By Matthew Purucker · Editor-in-Chief
During my senior year of high school, my newspaper advisor, Eric Schott, took The Oracle staff on a field trip to Somerset County, where Flight 93 crashed.
I had visited there once before, but after spending the day learning from Stephen Clark, superintendent of the Flight 93 National Memorial, my perspective on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks changed.
As long as I’ve been able to understand, I’ve known that Sept. 11, 2001 was an incredibly dark day in American history, but until that trip, I only understood it as such: history. Like most, if not all, Grove City College students, I was born after the attacks happened. My parents hadn’t even met.
Although we didn’t live through it as our parents’ generation did, that doesn’t mean our generation gets to forget it.
That’s why that visit to the memorial was important: to see history alive. I will always remember when Clark picked up a handwritten note left that day at the Wall of Names, 22 years after the plane crash. It shared a personal story and thanked the 40 heroes on Flight 93 for sacrificing their lives to ensure the plane wouldn’t reach the nation’s capital.
That visit showed me that when we look back at that tragic day and the rest of our history, we must never forget the heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice. Their courage 25 years ago helped ensure the freedom we have today.
So please, take a few minutes to learn about or remember the following heroes who sacrificed their lives on Sept. 11: Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana, a 24-year-old who saved nearly 20 people trapped in the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York and Todd Beamer, an account manager for Oracle (the company) who helped lead the 40 innocent passengers on Flight 93 to storm the cockpit.
Get to know them, but don’t stop there. They were just two of the many who became heroes that Tuesday morning among the almost 3,000 who lost their lives. Try to get to know them, too.
As Christians at Grove City College, we should be quite familiar with the importance of sacrifice, especially the one Jesus Christ made about 2,000 years ago, which gave us eternal life. Among many others, these men were Christlike; so, on this 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, let us remember their sacrifices and never forget their meaning.
