The real story of flight 93 | World news | The Guardian

The real story of flight 93 | World news | The Guardian:
"Todd Beamer was a religious family man. 
Mark Bingham was gay, a PR executive and a keen sportsman. 
Cockpit recordings from 11 September now show how these two very different men became heroes of America
First published on Saturday 1 December 2001
The words everywhere.
They have become America's favourite, bittersweet and articulate bumper sticker.
They were used by President Bush to dispatch his bombers to the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan - but they resonate further than that.
For they are also the words that closed a remarkable conversation on 11 September between a man called Todd Beamer and Lisa Jefferson, a telephone switchboard operator.
The words are: 'Let's Roll'.
Jefferson was in a suburb of Chicago, at the headquarters of the GTE phone company, when she took the call that, she now says, changed her life. Beamer, the caller, was aboard the hijacked and doomed United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco.
Beamer, who didn't want to worry his pregnant wife, had called GTC, the company that provides the telephone service on United Airlines flights.
He and Jefferson talked for 13 minutes, during which they recited together the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23 - 'Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.'
Beamer had ideas about that valley, and how many dead it should claim. 
For as Flight 93 was gnarled off course, he and other passengers learnt through an extraordinary series of calls they made to relatives and partners that their plane was one of a quartet turned into terrorist guided missiles.
And in the hopeless claustrophobia of a tubular steel trap 30,000 feet up, they tried to defy death.
By the time Beamer dialled GTE, his aircraft had been re-routed by the terrorists towards Washington, and perhaps on course for the White House, or the Capitol.
Beamer and other passengers decided to take on the hijackers and wrest control of the plane. 
The recent release of tapes from the cockpit voice recorder indicates just how close they came to doing so..."