Country singer, Alan Jackson, wrote the following words in the hours after terrorist attacks on September 11, 2021.
Where were you when the world stopped turning on that September day. "
I remember it well in my life and home. My youngest was five. His sisters were 9 and 11 respectively, a bit ironic when I look at it now. We never turned the TV on in the mornings. On that day, my husband broke the tradition because he'd just seen footage of the first of the twin towers being hit by a plane. By the time he got the TV on, the second one was down. It was a shock, but not a terrorist attack at that point.
My kids and I piled in the car for the drive to school. The car radio was on, the two burning towers was the topic of conversation. Suddenly the radio music was interrupted. Another plane had hit the Pentagon. I pulled the car over. My sister, my children's aunt, had been dropped off in Washington DC to be a college intern. Her metro stop was one stop shy of the Pentagon. Suddenly my world shook.
Seconds later, just after I gotten back on the road to drop of my kids, a final plane had crashed into a Pennsylvania field. The details still unclear. I drove home on that sunny September day, heartbroken, and ill. Emotions that had no description coursed through me.
By the time I got home, the skies were silent. I live near an international airport. We see planes come and go all the time. The silence was deafening. Yet, eerily comforting. We as a nation had been wounded, damaged, and destroyed. We needed to live in the silence of this unusual moment. To grieve, to heal, to appreciate, to reflect. Eventually, we returned to a new normal. A kinder normal. A normal I deeply miss.
Last September 18, 2023, I toured that Pennsylvania field. Now a National Park, created to honor Flight 93 and it's 33 courageous passengers, who gave their lives, that all the rest of us might live. No other flight that day, realized what was happening to them, until it was too late. Only Flight 93 had the auspicious honor of taking a stand against tyranny. Stand they did, knowing full well they might not make it.
The memorial is a combination of indoor and outdoor observation. Among the indoor, museum displays, are the voice recordings of the final phone calls the passengers made. Wives, husbands, cousins, best friends, and siblings. You listen to those recordings while standing before a life size empty plane cabin. It's as close as you can get to the final world they saw.
As you leave the museum, in it's quiet, muted experience, you step out into a radiant sunlit world. To acres of glorious pasture, surrounded by jutting ancient trees. You can hear crickets singing, see birds, and butterflies. You can also hear silence. The earth is sacredly holding those passengers souls.
The National Park website reads,
At about 9:28 a.m., after 46 minutes of routine flight across Pennsylvania, the terrorists on Flight 93 overtook the cockpit, turning the plane southeast on a course directed toward Washington, D.C., the nation's capital. The passengers and crew were forced to the back of the plane and told to be quiet. Using airfones, passengers and crew began making calls to report the hijacking. They soon learned the shocking news about the other hijacked planes and quickly realized that Flight 93 was part of a larger attack on America. This realization led to a vote and a collective decision to fight back.In just over 30 minutes, this diverse group of people on Flight 93 developed a plan and put it into action. The cockpit voice recorder (reader discretion advised) captured the sounds of their struggle: shouts, screams, calls to action, and sounds of breaking glassware. To stop the uprising, the terrorist piloting the aircraft began to roll it to the left and right, and pitch the nose up and down. In its final moments, the plane turned upside down as it passed over rural Western Pennsylvania. The terrorists remained in control of the plane and chose to crash it rather than risk the passengers and crew regaining control of the aircraft.At 10:03 a.m., Flight 93 plowed into an empty field at a speed of 563 miles per hour. Upon impact, the 5,500 gallons of jet fuel on board the aircraft exploded, creating a ball of fire that rose higher than the trees
In Remembrance - I bring you my images from Flight 93 Memorial National Park
A beautiful post, Carrie. My heart breaks every time I remember those awful events and what everyone went through - particularly those trapped on the planes or in the attacked buildings. I don't think the world has ever truly healed from those events, not fully.