Here's a way to memorialize 9/11...

Thoughts? Nope. Prayers? Nope. How about simply being truthful.

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Workers picking through the wreckage of United Airlines flight 93. 🙏🏼

A lot of horrible stuff happened on 9/11. Put yourself into the head of anyone on any of the four planes that crashed. Everyone on board had plenty of time to know they were being hijacked, to eventually face the fact that they weren’t getting out of this alive, and then to see their death coming through the little windows. That is a mindfuck of epic proportions, and as bad as that seems for you and I trying to imagine it now, it was probably even worse for our fellow humans who actually went through that on that horrible day — all the way through it — to their deaths.

Mentally ill weirdos among us stroke themselves with the idea that 9/11 was an “inside job” or some other nonsense, for the most intense versions of the basic reasons all conspiracy theorists embrace their wacky conjectures:

1. Conspiracy theories reduce a complex topic into something simple and easy to understand — very convenient when you are undereducated.

2. Belief in these alternate realities confers a sense of superiority; “only we are anointed to know the real truth.”

3. Conspiracy theories convert your own weaknesses or failings into someone else’s fault.

Super satisfactory, psychologically.

And also the worst possible way to remember the victims of 9/11. The conspiracy theories are abhorrent. They are deeply offensive. These terrible things really did happen to our fellow humans. They died at the hands of ideologues; religious warriors with vengeance on their minds, vengeance against innocents who had nothing to do with their grievances. It was fucked up as all hell (again, pardon my French) and it sucked ass (sorry again).

So let’s recognize and accept that — let’s honor them by acknowledging how terrible their departure was — rather than graffitiing it with some bullshit conspiracy theory. No, the planes weren’t holograms. No, the planes weren’t empty or remote piloted. No, the dead were not paid actors. And yes, they really did exist — all of them.

All of the 9/11 conspiracy theories piss me off — in case that wasn’t already clear. But I want to talk about just one today. It pertains to Flight 93, the plane intended to strike the White House, but which passengers attempted to retake from the hijackers, setting off events which we’ll never know, but which resulted in the plane crashing at full flight speed in Pennsylvania.

I often think of that moment. I work at a desk. I go out with friends. I play sports. I do stuff in the world. But never, never, never have I had to fight for my life in the literal hand-to-hand combat sense. Those people did. One minute you’re in your seat on the plane enjoying your movie; the next, you’re the front man forced to attack a trained boxcutter-wielding killer, and you have no combat experience at all. But they did it. They didn’t win, but what an act of heroism. I look up to them because I don’t think I could have done what they did. Their courage was above my poor pay grade.

One of the stories that emerged on the Internet was that the US military shot down Flight 93. They did not die fighting for their lives hand-to-hand; they died because their own government killed them to save many more people on the ground — and then lied about it.

So setting the stage, it is a fact that by the time Flight 93 crashed, we’d already seen the Twin Towers and we knew there was a coordinated attack going on, using fully-passengered airliners as the weapons. The fact that Flight 93’s takeoff was delayed gave a huge ace-up-the-sleeve to the Americans here. It was quickly determined that Flight 93 had also been hijacked, and therefore was probably on its way to a target, probably something just as precious as the Twin Towers.

It is a nightmarish, unexpected, horrifying real-life application of the Trolley Problem: we had to take out Flight 93, with its 44 souls on board, to protect the lives of many more people on the ground. Someone actually had to make that call, and is probably sick to their stomach over it every day — 24 years later.

So, two F-16 fighter pilots were scrambled. Lt. Heather Penney and Lt. Col. Marc Sasseville (now a Lt. General) took to the air. Their planes were not armed. This was peacetime; planes don’t just sit around armed. There was zero time to arm them. Read this next line very thoughtfully:

Penney and Sasseville were ordered to take down Flight 93 by ramming it, at the cost of their own lives.

They didn’t balk. Zero hesitation — though, no doubt, unimaginable turmoil within. That’s a thing I find it hard to even imagine. Perhaps they did too. But they followed orders — perhaps the fact they had no personal say in the decision made it mechanically easier. Force the body parts to do what they need to do. The brain is still exploded, a universe away.

And so they kicked on their afterburners, hoping to catch up to the slower 757.

Yet a fight — even worse than the mental one the pilots were wrestling — was already underway aboard Flight 93. It was a hot war, a war for your life, a quick-chance-you-won-or-you’re-dead war, a war you have to fight with boxcutter slices vivisecting your arms, your palms, your face. A squad of passengers faced off with a squad of hijackers, in that single-wide aisle, like the narrow pass in the Battle of Thermopylae; appalling slashing everywhere, fighters died or were injured and thrown aside as the experts pared their way through the masses.

But the masses must have won — unthinkably, perhaps simply by attrition, by losing more and more to the enemy until they physically tire of the killing. Because that plane nosed down and plunged into the terrain, an outcome nobody wanted.

Well, maybe two were a bit relieved, if nonetheless terrified. When Penney and Sasseville heard that the 757 had crashed before they’d been able to catch up and stop it, they were treated to the most trivial of all celebrations any of us might ever face: “44 people just died, but at least I didn’t have to kill them.”

And now I have to stop presuming to speculate on the thoughts of Penney and Sasseville on that dreadful day. They’ve both done well since; Penney is retired from the military and Sasseville is now a General. Like the victims who died, Penney and Sasseville’s lives on that day were leaves in the wind. Anything could have happened, and it was just a random happenstance of departure times that governed everything.

They did not have to kill on that day.

But they easily might have had to.

A lot of people are harmed by conspiracy theories. Every friend and family member of a person implicated in a conspiracy theory has to put up with lies about their loved one — and that always hurts. When we see perfectly honorable public defenders like Penney and Sasseville put through this same treatment, it’s more than a little annoying. It is, and should be, infuriating. Some people declare they were paid actors, or even nonexistent, to cover up the “fact” that 9/11 was an inside job and was a false flag justification to start The War for Oil, or something.

The 44 died either way; there was no realistic path to their salvation. But Penney and Sasseville were contending with a clock; they have been in time, or might not. That tragedy might have had a count of 46 instead of 44, and it’s really just blind luck that the plane was late.

I am angrified by every 9/11 conspiracy theory. But in this case, I get to be 46/44 = 4.55% more angry!