By Sean D. Hamill MCT
SHANKSVILLE, Pa. – Bill Ziegler heard the roar of United Flight 93 as it soared too close to his home in Stonycreek Township on Sept. 11, 2001, heard the explosion moments later, and dashed to the scene within minutes in his pickup truck. He still couldn’t figure out what had happened.
“But there’s no sign of an airplane and no hole. It just buried itself,” Ziegler, now 81, told the National Park Service in an interview that is part of an oral history of Sept. 11. “And I couldn’t get it through my head where it was. You could see smoke coming up and some green leaves burning a little. But I guess the explosion made a hole for the plane.”
From the views of the first residents on the scene, to an air traffic controller still struggling to talk about his role, to a victim’s brother recalling how he was almost arrested trying to visit the site, the park service’s oral history project hopes to preserve the details of what happened in Shanksville.
As the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, Flight 93 National Memorial curator Barbara Black and oral historian Kathie Shaffer are quietly working to record the words of those directly involved in the events of that day. And through another project, the park service is collecting every memento visitors leave behind at the temporary Flight 93 memorial – more than 25,000 items to date.
There are similar projects memorializing the events of Sept. 11 in New York and Washington, D.C. But Shanksville is different, Black said, because of the way all 40 passengers and crew died, fighting the terrorists who took control of the plane and preventing the jet from slamming into the White House or U.S. Capitol.
“We do tell a story of hope,” she said. “But when you remember it, you’re always recalling that day, and it’s also a story of sadness.”
Black, 56, the former curator of the local historical museum, collects most of the mementos in weekly treks to the site. She approaches every item, whether it’s a Bible or a Tibetan prayer flag, toy frog or tattered American flag, or even a sock, with the same perspective.
“People say, ‘Why are you saving a sock?’ Well, that was that person’s message, and this was how they responded,” said Black, who has indeed catalogued at least one sock. “Who knows exactly what it means? We save them all and we’ll let historians decide.”
Black and Shaffer’s work is intended to create the hardware of memories, both in words and objects, that will be on display and available for future researchers at the permanent Flight 93 memorial projected to open by 2011.
But collectively, their work also combines to paint a picture of the heroism of those 40 passengers and crew, the evil they battled and the questions they eventually faced.
“With Flight 93, one of the questions people ask themselves when they visit the site is: What would I do? Would I be courageous enough? Would I get up out of my seat? Would I take action?” said Shaffer, 51.
She’s a reserved woman who was formerly a registered nurse. She also has a direct tie to Flight 93: Her husband, Terry, is the fire chief of the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department, and someday he will have to be interviewed for the project.
Her approach to the interviews is part instinct and part training, including standard questions she tries to ask each person – name, age, hometown, etc.
“Then I ask, ‘How did your day on Sept. 11 begin?’ They usually say, ‘It was just like any other day,’ and usually, 40 to 50 minutes later, they stop talking and, phew, they’re spent and you’re spent. It’s still hard for many of them to talk about it,” she said.
