Shanksville

This afternoon I looked across an open Pennsylvania field lit by a setting September sun, with a backdrop of trees in the earliest phase of their seasonal color-shift. Just in front of the treeline was a slight depression marked by a solitary American flag.

I tried to ignore my surroundings - the casually chatty tourists, the infuriatingly cheerful government employee, and the haphazard personal memorials whose tackiness is exceeded only by the sincerity of the people who left them. Standing there silently in my suit and sunglasses, I sobbed more violently than I have in nearly four years.

Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The ending point of perhaps the single most heroic act in American history. The impact site of United Flight 93, which crashed as its passengers struggled to regain control of the plane from four terrorists who intended to destroy a target here in Washington.

I get pissed off at how blithely, arbitrarily many people (especially politicians and members of the media) offered a "Hero" label to anyone who died on September 11th. However heartwarming it might be to attribute heroism to the victims, true heroism requires more than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Heroism exists where people choose to put themselves in harm's way for a greater good. It exists in its higest form when those who are least prepared for dangerous circumstances demonstrate valor in the face of their own certain death.

It is under that definition that the passengers and crew of Flight 93 stand alone. They didn't sign up for their fight. They had no training or combat experience. They didn't have any weapons. And yet they resolved that they would not sit idly by as the hijackers flew them into their intended target. Knowing that they had no real hope of saving themselves, the passengers gave up precious last minute phone calls to loved ones they would never see again, stormed the flight deck and forced the terrorists to down the plane, ending all of their lives in that lonely Pennsylvania field.

I wanted the field all to myself. I wanted to lay myself on the ground where the plane hit, to speak my gratitude and sorrow to the souls of those that died. I wanted to shout aloud to God, expressing passionately and violently all the feelings that were beating back and forth within me. I wanted to wail openly instead of just letting the tears roll from behind my convenience-store shades. But in the end I held the ache in my throat as I maneuvered among those pointing at this and that t-shirt left on the chain-link fence or chatting cheerfully about the lunch they'd had at the tour bus's last stop. With frustration and resent for all who seemed to regard the scene as more a novelty than a graveyard, I spun my tires and left the field behind me.