Somerset County, PA, USA, June 26, 2002 — Wally Miller hits the siren on his dark Ford Excursion. He's alerting the Somerset County sheriffs that he is once again entering the restricted area surrounded by dense forest and enclosed by an eight-foot metal fence. Inside his truck is the familiar stale smell of the wilted flowers that he brings back from the 90 or so funerals he conducts every year. Death has been the family business at Miller Funeral Home in Somerset, Pa., for nearly half a century. Never, though, anything that even remotely resembles this.
Before Miller can even unfold his lanky 6-foot-4 body from the vehicle, a deputy sheriff thrusts at him a plastic baggie containing a handful of jagged metallic nuggets, mangled and melted into irregular shapes, little bigger than children's marbles. They are the latest of the shreds to be recovered -- nearly six months later -- of what remains of United Airlines Flight 93. Miller holds up the bag and says that virtually the entire airplane, including its 44 human occupants, disintegrated in similar fashion.
"I'm just a hick," Miller says when he considers the enormity of what he does. "I'm a country coroner." He is a youthful 44, with dark hair and a long, angular face that sometimes suggests a young, shaven version of Abe Lincoln. He is quite comfortable talking about death, most of the time. He grew up watching his father, Wilbur, deal with the grief of countless friends and neighbors, and then Wally succeeded Wilbur, both in running the funeral home and becoming Somerset County's elected coroner.
Black box recovered 25 feet underground So it is with a calm, practiced voice that Miller speaks whenever he escorts grieving family members, as he has again and again and again, up the muddy hillock that overlooks the spot where Flight 93 came to earth. Here on this mound and elsewhere, in hundreds of face-to-face conversations and on the telephone, Miller explains to families from New Jersey to Berkeley to Japan to Germany the grisly calculus of what happened to their loved ones: The Boeing 757 still heavily laden with jet fuel slammed at about 575 mph almost straight down into a rolling patch of grassy land that had long ago been strip-mined for coal. The impact spewed a fireball of horrific force across hundreds of acres of towering hemlocks and other trees, setting many ablaze. The fuselage burrowed straight into the earth so forcefully that one of the "black boxes" was recovered at a depth of 25 feet under the ground.
Cremated on impact
As coroner, responsible for returning human remains, Miller has been forced to share with the families information that is unimaginable. As he clinically recounts to them, holding back very few details, the 33 passengers, seven crew and four hijackers together weighed roughly 7,000 pounds. They were essentially cremated together upon impact. Hundreds of searchers who climbed the hemlocks and combed the woods for weeks were able to find about 1,500 mostly scorched samples of human tissue totaling less than 600 pounds, or about 8 percent of the total.
Miller was among the very first to arrive after 10:06 on the magnificently sunny morning of September 11. He was stunned at how small the smoking crater looked, he says, "like someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped all this trash into it." Once he was able to absorb the scene, Miller says, "I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes, because there were no bodies there. It became like a giant funeral service." As a funeral director, Miller says, he is honored and humbled to preside over what has become essentially an immense cemetery stretching far into the scenic wooded mountain ridge. He considers it the final resting place of 40 national heroes.
Volunteer missionaries among casualties
Flight 93 is already beginning to pass beyond mere history and into the realm of American heroic mythology because the full story and true measure of the passengers' collective valor likely will never be known. What is known is that a group of men and women, randomly thrown together, somehow rose up as they faced death. Ages 20 to 79, from Manalapan, N.J., to Honolulu, from Greensboro, N.C., to New York City, they were energetic salespeople, ambitious college students, corporate executives, lawyers, a retired ironworker, a waiter going to his son's funeral, a four-foot-tall handicapped rights activist, a census worker, a fish and wildlife officer, a retired couple who were volunteer missionaries.
Fate, airport traffic and the cellular phone made their heroism possible. UAL 93 -- Newark to San Francisco -- was supposed to take off at 8 a.m., choreographed on virtually the same murderous timeline as the three other planes from Boston and Washington that were seized in the terrorist plot. But only the Newark takeoff was substantially traffic-delayed -- until 8:42. So by the time UAL 93 reached the outskirts of Cleveland around 9:30 -- and four Arab men abruptly stood and tied red bandannas around their heads, announcing they had a bomb -- two other doomed planes had already slammed into the World Trade Center towers and the third was hurtling downward toward its target, the Pentagon. This fourth plane was only now changing course and, it is believed, aiming straight for Washington to blow up the White House or the U.S. Capitol.
Aboard Flight 93, most of the passengers were herded to the back of the plane, and because several had working cell phones or grabbed the onboard GTE Airfones, they were able to reach their families and a 911 operator. Only then did they realize that their hijacking was no isolated incident. Four passengers in particular -- Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham and Jeremy Glick -- would later be hailed as heroes because media accounts of their phone conversations provided the most heart-wrenching and detailed glimpses of the plan for the passengers' life-or-death charge for the cockpit, where the terrorists had seized control.
Lord's prayer recited on flight 93
The lengthy 911 call between Beamer, a 32-year-old account manager for a Silicon Valley software firm, and Lisa Jefferson, a veteran GTE operator outside Chicago, became immortalized: As the plane lurched erratically and passengers screamed, Beamer, a devout Christian, and his seatmates recited the Lord's Prayer, with Jefferson joining in. "Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done . . ." As Jefferson intermittently heard more screams, Beamer and others recited the 23rd Psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . ."
Then Jefferson heard Beamer say, "Are you guys ready? Okay. Let's roll!"
Immediately after the crash, the seeming absence of human remains led the mind of coroner Wally Miller to a surreal fantasy: that Flight 93 had somehow stopped in mid-flight and discharged all of its passengers before crashing. "There was just nothing visible," he says. "It was the strangest feeling." It would be nearly an hour before Miller came upon his first trace of a body part. The emotionally wrenching impact of what happened to the bodies caused Miller to resolve to seek out and talk personally to every one of the victims' families.
| "I am a Christian... I'm not an exemplary Christian." For some reason, which remains unknown to him, Miller says, "God put me in charge of the site." |
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- Wally Miller
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Often, the families turned to Miller for guidance. But he says he does not have any answers to previously unthinkable questions. "I never tried to portray myself as anything I wasn't. I'm sure not an expert," he says. "I'm a funeral director, and I know a little bit about grief."
Wally Miller looks decidedly uncomfortable standing in a dark gray suit in front of a church audience. He is hugely popular in Somerset, reelected as county coroner last year with more than 80 percent of the vote -- without campaigning. Since September 11, he has been in great demand as a speaker, not just locally, but at gatherings of coroners, emergency rescue workers and law enforcement groups from New Orleans to Toronto. He'll talk about his work, he says, but not too much about himself.
For months, he tells the church group, he's been conscious of "the burden I carried" as coroner, but reluctant to discuss it in public. He did not plan to attend this service at Somerset Alliance Church on March 11, the night of the six-month anniversary, he says, but has done so at the urging of friends who convinced him that "this is the time and place to talk about the spiritual aspect of what happened out there."
First, though, he wants to make clear that he has no special qualifications for the discussion or for what he's done since September 11. "I am a Christian," he says. "I'm not an exemplary Christian." For some reason, which remains unknown to him, Miller says, "God put me in charge of the site."
"I knew when I stood in that crater that it was going to be a long road
ahead. But I knew we would make it through. I never dreamed it would go the way it has. My phone never stops ringing" and the demands seem endless, he says, "but it was okay . . . I was put here for this." He says he looks forward to the end of his role in Flight 93. "This is not something I want to be remembered for. It was part of my journey . . ."
Two Bibles found in wreckage of flight 93
Miller says he is often asked how he copes emotionally with the work he must do. He says he is not sure. Then he tells the church audience that, remarkably, two heavily damaged Bibles were found in the wreckage of the flight; a white one at the crash site that belonged to a passenger who was a practicing Buddhist; and a second one, black, of uncertain ownership. Miller says he ran across the second one on the floor of the warehouse where victims' belongings were being kept. The second Bible was scrunched up and was lying open, he says, to the 121st Psalm, which is customarily read at funerals. He says he has no idea who left the Bible in that position.
Then Miller opens the Bible he is holding and starts to read that Old Testament psalm to the church audience: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help . . ."
(c) 2002 The Washington Post Company. For the complete text of "Hallowed Ground" by Peter Perl, click on:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56110-2002May8.html
Source: Peter Perl, Washington Post
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