By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: September 9, 2011
The New York Times
SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — Jerry Bingham, whose 31-year-old son was a passenger on United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed near here a decade ago, has participated in so many memorial services for his son Mark that he can barely remember them all.
Ten years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a special report on the decade’s costs and consequences, measured in thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and countless challenges to the human spirit.
Now, he is preparing for one more. Not the 10th anniversary public tributes this weekend that will include President Obama and former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, with thousands of onlookers.
But on Monday, when the crowds are gone, the families of the 40 passengers and crew members who were killed when the plane was hijacked by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, will hold a private service to bury the unidentified remains of all of those who were on board.
Those remains have been kept in an above-ground crypt for the last 10 years by the Somerset County coroner, Wallace Miller, awaiting a final resting place. They will be laid to rest in three steel coffins at the patch of earth — sodden now from endless rains — where the plane rammed into the ground.
“This will be our last funeral,” Mr. Bingham said.
Not much, of course, was left after the crash except debris from the aircraft and some personal belongings. Mr. Miller said that only 8 percent of the human remains were ever recovered because the plane, roaring down at more than 570 miles per hour, exploded when it crashed. “Everything vaporized on impact,” he said.
At least some remains were recovered and matched for all 40 on board (in fact, for all 44, including the four terrorists). But the amounts were tiny — much less, even in total, than those that were unidentified.
The matching of remains for everyone killed here distinguishes this site from the scenes of the two other Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, where not all of the remains have been identified.
At the World Trade Center in New York, the remains of more than 1,100 of the nearly 2,700 victims have still not been identified. They are being stored now in climate-controlled conditions near the medical examiner’s office in Manhattan. There are plans to place them in an underground repository at a new museum at ground zero that is to open next year, but some families have opposed that idea and the dispute is continuing.
At the Pentagon, the remains of five, of 184, could not be identified and were buried in 2002 at Arlington National Cemetery.
With Monday’s service, the crash site here, which is off-limits to the public, will officially become a cemetery. This communal grave occupies one small corner of a 2,200-acre park nestled in the rolling hills of the Laurel Highlands that is now part of the National Park Service. The crash site, renamed the “field of honor,” lies at the edge of an open field near a stand of maples and hemlocks.
Patrick White, vice president of Families of Flight 93, who lost his cousin Louis Nacke II in the crash, said he viewed Monday’s burial as a reunion, of sorts, of “what until now has been a disconnection, a physical separation between the ‘them’ in the three caskets and the ‘those’ who are in the ground.”
“I view it as the first — and last — reuniting of people who have a shared destiny and a now common history,” Mr. White said.
Their destinies merged on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as they left Newark intending to fly to San Francisco. The plane was hijacked at 9:28 a.m., and air traffic controllers in Cleveland picked up a Mayday call from the pilot. The passengers and crew were forced to the back of the plane, where they began using the Airfones on the seatbacks to report the attack. At that point, they learned that a broader terrorist attack against the United States was under way.
The terrorists had turned the plane toward Washington, and later evidence revealed that their target was probably the United States Capitol. The passengers and crew quickly devised a plan to storm the cockpit; the cockpit voice recorder picked up the screaming and mayhem of the insurrection.
The terrorists tried to disrupt the rebellion by rolling the plane from left to right and pitching its nose up and down. The 9/11 Commission said the terrorists maintained control of the plane and decided to crash rather than risk having the crew and passengers take over. At 10:03 a.m., it crashed here, in the midst of fields that are now covered with goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. The white blades of windmills churn nearby.
“It’s such a beautiful setting for such a horrible, violent thing,” said Gordon Felt, president of the Families of Flight 93, whose brother, Edward, was a passenger that day. “This land is healing, but it is not healed. It will never be totally healed.”
The planning of any kind of memorial was stalled for years by a lengthy land-acquisition process, including a dispute with the owner of the 270-acre property where the plane actually crashed.
A public-private partnership has a multipart $62 million memorial here, but it is only partly built. Its marble “wall of names” will be dedicated Saturday, along with a visitors’ shelter. Once they raise a final $10 million, they intend to build an entry portal and a permanent visitors’ center. There are plans later for a 93-foot-high tower with 40 chimes for each of the dead. The visitors’ center for now is a small, rusted, corrugated shed left over from a mining operation here.
It was the approach of the 10th anniversary that helped focus the families on deciding to bury the unidentified remains at the crash site.
The service on Monday will be a full-fledged funeral, Mr. Miller, the coroner said, with at least one military pallbearer.
“There were four American military veterans on the plane, but in my mind there were 36 other veterans on that plane as well,” Mr. Miller said. “These people knew that they were pretty well doomed and for them to pull it together under unbelievable pressure to win the first battle of the war — incredible.”
The adult-size coffins are 6 feet 6 inches long. They will be lowered into three concrete vaults and covered with earth.
“When I walk away from there, the case will be closed on my end,” Mr. Miller said.
Mr. White said that a huge boulder that was dug up nearby would become the collective headstone. It will have a small plaque on the back, so only family members — at least for now — can see it.
As for Mr. Bingham, he said he derived comfort from the site, where he feels the presence of his son.
“You get a feeling of belonging,” he said. “There’s a serenity factor. You feel like you are talking to him. That’s the place for the burial.”
