September 11, 2001, a few minutes before two o’clock in the afternoon. I was idly channel surfing, having become bored with the deadly dull Kingsley Amis interview I was watching, when my eye was caught by an image on one of the local news channels. Some sort of skyscraper, one tower of which was on fire, a big hole in its side. I recognised the New York WTC and heard the newsreader say it some sort of airplane had crashed into the tower. Not conciously knowing the scale of the towers, I thought it had been some light sports plane or so which had gotten too close to the building and kept watching, switching between Dutch channels and CNN. Not that long after I started watching, while some reporter or other was talking I saw a second plane crash into the towers. Then I knew it was some sort of terrorist attack and started calling people, yelling to my brother, who was also watching upstairs in his room.
As it turned out, those would not be the only planes crashing that day: a third airplane crashed into the Pentagon and minutes later a fourth crashlanded somewhere in Pennsylvania. It’s because of that fourth airplane that I tell you this by now overly familiar story all of us experienced that day.
Because today, just minutes ago in fact, one of the dutch networks showed a reconstruction of what happened on that flight, flight 93. And once again it grabbed me by the throat, hit me deep inside.
It was the only one of the four hijacked flights not to hit its target, because of the heroism of several of its passengers and crew, because thanks to a delay of 41 minutes taking off they knew that three other planes had hit the WTC in New York and the pentagon in Washington and they knew they were going to be the fourth plane to hit an unsuspecting target, killing more innocent people. And they knew they had to stop the terrorists from doing so.
Mark Bingham, Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Sandy Bradshaw, who knows how many other passengers and crew attempted to do so. They failed in winning back control of the plane and landing safely, but they succeeded in stopping the terrorists -at the costs of their lives. In life, they had little in common other then that they were American, shared the same flight and were not afraid to do what was the right thing to do, even if it would cost them their lives. So in death they shared one more thing: they had become heroes. The US can be proud of them.
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