On board flight 93 no one could know for sure what would happen in the next few minutes. But some passengers had understood one thing by now: that plane would not have come to destination as a normal scheduled flight.
It was the morning of 11 September 2001.
Todd Beamer was 32 years old and was on the United Airlines 93 flight when the plane was hijacked. Through the calls made during the flight, passengers learned what was happening in the rest of the country: other planes had already been used to hit the World Trade Center.
At that point the perspective changed completely.
Beamer and other passengers realized that staying real would probably mean leaving the hijackers control to the end. They decided to try something that could hardly offer them a way of salvation: to reach the cockpit and react.
Before the assault, Beamer was in telephone contact with an operator on the ground.
Then he spoke the words that would remain tied forever to that day: “Let’s roll”.
Come on.
Passengers moved to the cabin. A desperate struggle followed, while the plane lost its share.
At 10:03, flight 93 rushed to Shanksville, Pennsylvania. None of the people on board survived.
But the plane did not reach Washington.
This is the detail that makes the story of flight 93 different from the other tragedies of that morning. People on board were not soldiers prepared for a mission. They were passengers who, within a few minutes, were in front of an extreme choice.
They knew that the chances of returning home were almost nonexistent.
Yet they decided to act.
The name of Todd Beamer became one of the symbols of that resistance, but what happened was a group of common men and women who, in the last moments of their lives, tried to prevent other people from becoming victims of the same attack.
At a distance of years, perhaps this is the most powerful meaning of their history: courage did not come from the absence of fear.
He came from the decision to do something despite that fear.