“Mark, this is your mom …” So began the voicemail message left on Sept. 11, 2001, by Alice Hoagland of Los Gatos for her son, Mark Bingham, who was at that moment aboard hijacked United Flight 93. It was a message her son never heard. He and several of his fellow passengers were gathering together a plan to overtake the hijackers and prevent what would have inevitably been further tragedy if the terrorist hijackers were left to strike their intended target – most probably the White House or U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C.
“Mark, this is your mom …” So began the voicemail message left on Sept. 11, 2001, by Alice Hoagland of Los Gatos for her son, Mark Bingham, who was at that moment aboard hijacked United Flight 93. It was a message her son never heard. He and several of his fellow passengers were gathering together a plan to overtake the hijackers and prevent what would have inevitably been further tragedy if the terrorist hijackers were left to strike their intended target – most probably the White House or U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C.
I can’t imagine the worry Ms. Hoagland experienced that morning. Wondering where, exactly, her son was; what, exactly, was happening at that moment. How many times I’ve called my own children with worry in my heart, albeit my concerns not even remotely close to Alice Hoaglund’s fears: “Hi, Ashley, it’s your mom … just wondering where you are. Give me a call as soon as you can, OK?” or “Alyssa, it’s Mom. Please let me know you guys made it back safely …”
On that morning a decade ago, I was still getting used to having my husband around the house on a weekday. He’d retired a short three months before, and this early Tuesday morning I awoke to sounds from the kitchen: coffee beans being ground, the small TV in the kitchen switched on to the news.
I lingered in bed, contemplating a mixed cauldron of feelings. At that moment our family of four should have been aboard a flight leaving San Francisco shortly before 6 a.m., bound for New York.
Both of our daughters were in significant relationships with the young men who would ultimately become their husbands. Knowing this might be the last opportunity we could travel together as a nuclear family, just the four of us, we had scheduled a two-week trip to Italy and France, departing Sept. 11, 2001. It would have been the first time any of us had traveled there, and we were excited about our upcoming adventure.
But then, just weeks prior to our departure, our older daughter landed a job that she’d been hoping to acquire – a teaching position at a private school in Scottsdale, Ariz. where she’d been living since graduating from college. Obviously decisions must be made quickly. Since Ashley’s presence on the trip was now out of the question, should the remaining three of us go on without her? We elected to cancel the trip entirely.
So it was, this mixed bag of feelings on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. I was sad our trip was cancelled, probably forever, but happy for Ashley who had a great job that launched her new teaching career.
Thus on that Tuesday morning, I wasn’t expecting a most unusual statement from my husband as he entered our bedroom and switched on the TV. “You’d better watch this,” he announced without preamble. “We’re under attack.”
What? Attack? What do you mean “under attack?” Attack by what? Locusts? What on EARTH was he talking about??? It was the most absurd statement I’d ever heard come out of his mouth. He might as well have said President George W. Bush was standing in our living room.
As the TV jumped to life I heard words about “a plane” striking the World Trade Center. Well. Obviously a confused or ill pilot inadvertently jammed his Cessna into the side of a building or something. I did simply not comprehend in its awful entirety what had just happened.
Protected on two sides by massive oceans, we Americans believed our country was relatively safe from attack. We knew there was fighting in other parts of the world. We knew there were those out there that hated us. But most of us never dreamed that four of our own planes – large commercial airliners at that – would be used to carry out the mostly deadly, reprehensible attack ever of innocent men, women and children on U.S. soil. And we instinctively knew that life would never be the same again.
As Americans, we all held each other a little closer that awful day, watching together the events unfold as they were reported on television sets across the country and around the world as one, two, three and then four planes were slammed into dust.
I failed to think again that day about the missed flight, the missed vacation we were to have taken. Days later I recalled our cancelled trip and was struck with the realization that our plane would have been in the air, New York bound, on that terrible September morning as the first tower was struck. Our flight would have been grounded – where? Las Vegas? Salt Lake City? I don’t know, but our family never did take that vacation together to Europe.
In retrospect, it was a trivial sacrifice indeed.
