United with Flight 93

Small pieces. Debris all over. Pieces you could hold in your hand. We were told that there was a large amount of flame in the that crater covered up. There wasn’t much of the plane there. Hardly any of it there. When you looked down, you couldn’t tell that it was a plane or something from a scrap yard.

This is what Corporal Craig Bowman told me when I asked him what he saw when he first arrived at the crash site of Flight 93 on 9/11. As the first PA State policeman [PSP] to arrive on the scene, he was in charge of “the crime scene,” setting up an inner perimeter at the crash site while his colleagues set up an outer perimeter that encompassed 10 square miles and would eventually be staffed by 250 PSP officers. Corporal Bowman also observed:

There was wire everywhere. It was charred, but the metal part of the wire was still there. You probably could have stretched out that wire from here to Somerset. The only thing recognizable was a Bible, laying open to Psalm 121, you know that “lift my eyes to the hills” Psalm. It was odd that the Bible would be laying there intact given the severity of the other damage.

My connection with Corporal Bowman and three other Shanksville First Responders had begun six months earlier when I filmed them for a client video about 9/11 that also featured First Responders from New York City and the Pentagon. After the shoot, they invited me to Shanksville and I accepted.

When I arrived a couple of months later, the First Responders still seemed haunted. Dave Fox, Assistant Director of the Somerset County Department of Emergency Services, pulled out a large thick book of blueprints of every square mile of the county. “The crash site is on page 93,” he said, turning to that page. “Ninety-three,” he repeated for emphasis. “What are the chances?”

Every citizen I met in Shanksville knew the names of the Flight 93 passengers as well as what seat they were sitting in. When family members came to the crash site, dozens of citizens and their children created scrap books filled with notes thanking the family member for their child’s sacrifice. “If the plane had stayed up in the air two more second, it would have plowed into our school,” read one note.

A makeshift memorial honoring each of the passengers had been set up outside the inner perimeter, featuring a hand-crafted angel for each passenger.

I was particularly touched by the memorial to Rich Guadagno, the 38-year-old manager at the Humboldt Wildlife Refuge in California.

Three of the four Shanksville First Responders are now divorced. Two were unemployed for a period of time. I learned this when I visited them in May of 2010. At that time, Corporal Bowman shared this:

Where does the community stand? It’s not even been 10 years so it’s too soon to have been healed. It may be another two, three or 10 years. Most people will move on. Some will hold on to this crash and catastrophe. No one will forget. Over time, trauma does heal, right? Time does tend to heal, right?”

TOMORROW: 9/11 — 25 years Later, Part III

The Aftermath