Text of Bush Address at Washington Memorial Service

We are here in the middle hour of our grief. So many have suffered so great
a loss, and today we express our nation's sorrow. We come before God to pray
for the missing and the dead, and for those who loved them.

On Tuesday, our country was attacked with deliberate and massive cruelty. We
have seen the images of fire and ashes and bent steel.

Now come the names, the list of casualties we are only beginning. They are
the names of men and women who began their day at a desk or in an airport,
busy with life. They are the names of people who faced death and in their
last moments called home to say, Be brave and I love you.

They are the names of passengers who defied their murderers and prevented
the murder of others on the ground. They are the names of men and women who
wore the uniform of the United States and died at their posts.

They are the names of rescuers -- the ones whom death found running up the
stairs and into the fires to help others. We will read all these names. We
will linger over them and learn their stories, and many Americans will weep.

To the children and parents and spouses and families and friends of the
lost, we offer the deepest sympathy of the nation. And I assure you, you are
not alone.

Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the
distance of history, but our responsibility to history is already clear: to
answer these attacks and rid the world of evil. War has been waged against
us by stealth and deceit and murder.

This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was
begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at an hour
of our choosing.

Our purpose as a nation is firm, yet our wounds as a people are recent and
unhealed and lead us to pray. In many of our prayers this week, there's a
searching and an honesty. At St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, on
Tuesday, a woman said, ``I pray to God to give us a sign that he's still
here.'' Others have prayed for the same, searching hospital to hospital,
carrying pictures of those still missing.

God's signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that
his purposes are not always our own, yet the prayers of private suffering,
whether in our homes or in this great cathedral are known and heard and
understood.

There are prayers that help us last through the day or endure the night.
There are prayers of friends and strangers that give us strength for the
journey, and there are prayers that yield our will to a will greater than
our own.

This world He created is of moral design. Grief and tragedy and hatred are
only for a time. Goodness, remembrance and love have no end, and the Lord of
life holds all who die and all who mourn.

It is said that adversity introduces us to ourselves. This is true of a
nation as well. In this trial, we have been reminded and the world has seen
that our fellow Americans are generous and kind, resourceful and brave.

We see our national character in rescuers working past exhaustion, in long
lines of blood donors, in thousands of citizens who have asked to work and
serve in any way possible. And we have seen our national character in
eloquent acts of sacrifice. Inside the World Trade Center, one man who could
have saved himself stayed until the end and at the side of his quadriplegic
friend. A beloved priest died giving the last rites to a firefighter. Two
office workers, finding a disabled stranger, carried her down 68 floors to
safety.

A group of men drove through the night from Dallas to Washington to bring
skin grafts for burned victims. In these acts and many others, Americans
showed a deep commitment to one another and in an abiding love for our
country.

Today, we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called, ``the warm courage of
national unity.'' This is a unity of every faith and every background. This
has joined together political parties and both houses of Congress. It is
evident in services of prayer and candlelight vigils and American flags,
which are displayed in pride and waved in defiance. Our unity is a kinship
of grief and a steadfast resolve to prevail against our enemies. And this
unity against terror is now extending across the world.

America is a nation full of good fortune, with so much to be grateful for,
but we are not spared from suffering. In every generation, the world has
produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America because we are
freedom's home and defender, and the commitment of our fathers is now the
calling of our time.

On this national day of prayer and remembrance, we ask almighty God to watch
over our nation and grant us patience and resolve in all that is to come. We
pray that He will comfort and console those who now walk in sorrow. We thank
Him for each life we now must mourn, and the promise of a life to come.

As we've been assured, neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities,
nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth can
separate us from God's love.

May He bless the souls of the departed. May He comfort our own. And may He
always guide our country.

God bless America.

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