by Jennifer King "The Heretical Housewife"
Copied from The American Partisan
September 19, 2001

Amidst the tragedy and horror of last Tuesday, tales are emerging of intense heroism and personal sacrifice. Tales which showcase the ability of human beings to act with great nobility and courage under dire and unimaginable hardship.

There were office workers, who refused to evacuate until they made sure all of their colleagues were accounted for. There were businessmen and women, who returned to the doomed buildings in order to search for friends. There were the heroic NYC firefighters and policemen, stampeding into the crumbling buildings that others were evacuating, in a frantic search to save as many as possible. There were the workers who bodily carried handicapped colleagues down many flights of stairs, at great potential cost to themselves.

And then, there were the men of Flight 93. Their names; Jeremy Glick, Tom Burnett, Todd Beamer and Mark Bingham. Just regular, young businessmen, on their way to San Francisco. Thrown together by an act of fate. They probably didn’t even speak to one another, perhaps hadn’t yet met one another, while the uneventful flight proceeded for an hour and the flight attendants served breakfast at 30,000 feet.

Suddenly, just shy of Cleveland, the plane veered suddenly south. The hijackers had taken over. Todd Beamer, 32, an Oracle executive from Hightstown, New Jersey, picked up an airphone and contacted a GTE supervisor. Beamer said that hijackers, wielding knives and threatening to blow up the plane with a bomb, had herded 26 passengers into first class. Beamer, nine others and the five flight attendants were ordered to sit in back. Beamer did not know what had happened to the pilots.

Beamer received the information about the World Trade Center crashes from the GTE supervisor, Lisa Jefferson. Other passengers were also phoning out. Jeremy Glick, 31, an Internet company executive, had phoned his wife at her parents home. Glick’s wife, Lyz, confirmed that other hijacked planes had been used as flying bombs by suicidal terrorists. He told her that he and other passengers were formulating a plan to stop the terrorists on board their plane, and that the terrorists had already ruthlessly stabbed one person to death. He calmly discussed his own impending demise, told her he hoped she would have a nice life. He told her how much he loved her and their 12-week old daughter.

Tom Burnett, 38, an executive at a Pleasanton, California medical products company, phoned his wife, Deena, four times. In his last call, he told her that he and a group of passengers were going to do "something" about the terrorists. Mark Bingham, 31, owner of a San Francisco public relations company, phoned his mother in Saratoga. Bingham had sat with Burnett in first class, but didn’t mention any proactive role to his mother. However, his mother is sure that the 6 foot 5 rugby player was actively involved in any attempt to overthrow the terrorists, basing her contention on Bingham’s active roles previously in disarming muggers and righting other wrongs perpetrated on innocent people.

Others who may have participated include Andrew Garcia, 62, of Portola Valley, California and Richard Guadagno, 38, from Eureka, California, a refuge manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who also had federal law enforcement training. Todd Beamer was still on the phone with Lisa Jefferson. He asked her to pray with him and together they recited the 23rd Psalm. Beamer asked Jefferson to phone his wife, pregnant with their third child. He told Jefferson that he and others were going to "jump on" the hijacker with the bomb, who was guarding the passengers in the back. He mentioned Jeremy Glick by name. Then, Beamer dropped the phone. Jefferson distinctly heard Beamer say, "Let’s Roll", sounds of scuffling and screams, and then, silence.

Jeremy Glick’s phone was still open, too. His father-in-law listened and heard screams in the background, silence, more screams and then nothing.

Witnesses on the ground report that the plane wobbled hard left, then right, and then nosedived into the field, a report consistent with the scenario of passengers wrestling with the hijackers.

Reportedly, F-16s flying over Washington were ready to intercept the plane, had it invaded Washington’s airspace despite orders to stand down. U.S. military pilots would have faced the unenviable task of gunning down their innocent fellow countrymen, in order to prevent another fuel bomb from taking out a national monument or the White House. The actions of those brave, doomed, passengers prevented that.

Some professional pilots have also theorized that the White House was indeed the target, and that the previous Pentagon crash was to provide the incoming plane with a visual sighting. Coming in from Culpepper, Virginia, they would have been able to fly low and fast from the south, using the smoke and the Washington monument to line a bead on the White House and strike a fatal blow from that low altitude. We’ll never know, but those passengers had a hand in preventing this, too.

The actions of Glick, Beamer, Burnett, Bingham, Garcia and Guadagno showed why terrorism is inevitably doomed to failure. Because the inexorable longing of the human soul is to be free, and there will always be those among us who will fight, courageously and tenaciously, rather than submit to tyranny. Who will die, bravely and defiantly, rather than submit to cringing defeat.

Real American manhood, and manly characteristics such as chivalry, pride and bravery have been under assault for many years in this country. They were reborn, gloriously, on Flight 93. May it remain so.

© 2001 Jennifer King

"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say,

'What should be the reward of such sacrifices?'

Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth?

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!" 

--Samuel Adams