Sacred Ground: A 9/11 Story

The NPR Politics Podcast

NPR

Politics, Daily News, News

4.5 • 24.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2021

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On Sept. 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked by four al-Qaida terrorists. The passengers and crew fought back and because of that, the plane crashed outside Shanksville, Pa., instead of its likely target: the U.S. Capitol.

Part of the plane crashed onto land owned by Tim Lambert, a public radio reporter at WITF in Harrisburg, Pa. The crash would end up connecting Lambert, in surprising ways, to the first responders who managed the aftermath and to the families of the people who died on board. He gained access and insight into 9/11 that no other reporter had.

Twenty years after Flight 93's crash, Lambert and NPR's Scott Detrow tell the story of Flight 93: what happened that day and what happened over the years to come.

Warning: This episode contains explicit language and content some listeners may find disturbing.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Every one of us who's old enough to remember goes back to the same thing.
0:04.0	How sunny, clear, and blue the sky was that morning.
0:07.7	Wally Miller was at home in rural Pennsylvania having coffee with his dad watching TV.
0:13.1	Suddenly there was breaking news.
0:15.3	An aircraft had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.
0:19.2	Then a second plane hit.
0:20.8	It was September 11, 2001.
0:23.8	Miller is the corner in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, a position he'd taken over from his dad.
0:29.1	How'd you like to be the corner in New York now, he asked, as they both sat there watching the shocking images?
0:35.3	About a half hour after a third jetliner plowed into the Pentagon, Wally's phone rang.
0:40.2	It was a neighboring county coroner's office asking if he needed any help with the plane that had crashed in his jurisdiction.
0:47.8	I thought they were kidding me.
0:49.5	I said, you guys shouldn't be making fun of something like that.
0:52.3	I said, this is very serious.
0:53.8	There was no plane crash.
0:55.5	Wally couldn't get through to 911, so he reached out on his county radio, but there wasn't much information to share.
1:01.6	So I just said, well, I'm going to go out.
1:04.7	Usually I have a jump kit that I put in here and different equipment that I use.
1:09.1	But I thought, well, if this is an airplane crash, I'm not going to have enough equipment for anything.
1:15.4	So I just put on a pair of gumboots and I drove out there.
1:19.6	But when Wally pulled up to what he'd been told was the crash site,
1:23.3	all he saw was a gaping, smoldering crater.
	...

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