I had left the Air Force about a year earlier and moved to Austin, Texas, as a project manager with Applied Materials. On the morning of September 11, 2001, one of my cubicle mates said a plane had hit the first tower of the World Trade Center. Having worked on jets, I immediately thought of a weather issue or a catastrophic failure. Then I saw the video of the second plane holding its course into the South Tower under clear skies. No pilot under duress would ever fly an aircraft like that. I knew then it was intentional.
Nineteen hijackers had appointed themselves judge over the lives of nearly 3,000 people they had never met. Murder is the ultimate selfish, narcissistic act, because the murderer decides who lives and whose life gets extinguished. That morning the terrorists made that decision for office workers, flight crews, passengers, and the rescuers who came to help them. Twenty-five years later, it remains the most hideous and barbaric attack our nation has suffered.
Against that evil stood a fellowship of ordinary people. Aboard American Flight 11 was Daniel Lewin, a passenger who had served four years as an officer in the Israeli military. The 9/11 Commission found he may have tried to stop the two hijackers seated in front of him without realizing a third was seated directly behind him. That hijacker stabbed him, and Lewin is remembered as the first person murdered on September 11. About five minutes after the hijacking began, flight attendant Betty Ong called the airline’s reservations office and stayed on the line for about 25 minutes, calmly and professionally relaying what was happening in the cabin to the people on the ground. She and fellow flight attendant Amy Sweeney reported the hijackers’ seat numbers. On the planes and in the towers, people called loved ones and spoke as calmly as they could in the time they had left.
Witnesses saw a man and a woman trapped high in the towers hold hands as they jumped. Firefighters climbed the stairs while everyone else was coming down, and police officers and EMS crews ran toward the towers with them. The FDNY lost 343 members that day, the Port Authority Police lost 37, the NYPD lost 23, and private EMS services lost eight. Stephen Siller had just finished his shift and was on his way to play golf with his brother when he got word that a plane had hit the North Tower. He canceled, went back, strapped on 60 pounds of gear at the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and raced to the towers. He gave his life that morning saving others.
On United Flight 93, the 33 passengers and seven crew members learned through their phone calls what had already happened in New York. According to one of those calls, they took a vote. At 9:57, they rushed the cockpit. The hijacker at the controls rolled and pitched the plane to throw them off balance. The passengers kept fighting, and he drove the plane into an empty field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about 20 minutes’ flying time from Washington. The 9/11 Commission concluded that he was defeated by the alerted, unarmed passengers of United 93.
Titles had nothing to do with what any of them did that morning. They were office workers, flight attendants, passengers, and firefighters, the fellowship of followers on an ordinary Tuesday. The courage they showed was not handed to them when the planes hit. It was in them all along, and the day revealed it. We remember the evil for what it was, and we celebrate Daniel Lewin, Betty Ong, Amy Sweeney, the first responders who ran toward the towers, the passengers and crew of Flight 93, and every ordinary person who stood up that morning.
