FOR THE CITIZENS-TURNED-SOLDIERS AND THE SURVIVORS
Approaching 10 years since the terrorist attacks on America of September 11 2001, I have been thinking a lot about United flight 93, and the actions of the retaliating passengers who thwarted their attackers’ mission.
After the hijackers either killed or disabled the airplane pilots, passengers learned from cell phone calls to loved ones that other targets had been hit: other hijackings had succeeded. They knew they were riding an airplane-turned-bomb, which must have some intended target: they were facing imminent death. They knew that their choice was to retake control of the flight or die.
Faced with their own imminent destruction, the passengers chose to fight. They organized and mounted a counterattack. The combat that ensued bore out the apparent intentions of the terrorist attackers: to maintain control of the airplane toward its destructive goal or else destroy themselves and the passengers.
The flight recorder captured the sounds of the conflict in which the passengers either closely approached retaking control of the cabin, or actually retook it. At that point, the hijackers, faced with the imminent failure of their mission, chose self-and-all-annihilation. On the flight recording is one of the hijackers issuing an order to end the flight, just before the time ground witnesses reported the plane crashed. It approached ground near upside-down at a steep angle, and impacted at about 500 miles per hour in a giant fireball, immediately killing all the hijackers and passengers.
The passengers succeeded in killing two hijackers and thwarting the remaining two. The terrorists succeeded in thwarting the passengers’ attempt to re-take the plane: by ending their own and all lives present.
Whether or not it was the passengers’ intentions to defend America as well as their own lives, they in fact did defend their country. What is more, they probably defended the Capitol; abundant evidence suggests the intended target of the flight was the White House or the Capitol building. At the cost of their own lives, the citizens-turned-soldiers of United flight 93 stopped a plot in action to destroy the housings of our liberty, and all of the life in them.
The survival battle and the sacrifices of the passengers of flight 93 are heroic.
These, and the other victims of the attacks of that day, left many survivors and survived, not only in the United States but globally. In some way we are all survived, but it is worst for those who had to confront this most personally and directly. To any of you, if you read this: To merely function after surviving a forced confrontation with such unspeakable evil is heroic. For all of us, but especially for you, I pray.
