September 11 · This Day in America
The morning is clear and ordinary. At 8:46 a.m. a hijacked airliner strikes the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At 9:03, the world watching now, a second plane hits the South Tower. At 9:37 a third tears into the Pentagon. The South Tower falls at 9:59. The North Tower at 10:28. In under two hours, 2,977 people are killed — office workers, travelers, and the 441 firefighters, medics, and police who walked up the stairs the others were running down, the greatest single-day loss of emergency responders in American history. The towers came down on live television, and a country watched its own people die and could not reach them. What is hardest to say plainly is also the truest: into that smoke, thousands of strangers ran toward each other. The grief belongs to everyone. So does the resolve that followed it.
Source: www.911memorial.org
Also on this day · 2001
On the fourth plane, the passengers had phones, and the phones told them what the others did not know. They took a vote. At 9:57 a.m. they rushed the cockpit of United Flight 93 — ordinary people, with no training and no time, fighting for control of an airliner. It went down in a field near Shanksville at 10:03, far short of Washington. Everyone aboard died. Whatever the hijackers meant to hit, they never reached it. Forty people decided that.
Source: www.nps.gov