Would You Have Stormed The Cockpit?
As we near another anniversary of that dark September day, don't just remember the heroes of Flight 93. Strive to be like them.
By Kylee Zempel
September 10, 2021
I remember many things from when I was five years old — losing teeth, watching “Leave It To Beaver” with my babysitter, giggling as one of my classmates went to the principal’s office for dumping a little carton of chocolate milk on his head. September 11, 2001, is one of the things I can’t. Despite its shock and significance, it’s a memory I just can’t pull.
Vivid, however, is my memory of the first time I hauled my mom’s 9/11 coffee table book out of its dusty nook and saw the picture of the falling man. That’s an image you can’t unsee, and as a youngster whose only concept of the terror attack was that some plane hit some building, that photograph immediately instilled the gravity of what those events meant for the 3,000 people on whose tombstones is engraved September 11, 2001, and the millions more whose lives will never be the same.
I also remember in great detail the time I visited the memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, looking out over the field where Flight 93 went down. I listened through the phones mounted onto the visitors’ center wall to the final words of men and women who should still be speaking today, and I pored over the timeline of events trying to imagine what it would have been like to be aboard the aircraft and to experience the wave of realization that there would be no exit and that my final moments would be spent in horror with strangers.
Those tactile experiences from my youth and adolescence left me with heavy questions. Why would a man jump out the window? I wondered. Why would someone storm the cockpit?
It’s that second scenario, of the plane that didn’t strike the Twin Towers but went down in the middle of an empty field, that I think about most. Now that I’m older and can grasp the circumstances, I better understand why someone would storm the cockpit. The weightier question now is: Would I have?
more
https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/10/would-you-have-stormed-the-cockpit/
