Imagine for a moment that all Americans could go back in time to 8:45 a.m. But war historians and American scholars call these questions crucial. You can't be a cowboy, but you can be a hero." But can a faceless, behind-the-scenes bureaucrat really be a hero? Can heroes actually be anonymous? Or does that undermine the very purpose society has in proclaiming heroes: to encourage bravery on the front lines and to sustain both soldiers and civilians as they bear the costs, the hardships, and the pain of war? These are only a few of the questions posed by the nature of the first great war of the 21st century. "But you still might save innocent lives, and you can definitely get some bad guys. "You won't get a Medal of Honor, a movie deal, or a political career out of it," he says. Today, Miles Parsons-that's a pseudonym-really is fighting bad guys, but he's doing so from behind a computer screen in an office of a government agency he isn't allowed to name, 6,000 miles from the shooting front in the new war on terrorism. "I wanted to fight bad guys and protect the USA," he says, smiling, but without irony. After getting his college degree, he enlisted in the real Army. Below is one such speech.As a boy, Miles Parsons loved to dress up and play army, usually pretending to be a GI in World War II. ![]() Now a junior in high school, Glick speaks to others on how to deal with tragedy. The only child of Jeremy and Lyzbeth Glick, Emmy Glick wasn’t even 3 months old when her father died on United Flight 93. “Because of my ongoing relationship with his widow and daughters, I do feel close to him,” she said. “It was one of the happiest days of my life,” Mills said.īurnett's other three daughters, Halley, Anna Clare and Madison, are now in their early 20s.Įven though she never met her birth father, Mills said he is still a part of her. Now in her early 30s, Mills, a few years after 9/11, flew out to San Francisco to meet her father’s widow and her half-sisters for the first time. Mills got in touch with Burnett’s widow, Deena, who, with Burnett, had three other daughters - Mills’ half-sisters. 11 were right.īurnett and Mills’ birth mother dated in college and decided to give Mills up for adoption when she was born. “I suddenly knew that my dad was the Flight 93 hero from the news.” “I hung up and started sobbing,” Mills said to Cosmopolitan. Less than three years later, Mills requested a copy of her birth certificate, and when her adoptive mother opened it, she admitted to Mills that it was someone “kind of” famous. But throughout the ordeal and the news coverage that followed, Mills said she noticed how Burnett was one of the men who helped stop the hijackers on United Flight 93 and that his story was “everywhere.” Though Mills was adopted (and at the time, she did not know who her biological parents were), when she got home from school, she said she blurted out to her adoptive mother that “one of my birth parents had died,” according to a Cosmopolitan article. The attacks happened when Mills was a junior in high school. Mariah Mills (the biological daughter of Tom Burnett) The four men who prevented the attack posthumously received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award in 2002.Īll but Bingham had children or were expecting children before that fateful day, and those kids, 17 years later, are carrying on the legacies left by fathers they either barely knew or never met. The plan was for the hijackers to crash the plane into the Capitol, the Pentagon or the White House, according to published reports. Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick and Todd Beamer rightfully are forever immortalized for their role in battling a group of hijackers on United Flight 93 - a flight that ultimately took the lives of everybody on board the plane.Īfter Burnett, Bingham, Glick and Beamer, all former athletes, stormed the cockpit and battled four hijackers, the plane ended up crashing into a Pennsylvania field instead of a Washington, D.C. Thanks to the action of some very brave men, the world won’t ever know the additional destruction it could have seen on Sept.
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