The Legacy of Flight 93

An Army officer remembers his cousin Rich Guadagno and the other 39 heroes who died in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on September 11

- By Col. Christopher Whelan

Displayed among the artifacts at the Flight 93 National Memorial is the badge of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife officer recovered from the downed plane. The badge was discovered by investigators amid the cockpit debris. I draw no conclusions from this. The physics of airplane crashes, especially when a plane is deliberately driven into the ground from a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, are complex. What I know is that the badge belonged to my cousin Rich Guadagno and, like the other 32 passengers and 7 crew members who perished that day at the hands of terrorists, he was a hero.

I first visited the site outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, almost by happenstance on a cold February day more than three years after the 9/11 attack. I’d been leading a group of West Point cadets at the Officers Christian Fellowship Retreat Center when I realized how close we were.

The cadets crowded around the 40-foot chain-link fence at the crash site, one foot for each passenger and crew. We had troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq by then, a direct result of what had happened that infamous day in the scarred remains of this abandoned strip mine. Some of these very cadets would face deployment themselves. I wanted them to see how it had begun, to understand that history happens in real places, to people and families whose lives are forever changed.