A Searing Memory

Thank you.

Never forget what happened and who did it.

My dad lost two cousins in the Pacific in WWII. He was in the Army Air Corps and was lucky enough to never see combat himself, although he did spend several months in the Philippines in late 1945/early '46 (and in his words, "we still got shot at every night". He also said that he never in his life saw hatred like the Filipinos had for the Japanese.)

In the early 1970s when my sister brought home a boyfriend (now husband of 49 years) who drove a Mazda truck, my dad asked him if it came with a map of Pearl Harbor in the glove compartment. In 1976 our church had an exchange program that brought a group of Japanese high school students to stay with us for a week. My mom told me after they left that my dad had made a comment to our minister about still being mad at the Japanese about WWII, to which the minister reminded him that these kids hadn't even been born then.

All of which is just setting some context around the fact that while watching The Flight That Fought Back this evening, a 2005 documentary/dramatization about United 93, for the first time I really viscerally understood exactly where my dad was coming from...

When they got to the moment in the film where the real-life Virginia Jefferson recounts hearing Todd Beamer say "Let's Roll" I completely lost it.

I hope there's a special place in Hell for 9/11 truthers. They irritate more that even Holocaust deniers.

Miffed White Male (View Comment):

My dad lost two cousins in the Pacific in WWII. He was in the Army Air Corps and was lucky enough to never see combat himself, although he did spend several months in the Philippines in late 1945/early ’46 (and in his words, “we still got shot at every night”. He also said that he never in his life saw hatred like the Filipinos had for the Japanese.)

In the early 1970s when my sister brought home a boyfriend (now husband of 49 years) who drove a Mazda truck, my dad asked him if it came with a map of Pearl Harbor in the glove compartment. In 1976 our church had an exchange program that brought a group of Japanese high school students to stay with us for a week. My mom told me after they left that my dad had made a comment to our minister about still being mad at the Japanese about WWII, to which the minister reminded him that these kids hadn’t even been born then.

All of which is just setting some context around the fact that while watching The Flight That Fought Back this evening, a 2005 documentary/dramatization about United 93, for the first time I really viscerally understood exactly where my dad was coming from…

When they got to the moment in the film where the real-life Virginia Jefferson recounts hearing Todd Beamer say “Let’s Roll” I completely lost it.

I hope there’s a special place in Hell for 9/11 truthers. They irritate more that even Holocaust deniers.

Truthers needs to be in scare quotes.

Just finished the piece in Tablet and it is a must read … as are other pieces there.

”Twenty-five years on, New Yorkers have plenty of reasons to be scared of Muslim terror. In the aftermath of 9/11, our basic survival instincts were suppressed, and the horror is that now the people who celebrated the attacks and those who whitewashed them are deciding what we are permitted to remember.”