The Ultimate Sacrifice

A visit to the Flight 93 memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was a somber and moving experience for me.  On the morning of September 11, 2001 four commercial airplanes were hijacked by al Qaeda terrorists in a planned attack against the United States.  Two were flown into the twin World Trade Center towers; another into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

But because of the heroic actions of the passengers and crew of Flight 93, that plane failed to reach the terrorists' objective which many experts believed was the U. S. Capitol.  They paid the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

Tim and I have visited the 9/11 memorials in New York City and Arlington, Virginia, but this memorial touched us more deeply than either of those.  First, you enter the memorial visitors' center where the story of that horrific morning is told in a countdown from the San Francisco-bound Flight 93's takeoff at Newark, New Jersey to its crash and the aftermath investigation.  You see a map of the estimated 4,500 aircraft that were airborne over the United States that morning wink out when the Federal Aviation Administration halts all operations, ordering planes to land at the closest airfields.  You watch videos of the news broadcasts telling of the destruction of the World Trade Center and the crash at the Pentagon.

You see the timeline revealing that 40 minutes into the flight somewhere near Cleveland, Ohio, the hijackers forced open the cockpit doors, killed the two pilots, herded the passengers and crew into the rear of the plane and turned Flight 93 toward Washington, D.C. less than 20 minutes of flight time away.

You listen to the taped messages of several Flight 93 passengers and crew who'd learned of the other attacks when they called loved ones to say their plane had been hijacked.  Linda Gronlund, age 46, called her sister to express her love, give her the combination to her safe and say goodbye.

Another was the call Todd Beamer, age 32, made that was routed to GTE Airpfone supervisor Lisa Jefferson, the call that ended as Beamer told his fellow passengers, "Let's roll!"  (Todd, just like my husband Tim and our son Richard, was a Wheaton College graduate.  The student center at Wheaton is named as a memorial the Todd M. Beamer Center.  Players on Wheaton's football team--which for four years included Richard--reach to touch the "Let's roll" sign as they exit the locker room before every home game.  Now Todd's son attends Wheaton and plays on its football team.)

Yellow are passenger seats.
Gray are those of the terrorists.

Finally, you learn that this Boeing 757 with a capacity of 183 passengers but which only carried 40 courageous men and women on that fateful morning, crashed at 10:03 a.m. upside-down, at 563 miles per hour in an empty field near rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania.  There were no survivors.

In Tucson, my FBI agent husband Tim was involved in the subsequent FBI investigation as he and the rest of the office there worked seven days a week for the next three months.  Several al Qaeda members of the 9/11 attacks had lived in Tucson, worshiped at the mosque and learned to fly planes there.  Hani Hanjour, the pilot of Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon first came to the U.S. in 1991 and enrolled in the University of Arizona's English as a second language program.  While in Arizona and despite his difficulty with English, he obtained his private pilot's license.  Another al Qaeda-trained terrorist--already possessing a commercial pilot's license--arrived in the U.S. in December 2000 and enrolled in pilot and jet-simulator training in Arizona.

Seeds of the tragic events of September 11, 2001 may be traced back to the formation of al Qaeda (meaning "the base") training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan in the early 1990s; the underground garage truck bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993; and the 1998 bombings at American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  Early in 1999 Osama bin Laden and operational leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reviewed plans for the 9/11 attacks and later that year radical militant Muslims living in Hamburg, Germany, arrived for training at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and were chosen for the 9/11 plot.  They returned to Germany and began researching flight schools.

Walking the pathway down to Memorial Plaza at the edge of the debris field left by the crash of Flight 93, you get a sense that this is holy ground.

The Wall of Names lists each of the 40 passengers and flight attendants.

A boulder in the middle of a different variety of grass marks the point of impact, a crater that measured approximately 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep.

Both the Wall and the visitors' center are lined up along the flight path the plane followed when it crashed.  As you stand on the overlook at the visitors' center, you almost feel as if you, too, are one of those passengers in the final seconds before impact.

Etched into the overlook's glass wall are the words, "A common field one day.  A field of honor forever."

Amen