Remembering United Airlines Flight 93: A Story of Courage and Resilience
It’s been 20 years since I’ve been in this field in Western Pennsylvania, drawn here by the story of citizens rising up against tyranny. I’ll be in a small space confined to the aisle of a Boeing 757, known in history now as United Airlines Flight 93.
In 2006, I had been working in news radio for only a few months. My instincts told me that, of all the stories to cover on that fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, most people would be going to New York City and the Pentagon, but I felt compelled to cover the story that few covered, because it is mired in controversy.
Within weeks of the terror attacks in 2001, we knew that President George W. Bush had been briefed on what he needed to do, and when he needed to do it, in order to scramble pilots into their fighter jets to bring down any airplanes that we couldn’t account for. This fueled the opinion that Flight 93 must have been shot down by an F-16 that no one in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, saw.
I say that with confidence because, on that fifth anniversary, I talked to as many people in Somerset, Pennsylvania, as I could. Many of them remembered, viscerally, that morning, and the only sound they heard was the one airplane and then one crash. I know the internet doesn’t buy it, but that human intel is good enough for me. That’s a lesson that I would be drawn back to in August 2017, when people who had never been to Charlottesville, Virginia, told me that I was wrong about events I personally witnessed.
So, we arrived on this Thursday morning preparing for a couple of days of coverage of the 25th anniversary, having only seen photographs and artist renderings of the memorial that had been built here. I told Flight 93 National Memorial superintendent Stephen Clark that the visuals I had seen invoke the same feeling I get from the USS Arizona memorial in Hawaii—a gentle grace belying the horrific ugliness that was being commemorated. And I had not even experienced the Tower of Voices, a brilliant sculpture that greets visitors to the Flight 93 memorial in Western Pennsylvania with 40 giant wind chimes—one for each of the passengers on that fateful flight.
Twenty years ago, the broadcasters were kept three quarters of a mile away from the crash site because it was still being investigated. All we could see from where the satellite trucks were lined up around my radio station booth was the charred tree line where the plane had gone in. That has now been replaced by a walking trail that takes you right down to where the impact site was. Challenge coins are left by visitors, and flowers are left by the Wall of Names, which follows the exact route Flight 93 took into this former strip mine before coming to rest not a mile away from an elementary school.
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That is another part of the story I learned from the residents 20 years ago on my first visit here. If the passengers had taken 30 more seconds to say, “Let’s roll,” and try to retake the plane, one can only imagine what a demolished elementary school would have added to an already inconceivable tragedy.
In fairness, I must point out that just last week the Department of War announced that plans are in the works for a memorial to those who lost their lives at the Pentagon in 2001. If you’ve not seen the brilliant adaptation of the World Trade Center ground zero, you are also missing out on another shining example of what beauty humans can create when confronted with pain.
Maybe that beauty has left us with a generation of 20-somethings in this nation that do not understand what it felt like to be confronted by radicals who claimed that they were allowed to kill you because their religion told them to. Today’s universities call these murderers “marginalized.”
Millions of Muslims that never would think of committing such atrocities—and who live and work in the United States next to Quakers, Lutherans, and Jews—are the ones being marginalized. They are being marginalized in equal parts by these radical Islamists, and by the press.
Long before Israel existed, Thomas Jefferson faced this same jihad when he met with Sidi Haji Abdrahaman in Tripoli to find out why the Barbary Corsairs were taking prisoner American sailors and stealing their cargo—when America was new nation that had not had any interaction or caused any conflict to be the basis for these attacks. Jefferson was told that raiding non-Muslims was part of their religious law.
Jefferson, undoubtedly one of the most pacifist of the founding fathers, advised Daniel Shays, President of the Confederate States of America, that waging war to end these attacks might be necessary.
In my recent interview with former Virginia Sen. George Allen, he offered this perspective: “You got to recognize that there are forces, evil forces, terrorist forces around the world, that would mean us harm. And they will do it. They’ll do it with bots, they’ll do it with cyber, they’ll do it with influencers, and they’ll do it militarily.”
Asked about Israel, former Sen. Allen said, “Israel, which is a wellspring in the wilderness, that’s our best ally in the Middle East.”
Speaking of the young Americans that weren’t born by 2001, he added, “These college campuses … like the University of Virginia, where two-thirds of the students last spring voted to sanction, boycott, and disinvest from any company that does business with Israel, these folks are on the side of the terrorists in Hamas.”
What about today?
When President Bush said to the nation in 2002 that we would root out “the state sponsors of terrorism,” doesn’t that mean Iran? To that question, Allen answered: “Of course, Hamas, they were funded by Iran—same with Hezbollah, same with the Houthis. And so, to me, you need to learn from history. Being blissfully stupid, ignorant, or being a dupe for these terrorists is so stupid. It’s worse when it’s dangerous to the free world, to our country, to our allies, to commerce, and everything.”
If only there was someone taking the debate to these college campuses to demand that these students defend their radicalism in the light of day. Oh, right, this is also the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
More tomorrow. Never Forget.
Listen to Joe Thomas’ full interview with former Sen. George Allen here.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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