SHANKSVILLE, Pennsylvania — At the Flight 93 Memorial, on Sept. 11, you will see all sorts. Dozens of bikers, many in their gang colors, rode, parked, and stood around the visitor center and surrounding road. A Canadian commercial pilot, in uniform, speaking French, was the first man I met there.
Tour buses and locals came to the site to honor the fallen and memorialize that awful day in 2001.
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As I left the memorial’s visitor’s center — a museum, in effect, about the day, the flight, and the site — I saw a young family: Mom, Dad, and three children. The oldest was 11, the youngest around 2.
This struck me because I remember when my children were younger, I wanted to talk to them about 9/11, particularly about Flight 93, but I didn’t know what they could handle. The museum here tells horrific stories. If you visit, you learn about death, fathers realizing they will never see their children, evil that’s hard to imagine. There’s detail about the passengers on the plane choosing violence — violence they know will likely end in their death.
So why did these parents pull their children from school and drive two hours from Mount Holly Springs, Pennsylvania, to visit this somber site?
Their answer began with a detail that made the visit even more poignant: Today was young Rockwell’s birthday. This boy was born on Sept. 11, 2014.
“I’ve been talking to him about bravery a lot,” the mother said. “It’s my hope he’ll be a hero.”
Dad nodded.
Being a hero, Rockwell told me, is “doing stuff for other people, before you.”
Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Thomas Burnett, and Jeremy Glick were such heroes. The easy course would have been to obey the hijackers and hope they would somehow live. Even when it became clear that it wasn’t an option, a fearful man would have held on to every last moment and avoided direct conflict.
But on that flight were men who were ready to be heroes. Men who saved others’ lives and saved the U.S. Capitol by doing something terrifying and violent that, in the words of then-President George W. Bush, “ranks among the most courageous acts in American history.”
Faced with stories of bravery, every man asks himself whether he would have done the right thing in that situation. Meeting young Rockwell, the birthday boy, I asked another question: Am I raising my sons to do the right thing in that situation? Are we raising the heroes that America needs?