Erica Fox

Twenty five years ago today, forty people who had never met decided to die on purpose so that strangers in Washington would not have to. United 93 should have left Newark at 8:00 a.m. It sat on the taxiway in a line of airplanes and did not get airborne until 8:42. Forty two minutes late. That delay handed the people in that cabin the one thing nobody else in the sky that morning was given. Time, and the truth. When four hijackers took the cockpit at 9:28, both towers were already burning. The passengers picked up the seatback airphones and called home, and their families told them what was happening in New York. So they knew. That is what separates Flight 93 from everything else that happened that day. Every other victim died without warning. These forty had roughly half an hour to sit with the knowledge that they were already dead, that the only question left was where the airplane would land and how many people it would take with it. Think about who they were. Captain Jason Dahl was flying that trip because he had swapped for it, so he could get home for his fifth wedding anniversary. His first officer was LeRoy Homer Jr., Air Force Academy class of 1987, a C-141 pilot who had flown in the Gulf War and into Somalia, a major in the Reserve, with a wife and a ten month old daughter at home. Both men fought for that cockpit and neither of them gave it up willingly. Todd Beamer's wife Lisa was pregnant with their third child. Jeremy Glick's daughter was twelve weeks old. Tom Burnett had three little girls. Lauren Grandcolas was pregnant and flying home from her grandmother's funeral. Deora Bodley was twenty. CeeCee Lyles was a flight attendant who had been a police detective in Florida and had four sons. Sandy Bradshaw had two small children waiting in North Carolina. Not one of them had a reason to be brave. Every single one of them had a reason to sit still and hope. Listen to what they said instead. Tom Burnett told his wife Deena, don't worry, we're going to do something. Sandy Bradshaw called her husband from the galley and told him she was filling coffee pots with boiling water. Then she said she had to go and hung up on him. Honor Elizabeth Wainio told her stepmother, I have to go, they're breaking into the cockpit, I love you. Todd Beamer stayed on the line with a phone operator named Lisa Jefferson for thirteen minutes, gave her his home number, asked her to tell his wife he loved her, and asked her to say the Lord's Prayer with him. Then she heard him set the phone down and say to the men beside him, are you ready, okay, let's roll. They took a vote first. On a hijacked airliner, with a man at the front claiming to have a bomb, they held a vote, because they were not going to force anyone else to die for their decision. At 9:57 they came up the aisle. The recorder caught six minutes of it. A galley cart driven into the cockpit door. Men shouting. The hijacker at the controls throwing the airplane into rolls and dives trying to knock them off their feet, and failing, because they kept coming. At 10:00 he asks the man beside him whether to finish it. Twenty five seconds later you can hear an American voice screaming, in the cockpit, if we don't we'll die. At 10:02 the hijackers are yelling at each other to put it down. They put it down. At 10:03 a.m., in an empty field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 130 miles and twenty minutes short of the United States Capitol, where Congress was still inside the building. The men who hijacked that plane were willing to die for their cause. So were the passengers. The difference is that the hijackers wanted to take thousands of people with them, and the passengers of Flight 93 made sure the only people who died were themselves. Forty of them. Salesmen, flight attendants, a college student, a retired ironworker, a judo champion, two pilots fighting to the last second for a control yoke. No weapons, no training, no orders, no chance. They are the only Americans on September 11, 2001 who saw it coming, understood exactly what it would cost them, and walked into it anyway.