SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — Judi Baeckel put up her American flag as usual outside her home the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and gazed up at the limitless blue sky that aviators call “severe clear.”
“I thought, ‘Oh, it’s going to be such a beautiful, wonderful day today,’” she recalled a couple of weeks ago.
Within hours, United Airlines Flight 93, almost belly up and engines screaming, slammed into a grassy field a mile or so from her front door.
A fireball shot skyward, and then a puff of dark black smoke shaped like a mushroom. Houses and buildings shook in the rural town of 245 people. Windows rattled; garage doors popped open.
“There was nothing but a big crater,” said Rick King, former assistant chief of the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Company Station 627, who, with three colleagues, was first on the scene in an engine nicknamed Big Mo.
Small fires flickered here and there. A grove of hemlock trees was burning. The air reeked of kerosene Jet A fuel. There was no one to rescue.
“You never get over it, never,” King said. “I relive it every day. I can see it as if it’s happening now.”
United 93, the fourth weaponized jet in the 9/11 attacks on America, missed its target, believed to be the U.S. Capitol, by 18 to 20 minutes — after passengers rebelled and stormed the cockpit to try to wrest the Boeing 757 from al-Qaida hijackers.
Forty passengers and crew members died in what came to be known as the first battle in the State Department-named “Global War on Terror.”
Within hours of the Flight 93 crash, a pasture full of satellite trucks were beaming Shanksville to every corner of the globe. TV news correspondents were doing stand-ups in residents’ driveways. You never get over it, never. I relive it every day I can it as if it’s happening now.Rick King, former assistant fire chief
“At first you didn’t realize the full impact of what happened,” said Kathy Walker, an area resident whose son would enlist in the Air Force. “That took days and weeks. … I mean, it was very personal because it was here. It was our town. Little Shanksville. … Who ever heard of Shanksville?”
Two decades on, the last U.S. troops — initially deployed to pursue al-Qaida leaders suspected of planning the 9/11 attacks — have been pulled out of Afghanistan, and the Taliban has taken over the country from a weakened secular government.
In Shanksville, the swarms of visiting media and tourists are largely gone. The 2,200-acre Flight 93 National Memorial, operated by the National Park Service, is accessible right off Route 30, leaving no need to go through town at all.
The borough has changed in small ways, but not in one big one: Residents here continue to dedicate themselves to honoring the victims of Flight 93 as heroes who laid down their lives to save many more in Washington. They’ve become the stewards and storytellers of hallowed ground.
