|
|
The Greatest American Hero of Our TimeDec 30 '08 (Updated Jan 04 '09) Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in Books
The Bottom Line "I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear." (Rosa parks, 1913-2005)
There is a part of me that doesn’t want to bring back this day for anybody—a part of me that believes this day represented some of the worst evil and dread humans can face. But there is an even bigger part of me that wishes I could be on that plane, United Flight 93, right beside Todd Beamer, and I wish I could take every American with me. Let’s go back, can we? Let’s light this thing up right now before we forget the sorrow and triumphs of that act--of that day. It seems like 9/11 is shrinking, and the stories and accounts that formed the day are spreading apart and dissolving. I hope what’s happening is that we are taking a collective breath, looking away from the disaster until our minds and hearts can handle staring at it dead on. But my fear is that we are forgetting, already. My fear is that if we don’t put the spotlight on the actions of those brave souls like Todd Beamer, we won’t possibly be able to convey patriotism, selflessness, and sacrifice to our children—not the kind that we witnessed on that day. We need to put some of the events of 9/11 so high up on the attention scale that we can be certain the message stays strong, and that the blueprint for what it is to be American remains as strong as it was after Pearl Harbor and the Revolutionary War. 9/11 will turn out to be a solid spike in the boulder of American History, that I know, but will we forget the actual people, the time, the feeling—will we lose the memory of how it felt to see the 2nd plane hit, or our fear and rage during and after that day? And scariest of all, will we let that day influence our lifestyles as Americans, or have we already… I was with my daughter on the morning of 9/11 at about 8:45 a.m. I was taking care of her alone while her mother was out of state for months of training. We were in northern Vermont. I was in the process of changing a video tape for my daughter—she wanted to watch, “Kipper,” the British dog, which was one of her favorite cartoon tapes. I took out the tape that was in the player and the news flashed on for a second… I saw the first tower burning. I was listening to Charlie Gibson talk about the incident, and I didn’t think too much of it at first, other than this was an unfortunate accident and I hope everybody could get out of the burning building. When the 2nd plane entered the frame, live, my thoughts for the three seconds before impact basically went like this: “Oh, it’s a fire plane. It’s coming to put out the fire because no hoses or ladders can reach that high. Wait, they can’t do that! The water or powder will hurt people on the streets if they dump from that high, geez I hope they don’t do that.” Crash. And like so many Americans, so many who have talked and written about it, it was at that very moment, that 2nd impact, that began a trip into total surreality for me . In the back of my mind, something was trying to convince me that this was some Hollywood production, a magnificent stunt. I knew the truth, but I felt like I was no longer here. I felt like I was watching from some other planet as I watched what happened to my country and my countrymen. People were jumping from buildings, others stunned as they looked at the damage, the radios of fire and police people buzzed with confusion, yelling, and frustration and the media fought to get information. Utter chaos, on so many levels… a country that was prepared for a nuclear war on a global scale and was the last standing super-power had been scallywagged by a group of low-life extremists. The reports of the Pentagon crash and flight 93 came in. The president had scrambled in Air Force One. Fighter jets scrambled to prepare for the unthinkable as the FAA ordered every aircraft in the sky to land. Fire trucks rolled like convoys into Manhattan, and the firemen filed into the buildings like infantry into Personnel Carriers. A holy man died as he prayed over an injured one. The towers fell. Extremists worldwide cheered. One man from Pakistan said, “We have finally ####ed the Americans!” Nobody knew what to do. A wife looked for her husband, a mother for her daughter, and hundreds of families hoped their loved ones had called in sick for work. Theories flowed like a broken dam of possibilities and elucidation became the entire focus of the media, all trying to at least define the attack so we could start figuring out a response. Thousands lay dead, hundreds injured. New York and Washington froze in time. For them, the Earth did stand still for one day. Everything just stopped. In a huge kind of macrocosmic way, those two cities had suffered a right hook that knocked them unconscious. Although he was not my favorite president, George Bush stood at the hallowed ground of the fallen towers and he spoke to firefighters, and he gained my respect; one of the firefighters who had survived was far away from where Bush was standing, and he yelled to the top of his lungs several times as George Bush spoke through the megaphone, “We can’t hear you!” On the 2nd or 3rd time, Bush broke his speech and replied with this: “Well I can hear you. The whole world can hear you. And whoever knocked these buildings down is gonna be hearing from all of us soon.” For a moment in time, regardless of mistakes before or after, George W. Bush was my hero. His address to the nation was much longer but only equally as powerful as that moment with the firefighters. But heroes change. There are thousands of people that were heroes that day, from out-of-state firefighters who came into town to help to all the city’s personnel who lost their lives trying to save others. And I hope that their sacrifice is always remembered and honored, but one hero seems to rise above the rest for me. One hero, almost certain of his impending death, rallied a group of airline passengers, unarmed, to attack the hijackers of flight 93, who had control of the plane, knives and, for all the passengers knew, a bomb. One man kept his voice steady. Father of 2 with 1 on the way, husband and son, a 32 year-old with a lifetime ahead of him, a career that would sustain him, and a family that was nuts about him—one man organized a group of strangers to mount the bravest counter-terrorism attack in history—one man put together a team within only minutes of this mind-boggling, panic-inducing confusion; a team of people who were not trained for anything like this, a team of people armed only with hot water and pure American courage, a team of people with nothing in common except for being Americans. And then, with those words I’ll never forget, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” This is my hero. I’ve never really had an American hero. I was awed by the WWII guys that stormed Normandy and pretty much any soldier who braved the battles, but I didn’t have one man, one truly iconic figure with whom I could place my ideals as an American; a person that I believe was the poster child for the America I was so proud of. The medics and chaplains seemed even braver than the soldiers, because they were usually unarmed and fought just to protect American lives here and in the hereafter. The bullets that whizzed past those guys eventually just became like mosquitoes; that was raw courage. Our soldiers overseas and in many other wars certainly showed heroic bravery, from the commanders who walked up and down the lines of their men, instructing and motivating them, while bullets flew by and shells went off danger-close to the men who ran out of ammunition and fought with their bare hands. America has no shortage of heroes, even here in her infancy. The one thing that had me stuck before I wrote this was how I could write specifically about Todd Beamer without discrediting the other passengers that helped him and all the other heroes who came before and after him. I couldn’t really figure that out but the best I can do is just say it; if most of those other heroic acts where by American military men (I'm an Air Force vet myself, and I know this country has no shortage of bravery), this was an act that could represent any American, and an act that I hope we would all follow if the situation arose. (The following description of some of my flying experience is all true, and I hope that it makes you a little uneasy as you imagine going through it, because that feeling, probably multiplied by 100, is what the Flight 93 passengers had to conquer in order to do what they did.) When I did my first jump in skydiving, I stood by the open door of the plane and just stared at the almost dark square fields that dotted the landscape. You aren't supposed to do a "night jump," until your 80th skydive, but I somehow find myself being an exception to the rule more often than not. I did my exit routine and jumped. For the first 15 seconds of falling or so (from about 12,500 feet to 9,000 feet) all I could do was stare at the ground—I was supposed to be doing a “practice” routine where you do mock ripcord pulls but I just stared at the ground, because I was shocked, just shocked that the Earth didn’t seem to be rushing up at me; it didn’t seem that I was even getting closer to it (but I was, at 120 mph or so). I didn’t feel fear; there was a slight dread from the very real possibility of dying for no good reason, but not fear—that was the day I knew I had fear beaten (at least in regard to any physics). And even after being shoved out of a plane on my 2nd jump (I messed up on my exit routine and wanted to do it over—one of my two instructors had other ideas) where I did no less than 6 back-flips before regaining my composure (not to mention my altimeter was broken and bouncing between 2,000 and 9,000 feet, which forced me to read the altimeter off of an instructor’s wrist), I still didn’t experience real fear. Somehow, I just knew I had it beaten. Side note on the skydive; I saw a special once that was a study about how people in life-or-death situations eventually remember and fall back upon their training after any initial panic. I can say that as I did those backflips, I had no plan--I didn't know what was happening, and I just couldn't grasp that somebody could shove me out of a plane (it made me some kind of angry, too--I wasn't ready--the instructor that shoved me out was the same one that jumped with George Bush Sr. a couple of times, I believe, and he happened to be a psychopath named Larry who owns SkyDive Suffolk in Suffolk,Va... it was all I could do not to clock him when I landed). But I remember thinking in my mind, "Fix it. Survive." And I literally had to close my eyes because when you are flipping, fast--plane, ground, plane, ground, plane, ground--you can tell your body to do something and it may not know how because of the visual disorientation--so I closed my eyes and did what I knew was the golden rule; stick your pelvis out as far as you can, which gives you the badminton birdie effect. So I did that, and opened my eyes about five seconds later to see if it worked. It did, and the instructors who were both steering clear of me (fear of getting knocked out by a kick--it's pretty common) flew in and floated alongside me. That, to me, was a prime example of being able to fall back on your training to survive. One guy was on TV recently; he was an accomplished ex-Spetznaz agent (basically Russia's CIA/special forces combined) and he said something like, "You think you will rise to the occasion--you think that when you go to war, you can handle a bullet or two in the shoulder or legs--but you won't. You will fall back only to the highest level you were trained at. This is why our training is so painful, and why so many die." So, along with some other stuff I had read or studied, these statements all came together with a common theme, pretty much--if you have been trained, you will amaze yourself because your mind will take over to save your life and you will do exactly what you were trained to do. But here's the problem: How on God's green Earth could the passengers of Flight 93 have been prepared to deal with anything like what they dealt with? Sure, Air Marshals might have had some training, but the average airline passenger pre-9/11 barely knew how to open a bag of peanuts. That has to be a testament to how far these people came in a matter of minutes--minutes. That all being said about defeating fear and falling back on training, and knowing enough to fly an aircraft and probably enough to land one or be talked down by the tower, I feel really uncomfortable flying with some guy I don’t know in the cockpit. It’s like I want control of the plane, like I don’t trust him… when in reality he’s our best shot to overcome a disaster. It’s a loss of control feeling; like being stuck to a giant whale in the middle of a cold, gray sea. And that feeling—that loss of control, probably accompanied by raw fear, is something I will never fully comprehend as being possible in the minds of those brave people on United Airlines Flight 93. Todd Beamer had a lot to live for, but he quickly recognized that he had even more to die for. In my mind, it has always been about numbers; if I can either save a younger person or more than one person, it’s automatic. Even if it is an elder, chances are I’m going in after them. But I don’t think it was about numbers with Todd Beamer. He knew he would be saving lives, sure, no matter the outcome of the charge to the cockpit, and I have no question that part of his motivation was to save more people and the next "target." But I don’t think he feared the additional loss of life that could have happened as much as he feared not being an example to his children, an amazing legacy to his wife and family, and arguably the absolutely most-respected American hero of our time--maybe ever. Thank you, Todd Beamer. What you did not only told our enemies that America fights back whenever she has her freedom threatened, but it awakened a patriotism in us that made American matter again; made the flag and its colors a little more vibrant. And now, to be honest, because of what you did, I think many Americans will have no problem finding the courage to fight our enemies, even if our only weapon is hot water, because now, we know we can win, and that in the event we lose, honor still carries with it enormous weight and influence. For as long as I live, now, when I bounce around in my thoughts and pause for a second on American patriotism—on what we did all the fighting and dying for—it will be you that I think of, because you are what every single one of us hopes we can be. (If you'd like to see some well-designed Todd Beamer products for sale, which I designed, visit my profile page, and click on the Todd Beamer Products link near the top. Thanks!)  |
| Write the first comment on this review! |
|
Ads by Google
|
