet. No shoe shuffling. No coughs. No whispers. Just silence.

We didn't need many explanations about that day. It remains too fresh in Americans' memories, which explains the hush as we filed in. We looked at the small monument along a wall that the hijacked plane struck. Some of us signed the book where visitors could express their condolences to the families who lost loved ones.

Mostly, we walked in silence, as the evening sun shone through a tinted window.

It's a curious thing, this looking back at Sept. 11.

Iraq has intervened over the last four years to cloud our nearly unanimous feeling of having been horribly wronged that day in 2001.

Maybe someone could spin it that Mohamed Atta and his fanatical band wouldn't have struck us if our culture hadn't been so permissive. But that's absolute nonsense, when your mind's eye recalls those people leaping off the World Trade Center, in a vain attempt to avoid the calamity. Or when you reflect on the military and civilian servants going about their jobs in the Pentagon that day as a commercial jet plane barreled toward them like a deadly missile.

Their cruel, agonizing deaths had nothing to do with a permissive culture. This one can't be blamed on us.

Of course, neither can we roll back the clock. The purity of that day's emotion is matched now by an overwhelming sense of frustration about how we went so wrong in Iraq. How could we have lost the world so quickly?

Today, we hear a thousand policy ideas from presidential candidates about getting the wind behind America again, but this isn't the time to think policy.

It's a time to feel the pain, relive the horror and move ahead silently, as our group of visitors did at the Pentagon. To me, that's the only way we'll ever recapture the sense of purpose we had in the weeks and months after Sept. 11.

President Bush is correct that we are in a long struggle. Not a battle against Islam, because plenty within Islam were mortified about the events of Sept. 11. But we are in a struggle to win over those whose religious fanaticism drives them to kill. Just last week, we saw that anew in Germany, where authorities foiled a terror plot intended to rival Sept. 11 in devastation.

Bush, unfortunately, has dealt a serious blow to America's ability to make progress in this struggle over the short term because of the disastrous course he set in Iraq. I can't imagine what it must be like to stand in his shoes and know that.

Maybe that's his private pain, who knows? All we know is our own emotions.

A presidential historian I called the morning of Sept. 11 screamed that he couldn't answer any questions about previous presidential crises and slammed down the phone. I still had to write about the presidential aspect of that unfolding day, but I really couldn't blame the guy. Looking back, he gave voice to our inner rage.

Let's remember that moment, where we were and how we felt. There will come a day when Sept. 11 drifts into academic subject, as Pearl Harbor lost some of its meaning to those of us born after World War II. We look back and honor Dec. 7, 1941, but we didn't live through it.

This one, Sept. 11, we did. Let's not retreat from the challenge it presents, which is figuring out how the three Abrahamic faiths can live together on the same planet in something approaching peace.

That's the great test. It began six years ago, on a morning that causes us all to grow silent.

William McKenzie is an editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Reach him at wmckenzie@dallasnews.com.