There are moments in history when the word hero becomes inadequate.

September 11, 2001, was one of them.

We know many of the images by heart.

Firefighters climbing the stairwells of the World Trade Center while thousands descended past them. Police officers covered in gray dust. The burning western wall of the Pentagon. A scar in an otherwise peaceful field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The faces of the missing taped to walls and telephone poles across New York City.

We know some of the names, too.

Todd Beamer. Rick Rescorla. The firefighters of the FDNY. The officers of the NYPD and Port Authority Police Department. The passengers of United Airlines Flight 93.

But September 11th produced thousands of individual stories, and some of the most extraordinary have never become household knowledge.

There were office workers who refused to abandon disabled coworkers.

Construction workers who possessed the knowledge necessary to escape the World Trade Center—and instead used that knowledge to climb toward trapped strangers.

A chef who stopped being a chef and became a rescuer.

Military personnel at the Pentagon who survived an explosion and then crawled back toward the fire.

Doctors and nurses who established makeshift treatment areas with whatever equipment they could find.

Flight attendants aboard Flight 93 who helped organize resistance while knowing that they might never see their families again.

And passengers who, thousands of feet above Pennsylvania, held what may have been one of the most consequential votes in American history.

None of them woke up on September 11th expecting to become heroes.

They went to work.

They boarded airplanes.

They kissed spouses goodbye.

They dropped children off.

They drank coffee.

Then history arrived without warning.

What happened next tells us something profound about courage.

New York: The People Who Went Up

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

The aircraft tore into floors 93 through 99.

Below the impact zone, thousands of people began trying to escape.

Among them were Port Authority employees Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz.

They were working on the 88th floor.

That fact is important.

They were below the impact.

They had a potential route out.

And they understood the building.

De Martini was a construction manager for the Port Authority. Ortiz was a construction superintendent and former Navy SEAL. Their knowledge of the building's interior—its walls, doors, stairwells and construction—suddenly became something far more valuable than professional expertise.

It became a means of survival.

The impact had twisted portions of the building. Doors jammed. Debris blocked passages. Elevators were unusable.

De Martini and Ortiz, working with colleagues including Pete Negron and Carlos da Costa, began clearing escape routes.

They found a usable stairwell.

People could get out.

At that moment, they could have joined them.

They didn't.

Instead, they heard people trapped elsewhere.

And they went looking for them.

Ortiz, De Martini and their coworkers began using construction tools to break through obstacles, pry open damaged doors and reach people trapped on the floors around them.

The National September 11th Memorial & Museum notes that the group helped at least 50 trapped people escape.

Consider what that means.

Every instinct in a burning skyscraper tells a person to go down.

They went up.

They knew where the surviving stairwell was. They knew how to escape. Rather than use that knowledge solely for themselves, they repeatedly used it to find others and direct them toward safety.

Eventually the men disappeared back into the tower searching for more people.

They never came out.

At 10:28 a.m., the North Tower collapsed.

Pablo Ortiz's wife, Edna, had been communicating with her husband through his pager. Her final page to him went unanswered.

She then watched his building collapse on television.

There are people who survived September 11th because Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz decided that knowing the way out created an obligation to show others.

They were not firefighters.

They were not dispatched to perform a rescue.

They simply possessed the ability to help.

For them, apparently, that was enough.

Abraham Zelmanowitz: “I’m Not Leaving Him”

Twenty-seven floors above the ground in the North Tower was another kind of heroism.

It did not involve charging toward flames.

It involved refusing to leave a friend.

Edward Beyea worked as a computer programmer for Empire BlueCross BlueShield.

Beyea was quadriplegic and used a wheelchair.

His friend and coworker Abraham “Abe” Zelmanowitz was with him.

As employees evacuated after Flight 11 struck the building, Zelmanowitz faced an agonizing choice.

He could descend the stairs.

Beyea could not.

So Zelmanowitz stayed.

The two had been friends for years. According to the 9/11 Memorial Museum, they enjoyed cigars and dinners together, often accompanied by Beyea's personal aide, Irma Fuller.

On September 11th, Fuller was with them.

Zelmanowitz urged her to evacuate and tell emergency personnel where Beyea was waiting.

Then he remained with his friend.

Eventually FDNY Captain William Francis Burke Jr., of Engine Company 21, reached them.

By then, the South Tower had collapsed.

Burke understood what that meant.

The North Tower could collapse as well.

He ordered the firefighters under his command to evacuate.

Then Burke stayed.

He helped Beyea and Zelmanowitz descend several floors.

Three men were now together: a quadriplegic office worker who could not evacuate independently, a friend who refused to abandon him, and a firefighter who sent his own men toward safety but remained behind to help them.

None survived the collapse of the North Tower.

Burke was the only member of his firehouse killed that day.

Zelmanowitz's family later explained that they were not surprised by his decision.

His brother said that Abe simply could not turn his back on another human being.

Benjamin Clark: The Chef Who Became a Rescuer

Benjamin Clark was not supposed to be part of an emergency response team.

He was an executive chef.

Clark had served as a Marine during the Gulf War before pursuing a culinary career. By 2001, he worked for the food-service company serving Fiduciary Trust in the South Tower.

His responsibility was normally feeding hundreds of employees.

September 11th changed his mission.

Clark could have concentrated exclusively on his own evacuation.

Instead, survivors remembered him helping others.

The 9/11 Memorial Museum records that Clark was last seen on the South Tower's 88th floor with three other people assisting a woman in a wheelchair.

He never made it home.

Benjamin Clark was 39.

He left behind a wife and five children.

There is something particularly important about Clark's story because it illustrates the nature of so many acts performed that morning.

There was no time to establish committees.

No time to determine jurisdiction.

No time to ask whether helping someone was technically part of a job description.

A former Marine and executive chef saw someone who needed help.

So he helped.

Moira Smith: One More Person

NYPD Officer Moira Smith repeatedly entered the World Trade Center complex to help evacuate people.

Photographs from September 11th show Smith assisting a bloodied survivor.

But photographs cannot fully capture what happened.

Her family later described her as going into the towers again and again to save people.

She was killed when the South Tower collapsed.

Smith was the only female NYPD officer killed on September 11th.

Her story belongs beside those of Port Authority Police Captain Kathy Mazza and MetroCare EMT Yamel Merino, two other women who died while participating in the response. The 9/11 Memorial specifically recognizes all three among the women who gave their lives helping others that day.

Their stories are reminders that the army of people moving toward the disaster was far more diverse than the familiar photographs sometimes suggest.

Police officers.

Firefighters.

EMTs.

Construction workers.

Chefs.

Security personnel.

Office workers.

Military veterans.

People whose names would become famous.

And people whose names most Americans would never learn.

The Pentagon: When the Building Became a Battlefield

At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon.

The Pentagon was not merely an office building.

It was the headquarters of the United States military.

But the people inside were largely performing the ordinary work of a Tuesday morning—meetings, paperwork, telephone calls and briefings.

Then the aircraft hit.

Fire erupted through portions of the building.

Walls and ceilings collapsed.

Smoke filled corridors.

People were burned, cut, disoriented and trapped beneath wreckage.

And almost immediately, survivors began becoming rescuers.

The official Department of Defense history of the Pentagon attack describes an extraordinary spontaneous rescue operation.

People who had just escaped turned around.

Military personnel crawled into smoke.

Medical personnel improvised treatment stations.

People tore clothing into bandages.

Rank mattered less than necessity.

The Pentagon had effectively become a mass-casualty battlefield.

And the people working there responded accordingly.

Marines Jason Schuetz and David Vera: Into the Smoke

Among those responding were Marines Jason Schuetz and David Vera.

The conditions were horrific.

The official Pentagon history describes rescuers repeatedly entering areas filled with smoke, fire and extreme heat.

Some rolled in pools of standing water to protect themselves from the temperature before going back inside.

When one group could no longer tolerate the heat and smoke, they handed their limited equipment to another group.

Then the next rescuers went in.

Schuetz and Vera estimated that during roughly 30 to 40 minutes their group helped save approximately a dozen people suffering from burns, cuts and smoke inhalation.

They had little of the specialized equipment that professional firefighters would normally bring into such an environment.

They had instinct.

Training.

And one another.

Schuetz later explained the mentality simply:

They were Marines.

Helping people was what they believed they were supposed to do.

That explanation is almost painfully understated.

There was fire.

There was jet fuel.

There was structural damage.

Nobody knew whether another aircraft was coming.

Nobody knew whether portions of the Pentagon would collapse.

Yet people continued going inside.

Lieutenant Commander David Tarantino: “I’m a Doctor. I’m Here to Help.”

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary Pentagon stories belongs to Navy Lieutenant Commander David Tarantino, a flight surgeon.

His office was not directly struck.

He could have evacuated.

Instead, Tarantino decided that the place where his medical training was most valuable was closer to the impact.

He moved through smoke-filled corridors, wetting paper towels and giving them to people struggling to breathe.

Eventually the smoke became so thick that he could no longer remain upright.

So he crawled.

He moved toward the damaged sections of the Pentagon, helping confused and injured people toward safety as he went.

Then he heard cries.

People were trapped.

Among them were Navy personnel Christina Williams, Charles Lewis, and retired Navy Captain Darrell “Jerry” Henson.

Debris had collapsed around them.

The heat and smoke were increasing.

Tarantino and other rescuers fought through the wreckage to reach them.

When Tarantino reached Henson, the former Navy pilot was badly trapped beneath debris.

The doctor crawled into the tiny space beside him.

He identified himself as a physician.

And he told Henson they were going to get him out.

The rescue required people to work in conditions that were becoming increasingly lethal.

Yet they continued.

The Pentagon's official history records Tarantino and other rescuers repeatedly attempting to move wreckage and free the trapped survivors while flames approached.

It is difficult to imagine the psychology of that moment.

Tarantino knew exactly how dangerous the environment was.

As a physician, he understood smoke inhalation.

He understood burns.

He understood trauma.

He understood what fire could do.

And he crawled toward it anyway.

Patricia Horoho: Building a Hospital on the Lawn

Outside the Pentagon, another problem was developing.

Survivors were emerging burned, bleeding and disoriented.

There was no traditional emergency room waiting for them.

So medical personnel created one.

Among those responding was Army Lieutenant Colonel Patricia Horoho, a nurse with trauma experience.

Initially, she had little more than basic medical supplies.

That did not stop her.

Horoho and other medical personnel began triaging casualties—determining who required immediate treatment, who could wait and where limited medical resources were most urgently needed.

The response eventually became a massive cooperative medical operation involving military and civilian personnel.

The Department of Defense's history describes Pentagon medical teams moving through the building searching for wounded, establishing casualty collection points and then setting up triage areas outside.

Horoho would later emphasize that the response was not the work of one person.

That is precisely the point.

The Pentagon story is filled with individuals whose names are rarely included in popular accounts of September 11th.

Doctors.

Nurses.

Medics.

Marines.

Sailors.

Airmen.

Soldiers.

Civilian employees.

People who were themselves victims of an attack and nevertheless immediately began caring for the person beside them.

Shanksville, Pennsylvania: The Airplane Where the Victims Fought Back

The story of United Airlines Flight 93 is different.

There were no firefighters aboard.

No police tactical team.

No military rescue force.

There was no one coming through the cabin door to save the passengers.

There were 33 passengers and seven crew members aboard Flight 93, excluding the hijackers.

They were ordinary travelers.

Some were going home.

Some were traveling for business.

Some were beginning trips.

The crew members were simply doing their jobs.

Then, at approximately 9:28 a.m., the hijacking began.

Through telephone calls, passengers and crew began learning what had happened in New York and Washington.

The World Trade Center had been attacked.

The Pentagon had been attacked.

Their aircraft was not part of a traditional hijacking.

They began to understand that they themselves were aboard a weapon.

Thirteen people aboard Flight 93 placed 37 calls.

From those calls emerged a remarkable picture.

The people aboard did not simply panic.

They gathered information.

They communicated.

They made plans.

And then they acted.

Sandy Bradshaw: The Flight Attendant Preparing to Fight

Sandy Waugh Bradshaw was a 38-year-old United Airlines flight attendant.

She had children waiting at home.

During the hijacking, Bradshaw contacted United Airlines and reported what was happening.

Then she called her husband.

She told him something extraordinary.

Passengers and crew were preparing to fight.

Bradshaw said they were boiling water to use against the hijackers.

Near the end of the call, she told her husband that everyone was running toward first class.

Think about the transformation represented by that sentence.

Minutes earlier, she had been a flight attendant serving passengers.

Now she was part of an improvised counterattack against terrorists who had seized a commercial airliner.

There was no training manual for what Flight 93's crew was confronting.

The assumptions governing hijackings had changed in less than an hour.

Bradshaw adapted.

So did the others.

CeeCee Lyles: Police Officer, Flight Attendant, Fighter

Another Flight 93 attendant was CeeCee Ross Lyles.

Before becoming a flight attendant, Lyles had spent six years as a police officer and detective in Fort Pierce, Florida.

She had completed flight-attendant training only months earlier.

She was 33.

A mother.

During the hijacking, she called home.

Her first call reached an answering machine.

She told her husband that the plane had been hijacked and told him that she loved him and their children.

Minutes before the crash, she reached him again.

They prayed together.

Then Lyles told him that they were preparing to act.

The former police officer had suddenly found herself confronting another crime—except this time she had no badge, no radio, no firearm and no backup.

What she had was courage.

And other passengers.

Jeremy Glick: The Judo Champion Who Joined the Counterattack

Jeremy Glick was 31.

He had a wife and a three-month-old daughter.

He was also a former collegiate judo champion and black belt.

During the hijacking, Glick called his wife.

He calmly described what was happening.

By then passengers understood that other aircraft had been used as weapons.

They were discussing what to do.

Glick told his wife that passengers and crew were preparing to rush the hijackers.

Before ending the call, he told her that he loved her.

Then he joined the others.

It is tempting to focus entirely on the physical strength of passengers such as Glick.

But the more remarkable element may have been the psychological decision.

They knew the hijackers claimed to have a bomb.

They knew people had already been killed aboard their aircraft.

They knew the pilots had been incapacitated.

They knew attacking the cockpit might result in their deaths.

But by then another realization outweighed those fears:

Doing nothing might allow hundreds or thousands of additional people on the ground to die.

Honor Wainio: “They’re Getting Ready to Break Into the Cockpit”

One of the lesser-known voices from Flight 93 belonged to Honor Elizabeth Wainio.

She called her stepmother.

Even while facing her own likely death, Wainio expressed concern about what her death would do to her family.

Near the end of the call, she reported that the passengers were preparing to enter the cockpit.

Then she had to go.

The call ended.

It is one of the haunting elements of Flight 93.

Families were effectively hearing a resistance movement form in real time.

The passengers were no longer merely hostages.

They had decided to become combatants.

Lauren Grandcolas: A Mother Who Never Came Home

Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas was 38.

She was returning home from her grandmother's funeral.

She and her husband were expecting their first child.

She called from Flight 93 and left a message for her husband.

There was a problem aboard the aircraft.

She told him she loved him.

She asked that her family be told that she loved them too.

Grandcolas is sometimes lost in the broader story of Flight 93.

She should not be.

Neither should the unborn child remembered with her at the Flight 93 National Memorial.

Nor should the dozens of other people aboard.

Because Flight 93's resistance cannot accurately be reduced to a single famous passenger or a single famous phrase.

The National Park Service recognizes all 40 passengers and crew members as heroes.

That distinction matters.

Forty Heroes, Not One

Todd Beamer's “Let's roll” became the phrase America remembers.

It deserves to be remembered.

But Flight 93 was not the story of one man.

It was collective resistance.

Thomas Burnett told his wife that a group aboard was preparing to act.

Jeremy Glick discussed rushing the hijackers.

Sandy Bradshaw described preparing boiling water.

CeeCee Lyles told her husband that action was beginning.

Honor Wainio reported that passengers were preparing to break into the cockpit.

Others participated whose exact actions may never be known.

At approximately 10:03 a.m., Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Everyone aboard was killed.

But the aircraft never reached the terrorists' intended target.

Evidence reviewed after the attack—including telephone calls and the cockpit voice recorder—established that the passengers and crew collectively decided to resist the hijackers.

Their target is believed to have been in Washington, with the U.S. Capitol among the likely objectives.

Whatever the precise destination, the passengers knew enough.

Their aircraft was headed toward people on the ground.

And they decided that it would not get there without a fight.

Heroism Without Orders

There is a thread connecting New York, the Pentagon and Shanksville.

Most of these people were never ordered to perform the actions for which we remember them.

Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz were not ordered to climb back toward trapped workers.

Abraham Zelmanowitz was not ordered to stay beside Edward Beyea.

Benjamin Clark was not ordered to remain behind helping a woman in a wheelchair.

David Tarantino was not ordered to crawl toward cries coming from the Pentagon's wreckage.

The passengers aboard Flight 93 were certainly not ordered to retake their aircraft.

They acted because circumstances placed a decision in front of them.

Some survived.

Some did not.

And there are almost certainly acts of courage from that morning that will never be documented.

The people who witnessed them died beside the people who performed them.

The Heroes Whose Names We Will Never Know

That may be the most important part of remembering September 11th.

History naturally simplifies enormous events.

Numbers replace individuals.

2,977 victims.

Four airplanes.

Two towers.

One Pentagon.

One field in Pennsylvania.

But numbers cannot describe September 11th.

People can.

The person holding open a stairwell door.

The stranger carrying someone who could no longer walk.

The office worker refusing to leave a wheelchair-bound colleague.

The firefighter climbing when everyone else was descending.

The Marine crawling through smoke.

The nurse kneeling beside a burned stranger.

The flight attendant boiling water because it was one of the few weapons available.

The passenger calling home, saying goodbye, and then turning toward the cockpit.

These were not superheroes.

That is precisely why their stories matter.

They were human beings experiencing fear, confusion and uncertainty.

Courage was not the absence of those things.

Courage was what they did despite them.

Twenty-Five Years Later

This September marks twenty-five years since the attacks.

A generation of Americans has now reached adulthood with no personal memory of September 11, 2001.

For them, 9/11 is history.

For millions of others, it remains memory.

That difference creates an obligation.

We must teach the next generation what happened.

Not simply who attacked us.

Not simply which buildings fell.

Not simply how America went to war afterward.

We must teach them what Americans did for one another when the unimaginable happened.

The National Park Service will again gather families and visitors at Flight 93 National Memorial this September 11th, reading the names of the passengers and crew and ringing the Bells of Remembrance in their honor.

Those names matter.

So do the thousands of names in New York and Washington.

Because eventually eyewitnesses disappear.

Photographs fade.

Artifacts move behind museum glass.

Events become paragraphs in textbooks.

And eventually a child will ask:

What was September 11th?

Our answer should include the terror.

It should include the destruction.

It should include the people we lost.

But it should also include Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz carrying tools upstairs when the safe direction was down.

It should include Abraham Zelmanowitz refusing to abandon Edward Beyea.

It should include William Burke sending his firefighters toward safety and staying behind himself.

It should include Benjamin Clark helping a wheelchair-bound coworker instead of concentrating on his own escape.

It should include Moira Smith going back for one more person.

It should include Marines crawling into the burning Pentagon.

It should include doctors and nurses building emergency rooms wherever casualties happened to fall.

It should include Sandy Bradshaw preparing boiling water aboard Flight 93.

It should include CeeCee Lyles praying with her husband before joining the resistance.

It should include Jeremy Glick preparing to fight.

It should include Honor Wainio worrying about her family even while facing her own death.

And it should include every passenger and crew member aboard Flight 93—not simply the handful whose names became famous.

Because September 11th showed humanity at its worst.

But in the same terrible hours, it also showed ordinary human beings at their absolute best.

Remember Their Names

There is a phrase permanently associated with September 11th:

Never Forget.

Twenty-five years later, those words demand more from us than remembering that the attacks happened.

Never forget the victims.

Never forget the firefighters.

Never forget the police officers.

Never forget the paramedics.

Never forget the military personnel.

Never forget the passengers and flight crews.

But also:

Never forget the chef.

Never forget the construction worker.

Never forget the office worker.

Never forget the nurse.

Never forget the friend who refused to leave his friend.

Never forget the people whose final actions were performed for strangers.

And never forget the heroes whose names history may never know.

On September 11, 2001, America was attacked.

For several terrible hours, thousands of people had no idea what would happen next.

And across New York City, Arlington, Virginia, and a passenger cabin thousands of feet above Pennsylvania, ordinary people were presented with extraordinary choices.

Again and again, they chose one another.

That, too, is the story of September 11th.

And that story deserves to be remembered.

Sources and Further Reading

• National September 11th Memorial & Museum
• 9/11 Memorial: Remembering Pablo Ortiz, Hero of the 88th Floor
• 9/11 Memorial: Remembering Abraham Zelmanowitz
• 9/11 Memorial: Remembering Benjamin Clark
• U.S. Department of Defense: Pentagon 9/11 Historical Study
• National Park Service: Flight 93 National Memorial
• National Park Service: Flight 93 Passengers and Crew
• National Park Service: Flight 93 Phone Calls and Seating Chart