Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, James Zumwalt used the anniversary to do two things at once: recount one of the day’s least-known acts of potential sacrifice, and pass along a message from a woman whose husband died at the Pentagon. He published the piece in American Thinker.
Zumwalt’s opening image is of a warrior’s basic assumption, that someone is watching his back. On 9/11, he writes, that assumption failed. Even as the country scanned its airspace and coastlines for threats approaching from outside, the attackers were already inside the perimeter, flying hijacked commercial jets toward American targets.
Two pilots, no missiles, one order
The essay’s centerpiece is the scramble of two National Guard F-16s from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. By the time flight leader Colonel Marc Sasseville and First Lieutenant Heather Penney, then 26, got the call, the Twin Towers and the Pentagon had already been struck.
Their assignment was to shield Washington, D.C. from any further airborne threat, which was expected to approach at low altitude to evade radar. At first the pilots were told three aircraft were inbound. That was later corrected to a single hijacked plane still in the air: United Flight 93.
They knew Washington was the general target. They did not know the specific one. Zumwalt notes the later assessment that it was probably either the Capitol, where Congress was in session, or the White House.
Then came the complication that gives the story its weight. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Cold War ended, the decision had been made that there was no need to keep the F-16s armed. The jets had no missiles. They could not shoot the airliner down.
That left one option, and both pilots understood it. According to Zumwalt’s account, Sasseville told Penney plainly what the mission would be: he would fly his F-16 into the nose of United 93, and she was to ram her aircraft into its tail. Penney’s own reflection, as quoted in the essay, was that once the mission became clear, she realized that if the universe had placed her there, that was her purpose.
The two stayed airborne three hours and never encountered the flight. Only after landing did they learn why. Passengers aboard United 93 had fought their way into the cockpit, and the plane went down in an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, far from any intended target. Penney, whose nickname was “Lucky,” had no need of the sacrifice she had accepted.
Zumwalt frames the day in arithmetic: 2,996 stories to be told. He tells one more of them.
A father’s day off, a son’s flight
Bernard Brown Sr. worked at the Pentagon and might easily have been killed by American Airlines Flight 77 when it struck the building. Instead, he had taken the day off to play golf. As he left, his wife drove their eleven-year-old son, Bernard C. Brown Jr., to Dulles Airport in Virginia for a flight to Los Angeles and an educational event. The flight he boarded was Flight 77.
Among the 2,996 dead was the husband of Laurie Laychak, a civilian budget analyst for the Department of the Army at the Pentagon, the same place the two had met. On the 25th anniversary, Zumwalt writes, she offered a message he believes Americans should sit with.
Laychak recalled the grief that followed the attacks. But she also wanted those too young to remember to understand something else about that period: it was a time of unity. “United we stand” was everywhere, the flag was flown openly, and people seemed kinder, more willing to stop and talk. She described it as an amazing, united feeling and patriotism.
What she sees now, according to the essay, is a very different country. Laychak does not wish another national tragedy on America. But she would like the sense of community from those weeks back.
Zumwalt asks whether hers is a lone voice in the wilderness and says he hopes not, that her call reaches people worn out by what he characterizes as continuing anti-Americanism among those he considers too naive to value what the country has. The piece closes on the importance of speaking freely, which he calls crucial to the republic.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/remembering-the-costs-of-9-11/