< Part of Flight 93 crashed on my land. I went back to the sacred ground 20 years later

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Every one of us who's old enough to remember goes back to the same thing - how sunny, clear and blue the sky was that morning. Wally Miller was at home in rural Pennsylvania, having coffee with his dad, watching TV. Suddenly there was breaking news. An aircraft had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Then a second plane hit. It was September 11, 2001. Miller is the coroner in Somerset County, Pa., a position he'd taken over from his dad. How'd you like to be the coroner in New York now, he asked as they both sat there, watching the shocking images. About a half-hour after a third jetliner plowed into the Pentagon, Wally's phone rang. It was a neighboring county coroner's office, asking if he needed any help with the plane that had crashed in his jurisdiction.

WALLY MILLER: I thought they were kidding me. I said, you guys shouldn't be making fun of something like that. I said, this is very serious. There is no plane crash.

DETROW: Wally couldn't get through to 911, so he reached out on his county radio. But there wasn't much information to share.

MILLER: So I just said, well, I'm going to go out. You know, usually I have, like, a jump kit that I put it in there and different equipment that I use. But I thought, well, if this is an airplane crash, I'm not going to have enough equipment for anything. So I just put on a pair of gumboots, and I drove out there.

DETROW: But when Wally pulled up to what he'd been told was the crash site, all he saw was a gaping, smoldering crater.

MILLER: And I'm like, well, where is this crash? You know, I saw debris where it hit, and they said, look right there. And I said, well, yeah, I see the debris, but where is it? You know, I was expecting to see big pieces of fuselage or tails or, you know, something that would - like you would see on a crash on TV. But there was nothing like that at all.

DETROW: One thing was noticeable.

MILLER: You can smell jet fuel everywhere. That was the one aroma that I can remember sticking in my mind all the time. I don't remember smelling anything but jet fuel.

DETROW: Wally eventually got his mind around the fact that this had been where a plane had crashed and basically disintegrated.

MILLER: I kept thinking, I want a fire hat, because you could hear this melted plastic dripping on the trees. It was going (mimicking sizzle). You could hear it hit the ground and sizzling.

DETROW: It was United Flight 93.

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DETROW: Across the country in San Diego, Debby Borza was taking her 10-year-old daughter Murial to school. She'd already told her the news about the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. As she drove, she tried to explain to Murial what was happening.

DEBBY BORZA: So I remember in the car, I was talking to her about how this event may be for her like John F. Kennedy being shot was for me because we were about the same age experiencing that. And I vividly remember it.

DETROW: Debby had no idea her older daughter, 20-year-old Deora Frances Bodley, had made it onto a flight to return home from visiting friends on the East Coast. As Debby settled into work, she got a frantic call. It was from Deora's friend Ali (ph). She dropped Deora off at Newark Airport.

D BORZA: Ali calls me saying, I'm so sorry. It's all my fault. And I'm going, what? She said, Deora decided to catch an earlier flight. And I just heard on the radio that the flight that Deora caught had just crashed.

DETROW: Ali was sure Deora was on Flight 93. Debby's mind was racing. She left work and wandered into a nearby church. She sat in a pew and prayed, asking God, where is Deora?

D BORZA: And hearing this voice in my head say, she's with me, and then to have my cell phone ring and to answer - I mean, within seconds, the cell phone rings after the answer to that and only to hear, you know, is this Debby Borza? And I said, yes. Well, my name is Sharon DeWitt. I'm with United Airlines, and I'm sorry to inform you. And I dropped the phone. You know, and that's how it started.

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DETROW: It started for Tim Lambert as an overwhelming news day. A friend had called him at home waking him up.

TIM LAMBERT, BYLINE: And he said, Tim, get up and turn on your television. Something's happening in New York.

DETROW: After glancing at the images of the Twin Towers, Tim rushed to his car and headed to work. He was just starting out as a part-time reporter at WITF in Harrisburg, Pa., the same station where, several years later, we became colleagues and friends when I went to work there, too. During that drive, Tim listened for updates on the radio.

LAMBERT: And I might have been around the Dillsburg, York County area. And I heard that a plane had gone down in Somerset County, Pa.

DETROW: Other reports put the crash just outside of Shanksville. Tim knew Shanksville. In fact, he owned land there, passed down from his grandfather to his father to him. But he didn't have time to think about it. He spent all day chasing local angles. His last assignment of the day was covering an evening prayer vigil. It was past 1 in the morning when Tim finally made it home. He saw that his answering machine was blinking. It was his dad.

LAMBERT: And I got a message from him on my voicemail that said, give me a call.

DETROW: Tim's dad said he had been watching the news all day about the crash near Shanksville. He'd studied the video of the smoldering crater and the burnt line of trees over and over. And then he said this.

LAMBERT: I think those trees are ours.

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DETROW: I'm Scott Detrow. This moment 20 years ago would connect Tim in pretty surprising ways to coroner Wally Miller, to Debby Borza and many of the other families of people who were on Flight 93. Over the years, Tim would be there as families grieved and found solace in each other's company, when they buried their loved ones and fought to turn the trees and land into something meaningful and permanent. So today Tim and I will tell you all about what the next 20 years of Flight 93 were like and how the families of Flight 93 coped with the incomprehensible.

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DETROW: I'm Scott Detrow. This is Sacred Ground, a special episode of the NPR POLITICS PODCAST and Up First Sunday.

In the weeks after 9/11, Americans struggled to get their heads around the horror of that day. There were so many terrible images playing on a loop - the plane hitting the second tower, the missing posters plastered over lower Manhattan, the collapsed side of the Pentagon. But in Pennsylvania, there was just a burned-out pit in a field and a charred line of trees. It seemed to be all that was left of United Flight 93 and the people on it. On the night of September 11, my friend Tim, who you heard before the break, had received that call from his dad telling him that he was sure Flight 93 had crashed on their land near Shanksville. Tim wasn't convinced. But three weeks later, the phone rang. It was the Somerset County coroner. And I'm actually going to have Tim tell you the next part of the story because, as a journalist, he was facing a pretty unique situation.

LAMBERT: So, yeah, I was relatively new to WITF, and it was really humbling to think people died on some of our land. But you have to remember, the site had been sealed off from the public since the crash, so not many people had actually been there who weren't part of the investigation. When the coroner, Wally Miller, called, he confirmed what my dad already knew - our land was part of the crash site, and it was considered a crime scene. In the interest of disclosure, I told him I was a reporter. His reply still makes me shake my head. What are you going to do? Report on yourself? And I was like, well, yeah, maybe, I'm not really sure. He simply said, you can do what you want. I'm not going to stop you. It's your land.

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LAMBERT: A few days later, I drove to Shanksville, bringing along my dad, two family friends and another WITF reporter. I also packed my audio kit. When we got to the crash site, I got out of the car, and the first thing we smelled was jet fuel. This was nearly a month after the crash. Bulldozers were scattered around the field. There were people with buckets carrying them around and picking things out of burned trees. A tall, lanky guy with a blue hardhat, gray coveralls and an orange vest approached us. It was Wally. I was recording as he gestured to the burnt-out landscape and tried to explain what had happened to the plane.

MILLER: The front porch and the cockpit and first-class section broke off and bounced into that area, which is - obviously, there's no trees there now. But the tree line came all the way out. And then the rear two-thirds of the plane just telescoped right into the crater. Everything just blew into pieces, like this.

LAMBERT: After he said that, it was like a camera shutter clicked. We all started to wander around, seeing things that didn't catch our eye earlier, stuff like fragments of metal, wire, insulation and fabric. Debris was all around us. Flight 93 was all around us. Wally said that anything that looked like it didn't belong in the woods was from the plane.

I can't get over the pieces. There must be a million.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: They're all over the place.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: It's so hard to get that comprehension in your mind, that something that huge could get down to those kind of little pieces.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: It's like, you know, you got confetti of metal all over the place.

LAMBERT: And paper - lots and lots of paper.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: There's magazines in the seatbacks, you know? There's a lot of that stuff. It comes out of the trees every day.

LAMBERT: Can't know what that would have been. Something. It's a piece of luggage. It's a piece of luggage. That's what it is.

We couldn't go down into the trees because large pieces of debris were still falling from the 60-foot-tall hemlocks. I climbed up this big metal container and looked inside. All I saw was wire, twisted circuit boards, a stray flip-flop and a man's tie.

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DETROW: The reason Flight 93 ended up in Shanksville has a lot to do with how the flight began - with a delay.

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LAMBERT: On the morning of September 11, boarding for United Flight 93 starts at 7:20 a.m. at Gate 17 at Newark International Airport. The Boeing 757 is only 20% filled for the nonstop flight to San Francisco. There are 40 passengers and crew on board, ranging in age from 20 to 79. Four members of an al-Qaida terrorist cell are seated in first class.

DETROW: At least a quarter of the passengers and crew planned to take later or earlier flights or had their schedules changed. After the jetliner taxies to the runway, takeoff is delayed for about 25 minutes. That would later prove crucial. The plane finally streaks into the air at 8:42, four minutes before the first plane would strike the World Trade Center.

LAMBERT: Almost 40 minutes later, a warning message is transmitted to 16 flights, including United 93 - beware any cockpit intrusion. Moments later, Cleveland air traffic control hears some very disturbing sounds coming from United 93 - a struggle in the cockpit with a pilot yelling, Mayday.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Mayday. Mayday. Get out of here. (Unintelligible). Get out of here.

LAMBERT: The plane is over Eastern Ohio. Suddenly, it drops nearly 700 feet in altitude as the terrorists take control. Air traffic control will try...

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: United 93, Cleveland, do you still hear the center?

LAMBERT: ...And try.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: United 93, do you still hear Cleveland?

LAMBERT: ...And try to talk to the plane again.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: United 93, United 93, do you hear Cleveland?

DETROW: They're only met with silence. But the passengers and crew are communicating in other ways. At 9:35, flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw calls the United Maintenance Center in San Francisco to report a hijacking. It's one of 37 calls made from the plane over the next 25 minutes by the passengers and crew.

LAMBERT: Because of that delay on the runway, when passengers reach their loved ones, they quickly learn about the other planes and how they crashed. They realize their flight is probably headed toward another target.

DETROW: They begin to plan a way to fight back.

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DETROW: Several mention a vote taking place on whether to rush the cockpit. Bradshaw shares with her husband that she's boiling water to throw on the terrorists and later tells him, everyone is running up to first class.

LAMBERT: Jeremy Glick tries to ease his wife's fear by joking he still has his plastic breakfast knife. Honor Elizabeth Wainio tells her stepmom she has to go because they are getting ready to break into the cockpit.

DETROW: Flight attendant CeeCee Lyles ends her call with her husband with, we're getting ready to do it now. It's happening.

LAMBERT: And Lauren Grandcolas, about 3 months pregnant, leaves an answering machine message for her husband, Jack. I'm OK for now, she says. I just love you more than anything.

DETROW: At 9:44, when Flight 93 is less than a half-hour away from Washington, D.C., an air phone operator speaking with passenger Todd Beamer hears him say, are you ready? OK. Let's roll. At 10 a.m., United 93 makes steep dives and climbs and rolls to the left and right as the hijackers try to stop the counterattack. Three minutes later, the aircraft plunges upside down into the ground outside Shanksville. It is traveling at 563 miles per hour.

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DETROW: Flight 93 had been headed to San Francisco. The hijackers turned the plane east toward Washington, D.C., most likely with the goal, according to investigators, of ramming it into the dome of the U.S. Capitol. Because the passengers and crew launched their own counterattack and because of the flukes and whims of timing and physics, it had instead crashed outside Shanksville, partially on Tim's property.

LAMBERT: After that first visit to the crash site with Wally, I was kind of in uncharted territory. There's no book to read about how to handle a national tragedy playing out on your own land. To be clear, the plane had crashed across several properties. Mine held portions of the cockpit and first-class sections. So I started going out to the site as often as I could, partially as a journalist who had access no one else did but mainly because I wanted to help. I got to know Wally. I picked up debris. And one day, Wally told me how the families of the passengers and crew were calling him, wanting to know when the personal effects and remains would be returned. As he recounted in his oral history with the National Park Service, his primary objective, like in any other coroner's case, was to deal with the next of kin. In the early days of his work, he was getting some pushback, though, from groups like the Red Cross.

MILLER: They didn't want me to talk to these family members because they thought it would be too traumatic. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, I don't know how many coroners' cases they've worked, but I've worked a lot of them, and I know when somebody is killed out here on the turnpike and the family comes in, they don't want to talk to a mental health counselor. They want to know, where's my son? Where's his stuff? Can I see him? How do I get the stuff home? What do I do next?

LAMBERT: The families didn't have anywhere else to turn. The investigation was still ongoing, so the FBI and United couldn't really share much. And on top of all of that, many were getting frustrated that there were a lot of images from New York and Virginia but Flight 93 wasn't getting a lot of media attention.

D BORZA: I was looking for and listening over and over again media telling us what happened. But it's like, well, what about my daughter's flight? There certainly weren't - I didn't see people from Shanksville being interviewed - nothing. We're like, what about United 93? What's going on there? Where is the media there? Why - who - I don't know who to call. Who would I call to find out more?

LAMBERT: So Debby Borza called the only other person she could think of who might have information - the county coroner, Wally Miller. Over the coming weeks, she and Wally began to bond.

MILLER: I never met her. She didn't come out the first week, but we'd start calling each other. She - like, next thing you know, it'd be, like, 2 o'clock in the morning. And she'd call me up, like, a week later. Oh, I figured you'd probably be up. Or, you know, are you up?

LAMBERT: Wally talked to her over and over for hours, wearing the hats of investigator, coroner, funeral home director and friend.

DETROW: Debby says Wally would update her on anything he'd found concerning Deora's remains. He also talked to her about the tedious identification process at the crash site. But Debby was only one person, and Wally had a growing sense of unease. He felt like there was a huge disconnect between what the families understood about the crash and the reality on the ground.

MILLER: People were going to be expecting caskets that they could open up and see somebody. We weren't sure that they quite understood the level of devastation.

DETROW: The devastation was incomprehensible. The plane had crashed so violently, so fast.

MILLER: We recovered 8% - 650 pounds. The vast majority of that material was consumed on impact.

DETROW: For many families, the most they could expect to get back was a tooth or a fragment of a bone. But they didn't know that, and Wally needed to tell them. He decided to organize a meeting where he'd share this grim news in person and answer any other questions family members had. Everywhere he turned for help - county officials, the Red Cross, United, the NTSB - he was told no. The reason - this kind of approach had never been done before to anyone's knowledge. Each group also believed the families wouldn't make the trip. Finally, in February 2002, it happened. Wally brought the families of Flight 93 together in a hotel conference room in New Jersey.

LAMBERT: He asked me to come along to help out. I wasn't there as a journalist. I was there as Wally's friend. Around 90 people came. They represented 36 of the 40 passengers and crew on Flight 93. Emotions were running high. Some family members were too distraught to sit through the presentations. Others were angry and lashed out. It was hard for anyone in the room to keep it together, even for Wally. I remember when he first met Debby in person, she extended her hand to him, and he just began to sob.

DETROW: The FBI sent representatives, too, to answer questions and because they still had information they wanted to gather about the people on the plane. Wally had warned the agents beforehand to be prepared for awkward questions.

MILLER: I said, well, it might not be that good of an idea. And they said, why? I said, because you know what's going to happen. The very first question is going to be, when can we hear the black box tape? And they're like, well, we're coming up anyway.

DETROW: The black box. It held the cockpit audio recordings that had been recovered from the crash site buried 15 feet into the crater. Legally, the recordings are for the investigators only. The audio is never made public, even to families of crash victims. And at this point, the FBI hadn't budged on this. But with so many narratives forming about the rebellion against the terrorists, the families had questions. Was my loved one involved? What actually happened in those final minutes? So at that meeting, they made it clear. Laws and rules be damned. They wanted to hear for themselves what the final minutes on United 93 sounded like. In his oral history, Wally said it played out just as he thought it would. The FBI agents were up front, facing the group of grieving families.

MILLER: And finally, they said, does anyone have a question?

DETROW: The wife of a passenger spoke up.

MILLER: She got up. Yeah. She goes, I'd like to know when they're going to play the black box tape. And people go, yeah. We want to know when they're going to play the black box tape.

DETROW: Tim has told me the story so many times. He's never forgotten it. Debby Borza also vividly remembers the moment. The two of them talked about it when we all met up this summer.

LAMBERT: And it was, like, full-on rebellion. Like, this is what we want.

D BORZA: Yeah. Exactly. This is what we want.

LAMBERT: And why was that so important at that point for you and the rest of the families to hear that?

D BORZA: You know, we really just wanted to know the factual, right-then-and-there account of what happened. And I thought of it as, well, I want to hear whatever it is that my daughter went through. I'm her mom. That's what mothers do. At least that's what this mother does. And I want to experience any kind of emotion that I might get. And, you know, think of it as probably just a fraction of what my daughter went through, so yeah. There's a black box on there. You happened to retrieve it from this site, so we want to hear it.

DETROW: Eventually, the families took their demands to Congress. Lawmakers pressured the Justice Department. And finally, in a highly unusual move, the FBI relented - families would hear the black box recording.

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DETROW: After the break, we go inside that unprecedented meeting, as the families hear what it sounded like in the final minutes of Flight 93.

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DETROW: You're listening to Sacred Ground, a special episode of the NPR POLITICS PODCAST and Up First Sunday. I'm Scott Detrow, along with Tim Lambert.

In April 2002, the FBI ushered the families of Flight 93 into a hotel auditorium near Princeton University and sat them before a big screen. Debby Borza was there.

D BORZA: We had headsets. We could take notes. They had a screen up with a rolling text. So if there was anything in Arabic, it was transcribed into English, so we could see all of that there.

DETROW: The FBI warned the families just how upsetting the audio would be and had grief counselors standing by to help them. Once they were all settled in, the presentation began. Black boxes typically only record the final half-hour of a flight. So the recording of Flight 93's cockpit begins shortly after the hijackers have taken control of the plane. A transcript of the audio was made public after it was played at a terrorism trial, so we know what Debby and the other family members heard that day.

LAMBERT: At first, they heard the hijackers warn the passengers to stay seated, that there's a bomb on board, and the plane is heading back to an airport.

DETROW: There's also a gruesome moment - what sounds like the hijackers killing a flight attendant pleading for her life. Then just a lot of silence.

D BORZA: You know, it's a half-hour of wind noise, you know, as the plane's flying through. I guess it's - it can be kind of noisy in the cockpit with the wind.

DETROW: About 25 minutes into the tape, the counterattack begins. A hijacker says is there something, a fight? They want to get in here. There are some guys, all those guys.

LAMBERT: Then passengers and crew begin to be picked up on the microphones. There are sounds of brutal fighting. Someone yells in the cockpit, if we don't, we die.

DETROW: Up, down, up, down, a hijacker says. This is the point where the plane begins steep dives and rolls from side to side as the hijackers try to stop the attack. More voices - go, go, move, move. Debby Borza was paying attention to every sound.

D BORZA: For me, the thing I'm listening for is Deora's voice. You know, I was listening for her voice.

LAMBERT: Ken Nacke, a Baltimore County police officer, was sitting next to his sister, Paula, in that auditorium. He was straining to hear their brother, who the family all called Joey. Kenny had his eyes closed to better focus on listening.

KEN NACKE: And then Paula and I immediately just turned our heads at each other at the same moment and looked at each other and just kind of mouthed the words, that's Joey. You know, it's not like I just heard it; it was odd that we both turned and faced each other at the same time when that part of the tape was playing.

LAMBERT: For Kenny, there was some small comfort in getting confirmation that Joey was part of the revolt. Another thing Kenny took away from listening - the passengers and crew weren't panicking.

NACKE: The times that you heard the voices of the passengers and crew - the amazing thing for me was the calmness of their voices. I didn't sense fear. You know, me - I kind of just sensed determination on their part when you heard their voices.

LAMBERT: The final moments of audio are commotion, fighting and what sounds like a struggle over control. Then sudden silence.

NACKE: Actually, the end of the tape was harder than anything else because I believe they were able to get inside the cockpit. And I think, in my mind, the last word you heard was, pull it up, pull it up. And then just silence. I mean, the tape just stopped. No crash, no boom, no nothing. It was just like the end of it.

DETROW: That end for Debby Borza was hard. She never heard Deora on the tape. When the families were offered to listen a second time, she declined.

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DETROW: This experience of listening to the audio was different for every family in that room. But in the end, the families had all shared two important moments - experiencing that searing grief together and also realizing the power they had when they banded together and pushed for one goal. It was something they would do again and again over the coming years.

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DETROW: Not every family member wanted to get this close to what happened. Lori Guadagno had lost her brother Richard on Flight 93. She didn't go to that first family meeting, the one Wally organized. She didn't listen to the black box, although she was sure Richard, a fish and wildlife officer, was part of the fight to retake the cockpit. She stayed far away from Shanksville. Looking back, Lori was honest about how angry and really ugly she felt in that first year. She pushed everyone away.

LORI GUADAGNO: I really wanted to be alone. I wanted to remain isolated. It was not a pretty side of me. I'm not proud of it at all. But I'm just being honest. I just didn't want anyone else's story to be entwined in my story.

DETROW: A big part of Lori's story had been a close bond with her brother. They were tight growing up. Richard was a quiet, intense kid. He loved nature. When his dad took him golfing, Rich would wander off into the woods to collect tadpoles. He trailed the old Italian men in his New Jersey neighborhood as they grew backyard tomatoes. He especially loved frogs.

GUADAGNO: We were at a seafood restaurant on the Jersey Shore. And Rich saw on the menu that they served frog legs, and he lost his mind. We couldn't eat there. He was hysterical.

DETROW: As adults, the two remained close.

GUADAGNO: There's no one on this planet that can understand who we are, where we came from. You know, we share the same DNA.

DETROW: Lori and Rich had been together right before 9/11. He'd flown in from California to spend time with her in Vermont, where she was living. Then they'd headed down to New Jersey together for their grandmother's hundredth birthday. Lori says it was amazing, a big Italian American gathering with cousins and second cousins running all around the party hall that they had rented. She remembers Rich there snapping pictures, roll after roll. When the party was over, they drove back to their parents' home.

GUADAGNO: And then both of us looked at each other in my mom's kitchen. And at the same time, we knew that there was a serious piece of eggplant parmesan in the refrigerator left over from a previous meal. And we both wanted it. And so he jumped on my back as we fought in the kitchen for this coveted piece of eggplant because that's the kind of siblings we were.

DETROW: Lori left early the next day for the long trip back up to Vermont. Her last glimpse of her younger brother was him standing at the window, watching her drive away. Two days later, Rich was gone. And Lori found herself again heading south back to her parents' home, looking into the same window where her brother had stood just days before.

GUADAGNO: When I drove up, there were all of these cars in front of my house. And I just knew everything had changed - everything. My parents had changed - everything. It was different now. I was walking into a world that, you know - the world had changed. But my family had changed, too.

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DETROW: In the early months after 9/11, Lori's parents went out to Shanksville. They got to know Wally. They got to know some of the other families making the same journeys. But when Lori thought of that sight, she thought of what she'd seen on TV that day - the burning trees, the ugly gash in the ground. It seemed wrong to her that the nature Richard loved was so ugly.

GUADAGNO: And so I didn't want to go there. I didn't want to be present in all of the devastation that was there that I was seeing bits and pieces of. I can understand why a lot of family members were drawn to it and wanted to be there immediately. But I wanted nothing to do with it.

DETROW: Still, as the first anniversary of the crash neared, Lori knew she would have to go to Shanksville to support her parents.

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LAMBERT: September 11 in 2002 was surprisingly cold. The Red Cross was handing out blankets but ran out. There was intense security all around us - troopers on horseback, snipers in the fields and woods. Bush administration officials were milling around. Here's how NPR covered it that morning.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Maybe the most touching moment of the day came when Muriel Borza remembered her sister, Deora Bodley, a college student on her way back to school in California, when Flight 93 was swept up in the events of September 11.

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MURIAL BORZA: I'm 11 years old and lost my sister Deora on Flight 93. I miss her very much. She taught me a lot of things. But most of all, she taught me to be kind to other people and animals. I have a wish that can fulfill in memory of those who perished on September 11. I ask for one minute of peace worldwide today, September 11, 2002.

LAMBERT: The ceremony was a blur of tears and sobs.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Richard Guadagno.

LAMBERT: Especially when the names of the 40 who died were read aloud.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: Toshiya Kuge.

LAMBERT: None of it moved Lori Guadagno. She glowered during the ceremony, cringed at the way their grief was on public display. She was icy toward other family members by her own admission. When it was over, families and friends of the passengers and crew made their way slowly to the crash site, the piles of burned hemlocks from my first visit 11 months ago were gone. The field was now filled with green grass, all except around where the gaping crater once was. The grass didn't take hold there. It was still just dirt. In that field, Lori wandered off by herself.

GUADAGNO: And I remember looking up to the sky and really pissed off, I said, Rich, if you can hear me, just show me a sign. I need to know you know I'm here. I need to feel you here. And I took one step. I looked down on the ground, and there is this perfectly formed preserved bird nest at my feet that if I took a step that was two inches farther, I would have crushed it. And so I pick up this nest. And I am running in the field with the nest - scream, mom, dad, where are you? It's Rich. It's Rich. And I needed them to see this. They probably were thinking, oh, my God, she's lost her mind. She's having a breakdown right now. I'm like, no, you don't understand. I was just talking to him, and I asked him to show a sign. And there at my feet in the middle of this field, in the middle of nowhere - there's no trees. There isn't anything. There's this bird's nest. It's Rich. And suddenly in that moment, as bizarre and ridiculous as this sounds, some little part of my heart started cracking a little bit.

LAMBERT: It wasn't immediate. It took some time. But over the years, Lori began to feel a deep attachment to the crash site.

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LAMBERT: Lots of other family members were growing attached to this land, too. They often gathered at the crash site to talk about how to turn it into something meaningful. In 2006, Debby and I met up with Ben Wainio and his wife, Esther Heymann, right next to where the plane had crashed. They'd lost their 27-year-old daughter, Honor Elizabeth, on Flight 93.

ESTER HEYMANN: I have spent so many hours here. I mean, the longest I stayed one day was five hours alone. I brought a lawn chair and a candle to light and just sat. For me, it's been cathartic, and it's helped me reach a different place. You know, I'm still full of tears, but I just feel so grateful that the birds are here singing and that the flowers are growing and, you know, just in the sense of it maturing a little bit from the poor land, you know, having to be searched and searched and gone through and gone through. So it's much more peaceful now.

DETROW: But five years after the terrorist attacks, a lot was up in the air. Coroner Wally Miller was holding the site as a death scene, but it wasn't clear how much longer he could do this legally. Also, it was still private land. Tim and most of the other property owners were willing to sell it, but that hadn't happened yet. And there was one landowner who was holding out and even working on plans to potentially build his own private memorial with golf carts to ferry people down to the crash site.

LAMBERT: The families wanted a public memorial funded partially by the government, but Congress wasn't coming up with the money, something Ben Wainio was unhappy about.

BEN WAINIO: You know, you talk about politicians. You know, talk is cheap. They said they wanted to build this memorial and fund it, and we have to fight for everything we get to honor the 40 people that saved their lives.

LAMBERT: Also, they wanted to make sure the exact area where the plane had crashed remained untouched, preserved as a cemetery or as they called it, sacred ground.

HEYMANN: I can't really talk about it without getting upset, but I just hate the idea that it isn't protected. I mean, I know it is, but, you know, there's still things here. You know that. And I just would love it if we could reach a point where it was going to be protected forever.

LAMBERT: It would be three more years before any doubts, any fears would be put to rest. After delays, legal action and budget battles, the land was secured, and the families got what they wanted. The National Park Service would build a memorial, and that sacred ground would be set aside for the families only.

DETROW: In a way, family members became the primary owners of that particular space. One moment that underscored this came in 2011, when they orchestrated the placement of a big sandstone boulder into the field to mark the spot where the plane had gone down. Patrick White, a cousin of Joey Nacke, was one of the family members supervising. He figured the boulder weighed 17 tons.

PATRICK WHITE: I watched it snap a 20-ton chain three times when it was lifted.

DETROW: Patrick watched the workers move that giant boulder into place. He thought everything looked good. Then Debby showed up.

WHITE: Debby's like, I think we should orient it a little. And I said, yeah, we can get him to push it around so that it kind of aligns with the flight path.

D BORZA: But as the boulder came off the truck, it started to twist a little. And hey, what can you do with a two-ton boulder? You can't stop how it's going to go. And it slid off the truck, and it wedged the back of the truck into the ground. You know, and then they had to get a forklift out here. And they had to lift the rock and get the truck out. But yeah, no, I was directing the best that I could. The rock just wasn't listening (laughter).

UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing) Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light...

LAMBERT: Ten years after 9/11, families, friends and dignitaries were once again in Shanksville. This time, they were not just remembering those who died but celebrating the memorial, which was finally rising on the site. Now I could walk along a pathway past the crash site marked by that sandstone boulder. At the end of the pathway are 40 white marble slabs bearing the names of the passengers and crew. The ceremony that day had echoes of past anniversaries. The reading of the names, speeches about the heroics on board and political leaders like former President George W. Bush.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GEORGE W BUSH: We'll never know how many innocent people might have been lost. But we do know this. Americans are alive today because the passengers and crew of Flight 93 chose to act, and our nation will be forever grateful.

LAMBERT: But it was something that happened two days after this event that sticks with me. The families returned to the memorial. This time, they were alone, except for some guests - people like me and Wally. They were here to do something they had long hoped to do - hold a funeral at the crash site. The unidentified remains had been placed in three caskets. Together, they would bury them near the sandstone boulder. Debby was there.

D BORZA: We had all been waiting for that day. And you don't know what it's like to come back anniversary after anniversary and put on a particular type of face as a family member because who else is here with you? Some dignitaries, some politician - and not like there's - there's nothing wrong with that. It's just never became something private and personal.

LAMBERT: The remains were driven down by hearses.

D BORZA: We had pallbearers that brought the caskets out. We already had the plots dug out and ready for these caskets to be put in. All the family was down here. All of our invited guests were down here.

LAMBERT: And then the caskets were lowered into the ground. A rabbi, a Buddhist priest and a Lutheran minister jointly led the service. Patrick White was there, along with his cousin Kenny and other family members. They decided spur of the moment to honor a tradition from their own family.

WHITE: After the caskets were put in place in the ground, brothers, cousin, whoever took shovels, and we buried our own...

LAMBERT: Other people from other families, picked up shovels and joined in.

WHITE: ...And didn't stop until the job was finished.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DETROW: After the break, we hear what this grief is like 20 years later. And we return to Shanksville and make a surprising discovery.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DETROW: I'm Scott Detrow. This is Sacred Ground, a special episode of the NPR POLITICS PODCAST and Up First Sunday. Now it's been 20 years, and things are still changing. Things are still hard. This summer, Tim and I flew to Florida to see Lori. We talked for hours about Rich and Flight 93 over tacos at dinner until the restaurant closed. We picked right back up the next day at her house...

GUADAGNO: All right, girls. OK, that's not necessary.

DETROW: ...With Lori's two dogs standing by.

GUADAGNO: No, no.

DETROW: Both pooches have sniffed the microphone (laughter).

And as we talk, Lori brought out box after box of items she has kept that, to her, keep Richard's memory alive.

GUADAGNO: This is the beloved nest - the nest that was the turnaround.

DETROW: Nearly two decades later, it's there protected by a glass covering.

GUADAGNO: And I still wear his clothes. I - oh, yeah, I have his ripped-up Levi's. I have...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: You have his bike.

GUADAGNO: I have his bike, whatever I can do to kind of bring back that - yeah.

DETROW: The guitars he made by hand, his brown hat and jacket from the Department of Fish and Wildlife, photographs taken by Rich of that big 100th birthday party the weekend before 9/11. The FBI recovered the rolls of film, developed them and returned the pictures to Lori years later. The pictures are licked with flame and ghostly burn marks. Lori keeps bringing items out. Suddenly, her entire demeanor changes.

GUADAGNO: This was not an easy thing to receive, clearly.

DETROW: It's a white three-ring binder. The cover reads, unassociated personal effects of Flight 93. It arrived at Lori's house in 2002.

GUADAGNO: All the family members received this to go through for all of the unclaimed, unidentified personal effects that were gathered from the flight. So unfortunately, we all had to go through page by horrifying page and see if we could identify articles.

DETROW: Tim reads the table of contents. It's a mundane list of things any of us would pack on a trip. The simplicity is what makes it so startling.

LAMBERT: (Reading) Bathing suits, hair bands, belts, bags, dresses, hats, pants, women's pants, shirts - women's, shirts - men's, shoes.

DETROW: Pairs of shoes and individual shoes are in different sections. Individual pictures of each item catalogued and assigned a number fill the rest of the binder. It was so clinical. And yet for Lori, it couldn't get any more personal.

GUADAGNO: 'Cause then it felt like as someone was looking at Richard's personal items, I was looking at theirs. And this just felt - just almost a violation, yet absolutely necessary. And I went through every, every single page, every page because the thing is I knew what my brother was wearing. I knew what was in his suitcase, so I was ready. I was so ready to look at these items and say, there it is. There's his Pearl Jam disc. There's his running shorts. There are his sneakers, you know? And the only thing I was able to identify was the wallet.

DETROW: A hemp wallet Richard bought during that visit to Vermont just before the big birthday party for their grandmother. It still had receipts inside, including from a meal he and Lori had shared. The material had soaked up the smell of the plane's jet fuel.

Everything else we talked about - you were talking about memories that were clearly painful. But the way you talked about it felt like you had settled it in your soul, in your mind. And your voice has changed as we go through these things.

GUADAGNO: No, these are things that I tuck away and I don't really ever look at or touch. I know they're there. I need to know they're there. But just last night, gathering these things - it's so much harder than I even think it is or would be because I think, you know, OK, 20 years, so much time has come, and I'm at a place where the pain never goes away, obviously. I've never had closure in this story. I never will. But I found a place to put it so that I can lead a happy, productive life. And I know that's what Rich would want. But when I touch these relics, it's - this is really tough shit. It is.

DETROW: There is one place Lori can find some peace...

GUADAGNO: I want to be there because also, I know how the wind feels.

DETROW: ...A place she once hated - the crash site.

GUADAGNO: I know how that land smells.

DETROW: She gets there when she can. She says it brings her a certain closeness she can't tap into anywhere else.

GUADAGNO: I know what certain tree bark feels like to touch. I know what the soil feels like in my fingertips.

DETROW: Lori says as much as she wishes Rich had not been a part of 9/11, this was a good place for him to be. It suits his soul.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DETROW: Earlier this summer, Tim and I drove up to Shanksville. We were there to meet Debby Borza. After Deora's death, Debby moved from California to the East Coast so she could help guide the making of the memorial. But she recently moved back to Southern California. When we arrive, Debby greets us warmly.

Turn around. Turn around. (Laughter). Oh, good to see you.

D BORZA: So good to see you.

DETROW: How are you?

She's relaxed, happy. She's smiling.

D BORZA: My job's done. You know, I - it's in the hands of the Park Service now. I'm glad I figured out how to let them have my daughter's life.

LAMBERT: But she admits she's still trying to process 20 years. She says what's so strange is that from this point forward, Deora will have been gone longer than she was alive. And Debby can't help but imagine what the past two decades would have been like for her daughter. She would have been turning 40 this year.

D BORZA: I look at her friends, you know? I don't keep that close of contact with Deora's friends. I mean, they're my Facebook friends, you know, so they post pictures of their children, you know, their vacations. You know, it's like and - so I guess I just live vicariously through, you know, their posts on Facebook, you know? And yeah. And they're busy living their lives. And so maybe it would have been like that. I don't know.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LAMBERT: For Debby, the memorial is like a second home. She's lived and breathed this place for 20 years. She has rituals, too. She likes to look at license plates in the parking lot to see how far people have traveled to be here. She greets the volunteers by name.

D BORZA: Hey, Chuck. Come over here to give you a hug.

LAMBERT: Then she walks to the white marble marker with Deora's name on it.

D BORZA: Hi, baby girl. Aw, I always look through here because I like to see the flowers - black-eyed Susans.

LAMBERT: After that, Debby makes her way toward the sandstone boulder.

D BORZA: You know, I - as I get closer to the sacred ground, it does become personally my place. This is where my daughter's remains are.

LAMBERT: Deora died alone, Debby points out, with no friends or family on that plane with her. But here, Debby has found a community in addition to peace.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DETROW: After a few moments, Tim asks Debby if he can walk back into his family's land. He wants to see the cabins where he spent summer days, a place he can only visit now when he's with a family member. She tells him to go ahead. I join him. As we walk into the woods, Tim automatically snaps back into an old habit.

LAMBERT: One of the things that I'm still doing it now is your eyes were always on the ground because you were going to see a piece of the plane. You were going to find debris from the plane.

DETROW: He doesn't expect to find anything of significance - maybe a small piece of wire or metal. It's been 20 years. And about 98% of the plane has already been recovered. Still, as Tim hunts for some of the trees spray-painted to mark that they had been climbed and searched, his eyes keep darting.

LAMBERT: I'm looking everywhere. My eyes are scanning the ground and anything that looks a little different.

DETROW: Then as we turn and walk back to the tree line, back to find Debby in the open field...

LAMBERT: Right here. Look at this. Look at this. This is a piece of metal.

DETROW: It's about 10 inches long, jagged, ripped - the unmistakable greenish gray of an airliner.

LAMBERT: (Crying) Oh, man.

DETROW: You OK?

LAMBERT: Yeah.

DETROW: When's the last time you saw a piece of metal this big here?

LAMBERT: Probably before we sold the land. And wow. That happens. It sneaks up on you when you come to this place. You never know when you're going to - it has some dirt on it. You can see a screw. A piece is bent.

DETROW: It's twisted. It's jagged. You can see how it was part of an explosion.

LAMBERT: We wouldn't have missed a piece like this when we did those searches. There's no way you can miss a piece this big.

DETROW: So you have to imagine it was up in one of those tall trees. And just over time, the wind shook it loose. The rain shook it loose.

LAMBERT: Yeah. Yeah. Or the weather just - you know, again, the ground shifts and sifts. And it comes up. Amazing. Twenty years. And now that this is a national park, it stays here. You can't remove it. You can't - you know, they'd want it here. This is part of the history now. And I'll just put it back where we found it.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DETROW: Sacred Ground was edited by Jennifer Schmidt and produced by Chris Benderev. The executive producers are Nicole Beemsterboer and Shirley Henry. Fact-checking and research by Susie Cummings, Candice Kortkamp and Julia Wohl. Thanks to Tracy Brannstrom, Liana Simstrom and Dan Girma of NPR. And a special thanks to Arnie Seipel.

LAMBERT: Thanks also to WITF, especially Ron Hetrick, Cara Williams Fry and Scott Blanchard - also Katie Hostetler (ph) and Betsy Keene (ph) from the National Park Service, Tobo Boehmer (ph), Gordy Felt from the Families of Flight 93, and Tom McMillan, the author of the book "Flight 93." I'm Tim Lambert.

DETROW: And I'm Scott Detrow.

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