the summer of 2001, not everyone in the United States felt confident in the state of the nation, but many relished, or took for granted, the privileges of life in the last superpower at the dawn of the twenty-first century. They had enjoyed the longest uninterrupted economic boom in the nation’s history, and the spread of American culture, political ideas, and business interests to the world’s farthest reaches seemed destined to continue indefinitely. Almost none lost sleep over threats emanating from a cave in Afghanistan. A Gallup poll taken on September 10, 2001, found that fewer than 1 percent of Americans considered terrorism to be the nation’s No. 1 concern.
But they didn’t know that a countdown had already begun. Nineteen bin Laden devotees, radicalized young Arab men living in the United States, awoke on September 11, 2001, determined to fulfill the fatwa. In twenty-four hours, the poll results would change, along with everything else.
September 10, 2001
CAPTAIN JOHN OGONOWSKI
American Airlines Flight 11
“Dad, I need help with my math!”
John Ogonowski’s eldest daughter, Laura, called out to her father the second he stepped inside his family’s farmhouse in rural Dracut, Massachusetts.
“Laura!” yelled her mother, Margaret “Peg” Ogonowski, in response. “Let him walk in the door!”
Fifty years old, six feet tall and country-boy handsome, John gazed at his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter. His smile etched deep crinkles in the ruddy skin around his blue eyes. Dinner hour was near, and Peg suspected that John felt equal parts tired and happy to be home. As darkness fell on September 10, 2001, he’d just driven from Boston’s Logan International Airport after piloting an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles. A day earlier, he’d flown west on American Flight 11, a daily nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles.
After twenty-three years as a commercial pilot, John’s normal routine upon returning home was to go directly to the master bedroom and strip out of his navy-blue captain’s uniform with the silver stripes on the sleeves. He’d pull on grease-stained jeans and a work shirt, then head to the enormous barn on the family’s 130-acre farm, located thirty miles north of Boston, near the New Hampshire border. Quiet by nature, content working with his calloused hands, John inhaled the perfume of fresh hay bales and unwound by tackling one of the endless jobs that came with being a farmer who also flew jets.
But on this day, to Peg’s surprise, John broke his routine. Changing clothes and doing chores would wait. Still in uniform, he sat at the kitchen counter with Laura and her geometry problems. “Let’s remember,” he often told his girls, “math is fun.” They’d roll their eyes, but they liked to hear him say it.
Homework finished, the family enjoyed a dinner of chicken cutlets, capped by John’s favorite dessert, ice cream. Also at dinner that night were Peg’s parents, visiting from New York; his father’s brother Al, who lived nearby; and their younger daughters Caroline, fourteen, and Mary, eleven.
At one point, Peg noticed something missing from John’s uniform shirt. “Did you go to work without your epaulets?” she asked. “I had to stop for gas,” John said. He’d removed the shoulder decorations so he wouldn’t look showy, like one of those pilots who seemed to expect the world to salute them.
John’s modesty and quiet confidence had attracted Peg nineteen years earlier, when she was a junior flight attendant for American. John had joined the airline as a flight engineer after serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, when he flew C-141 transport planes back and forth across the Pacific. Some of his return flights bore flag-draped coffins. In his early years at American, John was a rare bird: an unmarried pilot, easy on the eyes, respectful to all. On a flight out of Phoenix, a savvy senior flight attendant urged Peg to speak with him. When they landed in Boston he got her number.
They were married in less than a year. By the end of the decade John had been promoted to captain, Peg had risen in seniority, and they had three daughters. All that, plus their White Gate Farm, growing hay and picking fruit from three hundred blueberry bushes and an orchard of a hundred fifty peach trees John planted himself. Every spring, they put in pumpkins and corn to sell at John’s parents’ farm a couple of miles down the road, where he’d learned to drive a tractor at the age of eight. Peg often joked that the classic John Deere in their barn was her pilot husband’s other jet.
John and Peg continued to work for American Airlines throughout their marriage, with John flying a dozen days a month and Peg working about the same. They alternated flight schedules so one or the other could be with the girls. When that failed, their families pitched in. John had spent a chunk of his career flying international routes, but the overnight flights wore him down, and he’d recently been recertified on the Boeing 767, the wide-bodied pride of American’s domestic fleet. Lately he’d been flying regularly on the Boston–Los Angeles route, often on Flight 11, which Peg had flown hundreds of times as well.
John was scheduled to fly again the next morning, another six-hour trip to California, but he decided he didn’t want to leave home so soon after returning from the West Coast. Also, federal agriculture officials and a team from Tufts University were coming to the farm in the morning to discuss a program John felt passionate about. He and Peg had set aside a dozen acres to allow Cambodian immigrant farmers to grow bok choy, water spinach, pigweed, and other traditional Asian vegetables, to sell at markets and to feed their families. John plowed for the immigrants and rarely collected the two-hundred-dollar monthly rent. He built greenhouses for early spring planting, provided water from the farm’s pond, and taught the new Americans about New England’s unforgiving soil, crop-killing pests, and short planting season. Soon the Ogonowskis’ White Gate Farm was designated the first “mentor farm” for immigrants. When a reporter stopped by, John heaped credit on the Cambodians: “These guys are putting more care and attention into their one acre than most Yankee farmers put into their entire hundred acres.”
After dinner, John went to the desktop computer in the TV room. He logged in to the American Airlines scheduling system, hoping that another pilot wanted to pick up an extra trip. A match would turn John’s onscreen schedule green, allowing him to stay on the farm on September 11. He tried several times, with the same result each time.
“I’m just getting red lights,” he told Peg.
The farm tour would go on without him, while once again John would serve as captain of American Airlines Flight 11, nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles.
PETER, SUE KIM, AND CHRISTINE HANSON
United Airlines Flight 175
In 1989, a vibrant young woman slalomed through a house party, weaving through the crowd to avoid a determined young man with red dreadlocks, freckles, and a closet stuffed with tie-dyed T-shirts. Peter Hanson was cute, but Sue Kim wasn’t interested in a latter-day hippie desperate to convince her that the music of the Grateful Dead was comparable to the work of Mozart.
This sort of thing happened often to Sue, a first-generation Korean American. It made sense that a curious, intense man like Peter would meet her at a party and be smitten by her intelligence and effervescence. Sue’s easy laugh made people imagine that she’d lived a charmed life. But she hadn’t.
When Sue was two, her overworked parents sent her from their Los Angeles home to live with her grandmother in Korea. She returned to the United States four years later and learned that she had two younger