Table Of ContentAngel Patriots
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Angel Patriots
The Crash of United Flight 93 and the Myth of America
Alexander T. Riley
New York University Press
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
www.nyupress.org
© 2015 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Riley, Alexander.
Angel patriots : the crash of United Flight 93 and the myth of America / Alexander T. Riley.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4798-7047-9 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4798-6845-2 (pb : alk. paper)
1. United Airlines Flight 93 Hijacking Incident, 2001. 2. Terrorism—Social aspects—United
States. 3. Memorialization—United States. 4. Myth—Social aspects. I. Title.
HV6432.R547 2015
974.8’79044—dc23
2014040547
New York University Press books are printed on acid-f ree paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Also available as an ebook
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1. Flight 93 and 9/11: American Mythology in the Making 1
2. Death, Horror, and Culture: Making Sense of the
Senseless in Memorials 35
3. The Sacralization of Shanksville: The Emergence of the
Temporary Memorial Site 68
4. Flag Bodies: Commemoration in the Flight 93
Memorial Chapel 111
5. The Permanent Memorial: Symbolic Work and Conflict
in the “Bowl of Embrace” 156
6. The Cultural Narratives of the Books on Flight 93 192
7. The Cultural Narratives of the Films on Flight 93 219
8. Myth in Practice: Visitors at the Temporary Memorial Site 258
9. What Flight 93 Tells Us about America 281
Notes 289
References 305
Index 311
About the Author 317
v
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Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the tremendous help I
received from people and institutions in and around Shanksville and
from others elsewhere in the world.
Barbara Black, Joanne Hanley, Donna Glessner, and others at the U.S.
National Park Service made precious time in their busy schedules to
talk with me, and Barbara allowed me to look about and take photos
freely in the archives at the Park Service Somerset office. I am greatly in
their debt.
Hundreds of visitors to the temporary memorial and the Flight
93 Chapel shared some of their experiences of the memorials with
me, and many others did so nonverbally as I observed them — I hope
inconspicuously — as they interacted with the memorials. All deserve
my profound thanks.
Paul Murdoch, the lead architect of the permanent memorial design,
gave me gracious, detailed explanations of the ideas behind his group’s
design and allowed me to use one of their images in this book. I am
exceedingly grateful for his help.
Many academic colleagues who heard various papers based on this
research asked helpful questions and suggested additional reading
material. Above all, I should mention the faculty and graduate students
in the Cultural Sociology program at Yale and the Department of Soci-
ology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. A number of
members of the faculty at the University of Évora in Portugal were able,
thanks to their location outside of American culture, to give me insights
into the phenomena under investigation I did not encounter in the
United States. Thanks to all.
I am also grateful to my wife Esmeralda and daughter Valeria for
surrounding me with the moral cocoon necessary for engaging in the
extended and lonely work that writing a book can sometimes be. I love
you both very much.
vii
viii | Acknowledgments
The book is dedicated to the memory of Alphonse Mascherino, the
late founder and chaplain of the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel. Father Al,
as he was generally known (though, because he told me it was a name
he was given in his youth and I found it endearing, I usually called him
Father Fonzie), was tremendously supportive on every level of my work
at the chapel, talking with me at great length about the history of the site
and allowing my family to stay at the guesthouse free of charge, drop-
ping off secret care packages of Progresso soup and soda on the front
porch to ensure that we were nourished, even offering to make available
at the chapel copies of an early article I wrote on Flight 93 memorializa-
tion. He was the most fascinating of interview subjects, but he quickly
became much more than that. He was my friend. I had greatly hoped to
give him a copy of this book and hear his opinion of my work. Although
I was aware that he had been dealing with a difficult cancer diagnosis
and recovery for the past several years, and although I knew he was
not a young man (his unbelievable energy level notwithstanding), it was
stunning to learn of his death as I was completing the book. Perhaps I
had come to believe, based on the evidence of his tireless work at the
chapel, that he was superhuman. Alas, despite his vitality and charisma
and joyous spirit, he was mortal and we have lost him. I only wish I felt
that I had sufficiently reminded him of my gratitude for all the care he
extended to me and to my family and of how much he meant to us while
I had the chance to do so. May his memory and his spirit live on in the
chapel. Requiescat in pace.
1
Flight 93 and 9/11
American Mythology in the Making
It is something of a cliché to say that things as awful as the 9/11 attacks
are beyond description. One book on the topic puts it this way: “Sep-
tember 11 is precisely the kind of event that defies representation.”1 In
the moment, this certainly seemed to be so for many who fully under-
stood the reaction of CNN reporter Aaron Brown on witnessing the
collapse of the North Tower of the World Trade Center: “Good Lord
. . . [six- second pause, which, on live air, seemed an eternity] there are
no words.” And yet it is not so. There are always words, and there are
always representations. Even to say “there are no words” is to produce
words that inevitably spin a web of meaning and interpretation (in this
case, stunned horror) around the event described by these words. Like
any other events that would acquire meaning, the attacks of 9/11 and
the specific portion of those events that constituted the crash of United
Flight 93 — the fourth hijacked plane in the day’s terrorist attack and the
only one that did not hit its intended target, crashing instead in a field
in southwest Pennsylvania — call for representation in order to exist in
the human world. Without it, they would not be. No events speak for
themselves, and no historical memory descends to us from the heavens,
however much we might cloak such decision making in the language
of the acts of God or nature that is culturally imperative for us. Events
become events, and then events of a particular moral tenor, with a par-
ticular cast of characters, relationships, and meanings, only when we use
the tools of our culture to make them into such things. The most basic of
those tools are the stories we tell about who we are and the symbols and
characters that make them up. These stories are like the air we breathe,
so self- evident to us that we have trouble clearly articulating their plots
and characters to listeners not already as saturated in them as we are.
Humans have been telling themselves such stories, and fitting events
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