Written by John Hnat

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Today is the twelfth anniversary of 9/11, one of the saddest days in the history of this great country.          

Most visitors find the site much colder than the place from which they came.   

Standing at this site on a sunny summer day, I am inclined to agree.  Although the hilltop on which I am standing is neither particularly high nor steep, a chilly wind is definitely blowing, making me glad that I decided to wear a long-sleeved shirt on an otherwise warm summer day. 

 

 

Then again, maybe some of that chill comes from the knowledge of what happened here.  The hilltop I am standing on is located in Shanksville, Pennsylvania; it overlooks the site where United Flight 93 crashed on September 11, 2001.  And as I stare over the field where United 93 met its end, I cannot help but think that the above advisory - which comes from the Flight 93 Memorial web site - refers to those recollections of the day at least as much as it refers to the current temperature. 

* * * * * 

If you are reading these words, then you are old enough to remember September 11, 2001.  No need to recount that day in much detail.  You know that terrorists associated with the group al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airliners, turning those planes into civilian-populated missiles.  Two of those planes were flown into the two main towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, causing the failure and collapse of those buildings (as well as others nearby) shortly thereafter.  A third plane struck the Pentagon in Washington D.C., collapsing a section of the world's largest office building. 

The fourth plane, United Flight 93, was also earmarked for a significant target in Washington D.C., although we will likely never know definitively if that target was the U.S. Capitol building or the White House.  Thanks to the courageous efforts of the passengers aboard the plane, who learned of the terrorist plot by calling relatives and friends from the plane, the plane crashed in Shanksville, saving an untold number of lives.   

In the aftermath of the attacks, the World Trade Center and Pentagon crash sites became tourist attractions.    Tens of thousands of visitors flocked to the giant pile of debris in lower Manhattan, where two of the world's tallest buildings went from skyscrapers to smoldering rubble in less than two hours.  Hundreds of thousands more saw the gaping hole left in the southwestern face of the Pentagon.   

For several reasons - the geographic isolation, the distance from most major cities, and perhaps the lack of remaining visible damage from the crash - the United 93 site has not been visited nearly as often.  Nevertheless, I felt drawn to the site.  I wanted to see where forty selfless Americans, knowing that they were almost certainly going to die, overcame their hijackers, in what would prove to be America's first response to the terrorists.   

Life kept getting in the way of my plans to visit the site, until finally I found myself one Saturday with absolutely no plans for the rest of the day.  A few minutes and a visit to Google Maps later, I set out for rural Pennsylvania. 

* * * * * 

The 9/11 attacks were one of those few crystallizing historical moments, like the Challenger space shuttle explosion a generation ago, or the assassination of President Kennedy a generation before that, or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a generation before that.  Chances are, you can remember exactly where you were when you heard the news, and you can remember plenty more details about that day than you could about, say, September 10^th.   

For me, the attacks came at a particularly sensitive time.  On the evening of September 9, 2001, some 36 hours before the first plane would hit the World Trade Center, I held my father's hand as he passed away.  He had been diagnosed with lung cancer several months earlier, and his health had deteriorated rapidly over the summer.  By Friday, September 7, it was clear that his remaining time would be measured in not months, or days, but hours.  He passed in and out of consciousness throughout the weekend, took a final turn for the worse around 8:00 PM on the evening of the 9^th, and then died minutes thereafter. 

If you have ever experienced the death of a close relative (I assume most of you have), then you know that the days following the death pass in a sort of fugue state, almost as an out-of-body experience.  My sisters and I called the hospice that had been providing help in my father's final days; they sent a nurse to clean up my father (and, interestingly, to flush every last remaining morphine pill down the toilet).  We then called a local funeral home, which dispatched two helpers to retrieve my father's body.  We phoned every relative and friend we could think of to break the news (not that it was unexpected).   

The next day, my oldest sister and I took care of all of the necessary, somewhat macabre details when a relative dies - meeting at the funeral home to decide when the funeral and wake would occur, buying a casket (metal?  pine?  Who gives a shit?), writing a death notice, and at least a dozen other details that added to the blur of the day.  As the schedule turned out, the wake wouldn't be held until Wednesday, leaving us with Tuesday wide open.  We agreed to meet at my father's house, clean out as many of his possessions as we could in one afternoon, and more or less mark time until Wednesday. 

Tuesday dawned as a gorgeous day - sunny, warm, not a single cloud to break up the blue sky.  With no real plans other than cleaning out my father's house and maybe meeting my then-fiancee for lunch, I was lazy.  I woke up later than usual, went to the grocery store to get a few things, then came home.  I decided to go to the rec center for a workout ... but before I did, I turned on the TV.  It was approximately 9:10 in the morning.  I still remember flipping through the cable channels, making my way down to the networks, when I came across the foreign programming channel.  You may have seen this one - it's the one that plays an hour of Italian TV, then an hour of Poland's best, et cetera.  At that moment, it had a Spanish-language live broadcast showing an image from Nueva York.  The image was the one that any of us can see when we close our eyes - the two towers of the World Trade Center spewing black smoke into the Manhattan morning.   

Of course, the entire day changed, much as I am sure yours did too.  I still went to the rec center later that morning, jogging blindly on a treadmill while the second tower fell (the first fell on the drive to the rec center; I still remember the "oh my God" uttered by the announcer).  I showered, met my fiancée for lunch at a local eatery (itself a surreal experience - it was the one time I have ever been in a restaurant when there was absolutely no buzz of conversation, as everybody silently munched their food while staring at the monitors by the bar), and then met my sisters at my father's house (where we did basically zero work, as we were glued to the TV). 

I do not pretend that my experiences were unique.  Every person reading these words has his or her own recollection of September 11^th.  (For a particularly good one by a regular TheClevelandFan.com message board contributor - one who was in the World Trade Center Marriott when the first plane hit, visit this site.)  But I was always drawn to the attacks.  I put together a "time capsule" of newspapers and magazines in the days that followed, thinking that it would someday help me describe the day to my as-yet-unborn children.  I could not help but wonder:  what would possess anybody to believe that attacks on civilian targets (well, we could quibble about the Pentagon, I suppose) were a good idea?  Why would anybody be so misguided as to sacrifice their own lives in its pursuit? 

And as for Flight 93:  what would bring forty intrepid passengers to rise against their hijackers, when all advice up to that point would have been "stay calm and quiet and let the hijackers do what they want"?  What events would cause forty people - complete strangers as of that morning - to become a team somewhere over eastern Ohio? 

* * * * * 

Particularly on a summer day, the drive to the temporary Flight 93 Memorial is a pleasant one.  The greenery and rolling hills of western Pennsylvania provide a very pleasant backdrop on a warm summer day.  To get to the site from Ohio, you drive on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (official motto:  "Now With Ten Miles Of Construction-Free Driving!") to Somerset, a small town not terribly far from the Maryland border.  You'll drive north on Pennsylvania 281 for a while (along the way, you'll pass the Somerset County Airport; in an interesting touch of irony considering the nature of the 9/11 attacks, the airport displays a large sign offering flight lessons).  You'll make a right at U.S. 30, then another right a couple of miles down that road (where you will see the first sign pointing the way to the Flight 93 Memorial).  A couple more miles through the Pennsylvania countryside, you'll drive up a hill ... and once you have crested it, the memorial comes into view. 

The crash site itself is not terribly remarkable.  It looks like ... well, any other green field in Pennsylvania, of which there must be thousands.  If you look at the site on Google Maps, you won't see much.  If you go to the map from the link in the previous sentence, the crash site itself is in the bottom center of the screen, just north of the patch of trees at the bottom, in between the two roads.  You never would have known it unless I told it to you, as the site of the crash was not terribly large, and has since been filled in and planted over (consistent with the decision to treat the site as a burial ground).   

The temporary Flight 93 Memorial is similarly underwhelming at first glance.  (In the map picture, it's the patch of concrete in the upper right hand corner of the screen.)  A tiny wooden building contains some maps, copies of the transcript from the cockpit during the flight's final moments, a sign-in log for visitors, and little else.  Beyond the building, a chain-link fence provides a place for visitors to attach photos, signs, shirts, caps, and other mementos.  A couple of official-looking memorials are flanked by several home-grown ones:  little crosses for each of the 40 passengers and crew members on the plane, plaques bearing messages like "9/11:  Never Forget The Day," and the like. 

 

 

 

The temporary memorial rests several hundred yards from the actual crash site.  The entire site is located on private property, and the crash site can be visited only by relatives of those who perished in the crash.  The location is marked by an American flag, one that is not terribly visible from the memorial.   

Yet while there is little to see, there is everything to see.  The crash site is located south of the memorial; as you face south, the previously mentioned hill is on your right (to the west).  Flight 93 came from the west, cleared the hill barely forty feet off the ground (while flying upside-down, mind you), and slammed into the field at 580 miles per hour.  You can channel the Dennis Hopper (XXXXlink - Speed) voice here:  in an explosion like that, they don't even bother counting the body parts.  The impact left a crater fifteen feet deep; the largest piece of wreckage was a six-foot piece of the fuselage.  As you look over the crash site, your eyes cannot help but see exactly where the plane flew over the hill (there is a tree on the hill; its height gives a rough estimate of what "forty feet off the ground" would have looked like) and into the field.  Your eyes go from the hill to the flag, then back to the hill, then back to the flag, until you swear you can actually see the jet burying itself into the earth. 

* * * * * 

Moscow, Russia.  June 17, 2004.  It's a glorious late-spring day:  the sun shining, the sky a perfect blue unblemished by a single cloud, the many poplars in the region providing a "summer snow" of fuzz blowing in the spring breeze.  Two days earlier, my ex-wife and I had officially adopted our two children from an orphanage in Tol'yatti, a city located some 500 miles southeast of Moscow.  Two dizzying days later, all of the necessary papers had been signed, all trips to the U.S. Embassy had been completed, and we found ourselves with some free time on our last night in the country.   

Our translator suggested that we visit a marketplace not terribly far from our hotel, an open-air market with street vendors and artists and the like.  It would be a chance to see some local culture, pick up some souvenirs, and/or just kill a couple of hours outside on a beautiful day.  We strolled through the marketplace, stopping at some of the vendors to check their wares.  Those seeking paintings, drawings, jewelry, music boxes, and other bric-a-brac would not have gone home disappointed.  The most prevalent item were the Russian nesting dolls (or matryoshka) - a set of dolls, identical in appearance except for their size, which are stacked one inside the other.  (Some of these sets are quite elaborate.  I saw one set of 40 dolls that came up to about my waist.)  Almost all of the vendors had at least a few sets of the matryoshka in hopes of catching a tourist's eye. 

At one of the vendors, I noticed a matryoshka with the letters UBL painted on the side.  UBL?  What's that?, I thought.  I picked up the dolls.  I turned them to see the image painted on the front. 

And with that, I was staring at the painted image of Usama bin Laden.  The prominent nose and lips, the long beard, the headdress ... they were all there.  I opened the doll ... sure enough, a smaller Usama emerged, the second-largest in what I guessed to be a series of five or six dolls.   

We live in a largely isolated and televised world.  When we see anti-American demonstrations in Iran or Syria or some other faraway land, we can easily pigeonhole it as the work of those wackos over there.  "Over there" are the operative words in that sentence - they are thousands of miles away from America, and their actions do not affect us in the least, other than maybe making us pause for a moment before we change the channel.   

As I held the Usama bin Laden doll in my hand, it hit me:  I am "over there."  There are plenty of people in this world who believe that bin Laden did a good thing on September 11^th.  And I'm in that part of the world now.  Even an act of terrorism that we regard as horrific - and properly so, if you ask me - is lauded by others as an act of defiance, of a David standing up to a red-white-and-blue Goliath.  I felt outrage.  I felt anger.  I felt sadness.  I felt a loss of hope.  I wanted to take those bin Laden dolls and throw them into the concrete, preferably at 580 miles per hour, just like the passengers on Flight 93 were traveling when they crashed.  I wanted to grab the cart proprietor by his collar and yell, you son of a bitch, how dare you celebrate a man who has brought so much suffering to so many. 

Besides the practical concerns - specifically, if I laid a finger on the son of a bitch, then I'd probably be writing this piece from some prison camp in Siberia - I figured that it would be pointless, even if I weren't in a strange land.  This poor guy probably did not know any better.  He had been raised much differently than I had been.  His experiences were undoubtedly quite different from mine.  He had been raised in a way that ... well, that led him to believe that selling Usama bin Laden dolls was a nifty way to make a few rubles.  It was a sad realization to have. 

Why was it sad?  Because celebrating bin Laden speaks of ignorance.  Al Qaeda, and the anti-American groups who support it, celebrated the attacks as an act of defiance against America.  That begs the questions:  what is America? And what are "Americans"? Approximately 3,000 people died in the terrorist attacks of September 11^th.  Who died on that day?  Men.  Women.  Whites.  Blacks.  Adults.  Elderly.  Children.  Babies.  Americans.  Europeans.  Asians.  Latinos.  Africans.  Christians.  Jews.  Muslims.  Buddhists.  Hindi.  Skim the lists of the dead, read the accounts from their survivors, and they're all there.  Bin Laden may have thought he was targeting Americans, but his attacks, carried out completely in American skies, hurt the world. The one uniting characteristic of Americans is how different we all are ... and yet how we have all decided that living with each other is a good thing. 

* * * * * 

The Flight 93 Memorial is staffed by volunteers (called "ambassadors"), local residents who answer questions and give talks every half-hour or so.  About ten minutes after I had arrived at the memorial, it was time for the presentation.  The forty or fifty people present at the memorial (themselves a cross-section of America:  families with children, leather-clad bikers with their Hogs parked in the lot, a touristy-looking Asian couple) gathered around the speaker, a grandmotherly woman named Susan.   

We sat on the benches positioned at the memorial - a series of green benches containing the names of each passenger on Flight 93 - as she began her talk.  The presentation lasted just a few minutes - just long enough to display several pictures from the crash (including the infamous picture from XXXXget her name, who has been pilloried by the "9/11 was a government conspiracy" nut-fringe crowd).  A few questions and answers later (no, Susan does not know whether the terrorists' ultimate target was the White House or the Capitol; yes, she has seen the movie United 93; yes, she believes it to be accurate, based on everything she has read), the talk was over. 

I wandered around the site for a few more minutes ... snapped some photos that did not come close to conveying the feel of the area ... spoke with Susan for a few minutes ... and then I walked back to my car. 

* * * * * 

While most of the world stared blankly at their televisions in shock on the afternoon of September 11^th, Linda Chiu had appointments to keep.  One, actually.  Linda, a Taiwanese woman living in San Francisco, was in the process of becoming an American citizen.  She had an appointment to be fingerprinted by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.   

As fate would have it, that appointment was scheduled for September 11, 2001. 

Why did she proceed with her appointment?  Why did she head to a federal building (maybe not a likely target for another attack, but certainly a risky place to be amid the chaos of the attacks) on the one day when the rest of the country took the day off? 

Simple:  "I've waited too long for this."  She knew that postponing her appointment could delay her citizenship by weeks, perhaps months; and becoming a citizen of the United States was too important to her to delay any longer.  And so it came to pass that on September 11, 2001 - a day when a terrorist group lashed out against America and our way of life - a young foreign woman took another step on her journey to become one of those Americans.   

I barely know Linda - she is the sister of a friend, one who herself became an American citizen in 2000 - but her actions on that day spoke volumes.  On the day when our country may have been hurt the most, at least in recent memory, Linda came that much closer to officially becoming one of us.  If being fingerprinted could ever be viewed as an act of bravery and defiance - a couple of qualities that have defined Americans ever since a group of our ancestors turned Boston Harbor into the world's largest teacup - then this was that time.  As an American who has probably taken his American-ness for granted far too often in his life, I can't help but be impressed by the determination of somebody who wanted to join our club.   

* * * * * 

Twelve years have now passed since 9/11.  Despite endless, ominous post-attack words that "the world will never be the same," the world is ... pretty much the same as it was before.  We now take off our shoes when we pass through airport security, and we hear occasional references to the Department of Homeland Security (a new Cabinet department created in the wake of 9/11) and the terrorism threat level (is red worse than orange?  What about yellow?  Who can remember?), but life on September 11, 2009 is not that different from life before September 11, 2001.   

Mind you, that is a good thing.  Not that we should never pause to reflect on what it means to be American, or that we should lose that meaning in a flood of iPhones and Hummers and Blackberries and a million other consumer creature comforts.  But if we change our way of life, then the terrorists have won.  Twelve years later, the memories of 9/11 remain fresh; but the world has returned to the normalcy from the time before the first plane hit the World Trade Center.

Maybe the place we find ourselves today isn't colder than that from which we came, after all.