Stories abound at Flight 93 memorial
SHANKSVILLE — The gate's hand-hewn hemlock beams tell a story. That shouldn't surprise anyone. Nearly every part of the Flight 93 National Memorial has a story to tell.
I spent a serene morning at the 2,200-acre site on Wednesday, the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the aborted attack that crash-landed here.
The story of Flight 93 is noteworthy not only because of the al-Qaida attack. The passengers and crew will forever be honored because they decided to fight back. They stormed the cockpit and overpowered their captors, causing the plane to crash in this vacant former strip mine instead of the hijackers' probable target, the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
The story is well documented through mobile phone calls from passengers and flight attendants to loved ones and authorities that they made a consensus decision to counterattack.
For their courage we hail them as heroes. We set aside the crash site as a permanent memorial to their sacrifice. We engrave their names in stone.
And we honor them with ceremonies on the anniversary of the attacks, with an emphasis on vigilance so that it never happens again.
Here are some stray impressions on my brief visit:
n There's a strong spirit of history at the memorial, similar to a presence I've felt during visits to Jerusalem, Gettysburg and the Alamo.
This once was an ordinary meadow, a reclaimed strip mine; now, by virtue of what happened here, it's forever changed. A National Park Service ranger told me the force of the airliner crash-landing at nearly 700 mph into the soft soil forced bits of the jet — and human flesh and bone — 30 feet, 40 feet or more into the ground, where they remain. It is a burial site.
n The plane came down at the edge of a hemlock grove. Broken hemlocks were used to make the heavy gate.
There are 10 hand-hewn beams — 40 facets in all — joined together in the same manner that 40 strangers came together in their resolve to block an enemy's path.
Most of the hemlock grove remained intact. Slow growing and resilient, these hemlocks will provide a lasting backdrop to the gigantic boulder that marks the plane's final resting place. It's doubly fitting that the hemlock is Pennsylvania's state tree.
n The hemlocks lead me to draw parallels to Gettysburg. It was another clump of trees on the eastern edge of that battlefield — famously called a “copse of trees” by a New York Times reporter — that provided the focal point of Pickett's Charge. That attack proved to be the Confederate army's high-water mark — the closest the South ever came to victory.
Let's hope 9-11 was the high-water mark for what appears to be a rekindling Islamic terror movement.
n Dwelling on that same theme, I recall the words of Confederate Gen. Richard Garnett, uttered moments before he was shot off his horse during Pickett's Charge.
He said, “When we go up that hill and we break that line, there'll be a clear path to Washington and maybe today, this day, will be the last day.”
The al-Qaida attackers certainly were hoping for that clear path all the way to Washington. But like Garnett, they fell short.
n The scrubby terrain of reclaimed strip mine reminds me of another historically significant place: Huffman Prairie, the field outside Dayton, Ohio, where the Wright Brothers returned from Kitty Hawk, S.C., to build the first airfield and perfect their new flying machine. The largest documented prairie habitat east of the Mississippi River, Huffman Prairie today is adjoined to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, one of the largest military flight installations in the country.
Wilbur and Orville, the sons of a United Brethren bishop, would shudder to see their invention turned into missiles filled with kidnapped civilians a century later.
n The Flight 93 Memorial's centerpiece — a staggered wall of white marble bearing the 40 names of the passengers and crew, is called “Sacred Ground.” I can't think of a more fitting name.
“When you're the only person here, the spirit of this place really speaks to you,” a park ranger told me. I believe it.
Tom Harrison writes editorials for the Eagle.
