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John,

25 years ago this morning, 40 passengers and crew members boarded United Airlines Flight 93 expecting an ordinary flight across the country.

Then the world changed.

After terrorists seized the plane, passengers called their loved ones and learned that planes had already struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Among those aboard was 32-year-old Todd Beamer—a husband, a father of two, with another child on the way.

Unable to reach his family, Todd was connected by phone with operator Lisa Jefferson. He told her that he and several other passengers planned to fight back. Before they did, Todd asked her to pray with him.

Then she heard him turn to the others:

“Are you guys ready? Okay. Let’s roll.”

Minutes later, Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Forty ordinary people, confronted with an unimaginable choice, summoned extraordinary courage. They could not know whether they could save themselves. They only knew they might still save others.

So they acted.

For those of us who wore our nation’s uniform, September 11 carries another weight.

I served for 30 years in the Army Reserve, including deployments overseas after 9/11. I had the privilege of serving alongside men and women who left their families and their lives at home because their country called. Some returned bearing wounds seen and unseen.

Some never returned at all.

Their service was part of what followed September 11. But the first acts of defiance happened that very morning in the stairwells of burning buildings, among first responders rushing toward danger, and aboard an airplane over Pennsylvania.

Twenty-five years later, millions of Americans were not yet born when the towers fell, the Pentagon burned, or Flight 93 came down in that field.

That makes our responsibility to remember greater, not smaller.

We must tell them about the 2,977 innocent people we lost. We must tell them about the first responders. We must tell them about those who answered the call to serve.

And here in Pennsylvania, we have a special responsibility to tell them about Todd Beamer and the 39 other passengers and crew members of Flight 93.

They had only minutes to decide what they would do with the time they had left.

They chose courage. They chose sacrifice. They chose others before themselves.

That field near Shanksville is hallowed ground because of that choice.

Twenty-five years later, Pennsylvania remains the keeper of their story. May we always be worthy of that responsibility.

May God bless the heroes of Flight 93, all those we lost on September 11, their families, our first responders, and every American who answered the call to serve.

We will never forget.

- Stacy

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