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If you'd been there... Questions in the AirBy Rick Horowitz
He keeps coming back to the plane. The fourth plane. It's not that he's been ignoring everything that's happened since then. Far from it. The rescue efforts, massive and valiant and largely futile -- he's been keeping track, keeping score. Likewise the investigations, broad and fierce and frantic. The heart-stopping rumors of further terrors yet to come. The latest security measures. The soothing prayers in so many tongues. The constant diplomacy, and the vast array of forces readying for battle. The anger, and the unreasoning anger. The countless kindnesses. The endless tears. He hasn't ignored any of that. But his mind keeps returning to the plane. The plane that didn't hit what it might have hit, that went to earth instead in rural Pennsylvania. Flight 93 refuses to loosen its grip on him. Softly, insistently, it demands his attention. "What do you make of this?" it asks him over and over again. And he replies, "I'm not sure." He's read everything he can bear to read about Flight 93, about how a seemingly normal cross-country morning was suddenly interrupted. About how some of the passengers, in worried phone calls to loved ones on the ground, were alerted to the intruders' murderous intentions. About how some of these passengers, knowing they were doomed anyway, decided to take on the intruders and foil their ghastly plans. He knows all this. He's heard the accounts of the people who received those calls, who heard the rebellion taking shape. ("Let's roll," the man said.) He's read about the sounds preserved on the cockpit voice recorder: a struggle, and then silence. Dozens lost -- but hundreds, even thousands saved? National symbols preserved? This was heroism of a heavenly order, valor beyond calculation; he has no doubt of it. He feels somehow ennobled by these strangers' deeds. Then Flight 93 asks him, "What would you have done?" And he's forced to reply, "I don't know." The strangers aboard Flight 93 have complicated things for him. He's perfectly used to dealing with the fear of flying; over the years, he's even made a certain peace with it. Step onto a plane, he's long understood, and you've given yourself up to the fates. If something terrible happens, it happens, and there's nothing you can do about it. Along with the dread, there was a certain freedom that came with all that powerlessness. There are no decisions you have to make, he could tell himself, nothing you can do that can alter the outcome in the slightest. But now this: this burst of courage from ordinary people. Did they truly risk their lives to save other lives? Hard to say. After all, he tells himself, from where they sat, with what they knew, their lives were already all but lost. Still, he admits, they did something. Would he have done as much? Or would he have convinced himself that it wasn't yet completely hopeless, that the information in those calls was wrong somehow, or that this particular band of hijackers had more benign intentions than the others, and that the best thing to do under the circumstances was to sit quietly and see what happens? He'd like to believe he'd have been heroic -- but he's not sure. He puts himself on Flight 93 and he plays it out again and again. Sometimes he's the leader of the rebellion, single-handedly disarming the monsters, then taking the controls and bringing the plane in for a landing smooth as a whisper. Other times he's frozen in his tracks; they've got a knife on someone he cares about, and he has to decide which is the greater sacrifice. Sometimes he dies a warrior's death, fighting gallantly until a box-cutter blade takes him from behind. Other times he cowers in his seat, too scared to move a muscle. He plays it out again and again. Weeks after it happened, he still can't find the answer. Flight 93 asks him, "What would you have done?" Flight 93 asks him, "What will you do?" Posted 9/27/01. Get
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Rick Horowitz
