Twenty five years ago today, a 26 year old rookie fighter pilot took off from Andrews with no missiles, no bullets that mattered, and orders that meant she was not coming back. Heather Penney was a first lieutenant in the 121st Fighter Squadron, DC Air National Guard, the Capital Guardians. She had been flying F-16s for a short time and she was the only woman in her class. Her father, John Penney, was a retired Air Force colonel who had flown in Vietnam and was then flying airliners for United. That morning both towers were burning, the Pentagon had been hit, and there was a fourth airliner still in the sky heading for Washington. United 93. The alert jets that normally sit armed on the ramp were not available. The squadron's F-16s were loaded with roughly a hundred rounds of non explosive training ammunition, ballast used to keep the aircraft in trim. No AIM-9s. No AIM-120s. Nothing that would bring down a Boeing 757. Lieutenant Colonel Marc Sasseville looked at her and said he would take the cockpit. She said she would take the tail. That was the entire plan. Two unarmed fighters would fly into a loaded airliner, aimed like darts at a jet almost seven times their weight, because there was no other way to stop it before it reached the Capitol or the White House. Penney has said she thought about ejecting at the last second and decided against it. She did not trust herself to stay on target if part of her was thinking about getting out. They ran to the jets, skipped most of the checks, and pushed the throttles up before the engines were properly warm. She said later that she was going to be a missile with wings. What she did not know, what nobody in the cockpit knew, is that it was already over. At 10:03 United 93 went into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, nose down at roughly 580 miles an hour, because forty passengers and crew had taken a vote, boiled water, grabbed a drink cart and gone up the aisle at the men who had taken their airplane. Penney and Sasseville flew for about an hour and a half looking for a plane that no longer existed, then escorted Air Force One back toward Washington. She flew two tours in Iraq and made major. For years afterward she refused to be called the hero of that story. Her line was that the real ones were already dead in a Pennsylvania field, and that they were ordinary people, mothers and fathers and schoolteachers and salesmen, who figured out what was happening and did the math faster than the United States Air Force could get a jet off the ground. They did with their bare hands what she was willing to do with a fighter.

Twenty five years ago today a 24 year old equities trader tied a red bandana over his face and went back up into a burning tower until it killed him. Welles Crowther worked for Sandler O'Neill on the 104th floor of the South Tower. Nyack, New York. Boston College lacrosse. When he was six his father handed him a red handkerchief and told him to keep it in his back pocket, and he carried one every day after that. Teammates knew him by it. He wore one under his lacrosse helmet. At 16 he joined his father's volunteer fire company in Upper Nyack. By 2001 he had a trader's salary and a trader's future and he had already put in an application to the FDNY, because he wanted out of finance and into a truck. 9:03 a.m. United 175 goes into the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. The 78th floor sky lobby is right in the impact zone, packed with people waiting for express elevators down. Most of them are killed instantly. The ones still alive are lying in the dark in burning jet fuel and collapsed ceiling, and none of them know that one stairwell is still open. Judy Wein, badly injured, hears a voice cutting through it. A young man with a red bandana over his nose and mouth, carrying a fire extinguisher. He puts out flames. He finds the intact stairwell. Then he says, everyone who can stand, stand now. Everyone who can help others, find someone to help. He lifts an injured woman onto his back and carries her down seventeen flights to the 61st floor, where the elevators are still running. Then he turns around and climbs back up to 78. He does it again. Ling Young, burned over most of her body, is led down by the same man in the same bandana, with another injured woman in his arms. He hands them off at 61, points them toward the elevators, and goes back up a third time. Somewhere in all of that he called his mother's voicemail. "Mom, this is Welles. I want you to know that I'm okay." The South Tower fell at 9:59. In March 2002 they found his body in the lobby, intact, lying with FDNY firefighters and the jaws of life. He had gotten all the way down and stayed to work the fire department command post instead of walking out the door. His family knew none of it. Then that May his mother read survivor accounts in the paper describing a man in a red bandana who came out of the smoke on the 78th floor and told them to stand up. She recognized her son from a piece of cloth. At least a dozen people are alive because of him, and the number is usually put at eighteen. In 2006 the FDNY made him an honorary firefighter, something almost no civilian ever receives. He was 24 years old.

Twenty-five years ago today, Manhattan became an island with no way off it. By 9:21 a.m. the bridges were closed. Then the tunnels. Then the subways. Two million people were sealed onto twenty-two square miles of rock, and the smoke was moving south. They went to the water because there was nowhere else to go. Battery Park filled with people standing shoulder to shoulder on the seawall, covered in ash, watching the harbor. Some of them waded in. There was no plan for this. New York had no evacuation plan for an island of two million people. At 10:45 a.m., a Coast Guard lieutenant named Michael Day keyed a radio and said this: "All available boats. This is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan report to Governors Island." That was it. No authority to compel anyone. No chain of command. Just a request broadcast into open water. Every boat in the harbor turned around. Tugboats pushing barges dropped their loads mid-river. Staten Island ferries. Commuter ferries rated for 399 passengers took on far more than that, with people jumping down onto the decks from the seawall. Circle Line sightseeing boats. Dinner cruise boats with the tables still set. Fishing charters. Private yachts. Coast Guard cutters and NYPD harbor units working alongside a retired fireboat that volunteers had bought at auction and restored as a hobby. Vincent Ardolino ran a small charter boat called the Amberjack V. His wife told him not to go. He went anyway and made run after run into a waterfront nobody could see through. The boats had no idea what they were sailing into. The towers had already come down. Nobody knew if there was a third plane, or a fourth. They went in through smoke so thick that some captains navigated by radar alone, loaded strangers until the freeboard disappeared, ran them to Jersey or Brooklyn or Staten Island, and turned straight back around. Then they started hauling cargo the other way, bringing in water, food, boots, and welding gear for the men digging at the pile. It ran until dark. Roughly nine hours. Somewhere between 300,000 and half a million people were taken off Manhattan that day. Dunkirk moved 338,226 men in nine days, and Dunkirk was run by the Royal Navy, with a plan, a name, and an admiral in charge. This one had a guy on a radio asking nicely. It remains the largest waterborne evacuation in human history, and it was not a fleet. It was just whoever happened to be near the water that morning.

Twenty five years ago today, a 62 year old man with cancer in his bones walked 2,687 people out of the South Tower, and then he went back inside. Rick Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall in 1939. British Parachute Regiment in Cyprus at 18. Colonial police in Northern Rhodesia. Then he came to America, enlisted in the US Army in 1963, and in November 1965 he went into the Ia Drang Valley as a platoon leader with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry. Hal Moore called him the best platoon leader he ever saw. His men called him Hard Core. He sang to them in the dark, Wild Colonial Boy in an Australian accent, because he had worked out that men who are singing are not men who are panicking. That is Rescorla on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once and Young, bayonet fixed. Thirty five years later he was head of security for Dean Witter, later Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. In 1990 he brought in his old friend Dan Hill and the two of them walked the basement. He warned the Port Authority that the parking garage was wide open, that somebody could drive in a truck full of explosives, walk out and light it off. Nothing was done. Three years later the 1993 bomb went off about thirty feet from the spot he had flagged. After that he told Morgan Stanley the towers were still a target and the next attack would come out of the sky. He wanted the firm to leave Manhattan. The lease ran to 2006, so they stayed. Twenty two floors of the South Tower, roughly 2,700 people. So he drilled them. Every three months, everyone, no exceptions, down the stairwells two abreast while he stood there with a stopwatch. Traders pulling seven figures resented being marched down concrete stairs by a Cornishman with a clipboard. He kept doing it anyway. 8:46 a.m. The North Tower is hit. Port Authority comes over the South Tower loudspeakers and tells everyone the building is secure and to go back to their desks. Rescorla picks up a bullhorn and tells his people to get out. He phones Dan Hill. "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate. They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people out of here." 9:03 a.m. The second plane hits the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. His people are already in the stairwells, moving exactly the way they had been drilled, and Rescorla is on the bullhorn singing to them. Cornish songs. A version of Men of Harlech he had rewritten for Cornwall. Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming, can't you see their spearpoints gleaming. He called his wife Susan from the stairs. They had been married two and a half years, met jogging in New Jersey. He told her to stop crying, that he had to get these people out safely, and that if something happened to him he wanted her to know he had never been happier, that she made his life. Someone told him to get out. He said, as soon as I make sure everyone else is out. 2,687 Morgan Stanley employees went home that day. Thirteen did not, and four of those were Rescorla and the men who stayed in the building with him: Wesley Mercer, Jorge Velazquez, Godwin Forde. He was last seen on the 10th floor, walking up. The South Tower fell at 9:59. They never found him.

Twenty-five years ago this morning, 2,977 people went to work, boarded a plane, or answered a call and never came home. 343 firefighters climbed stairs everyone else was running down. A quarter century has not made it distant. Say their names. Remember the morning. Never Forget.

Wyoming hanged Tom Horn in 1903 on a machine specifically designed so that no human being would have to feel responsible for killing him. Which, given what Tom Horn did for a living, is about as tidy as history ever gets. He was born in Missouri in 1860 and left home at sixteen. He ended up in Arizona working for the Army as a packer, scout and interpreter under the chief of scouts Al Sieber during the Apache campaigns, and he was with the column that brought Geronimo in. He also won a steer roping championship out there. Years later he wrote an autobiography that inflated most of it considerably, which was standard for the genre. In the early 1890s he worked for the Pinkerton agency out of Denver, running down train robbers. He was extremely good at the tracking part. He was reportedly much less interested in the part where you bring a man in alive. Then he went north to Wyoming and hired on with the big cattle outfits as a stock detective. The job title was a formality. What the cattlemen were paying for was for suspected rustlers to stop existing, and Horn delivered that with a rifle, at long range, frequently from a couple hundred yards, with nobody around to see it. Historians credit him with the 1900 killings of Matt Rash and Isom Dart in Brown's Park and suspect him in several others. The line most often attributed to him is, "Killing men is my specialty. I look on it as a business proposition, and I think I have a corner on the market." Whether he actually said it is argued about. It was his reputation regardless, and he did nothing to discourage it. Then on July 18, 1901, a 14 year old boy named Willie Nickell was shot dead by a gate at Iron Mountain. Willie was big for his age, and he was wearing his father's coat and hat. His father, Kels Nickell, was running sheep in cattle country and was in a poisonous feud with his neighbors. Nearly everyone who has looked at it since has reached the same conclusion, which is that whoever fired thought he was shooting the father. Six months later, a deputy US marshal named Joe LeFors got Horn into an office in Cheyenne to talk about a job in Montana. He got Horn drinking. He flattered him, and let him brag, and kept nudging. Behind a door left open a crack in the next room sat a deputy and a court stenographer named Charles Ohnhaus, writing down every word. Somewhere in that transcript is the sentence, "It was the best shot that I ever made and the dirtiest trick I ever done." That was the case. Everything else the prosecution had was circumstantial. He was tried in an election year, in a state that had finally had enough of cattle barons buying outcomes, and the jury convicted him. Here is the complicated part. Most historians who have gone back through the evidence now believe Tom Horn probably did not kill Willie Nickell. There were other suspects with better motive and better opportunity. The physical case was weak, and the confession was a drunk man performing for a lawman who was steering the conversation. He had certainly killed people. He was very likely hanged for the wrong one. He got out of the jail in August 1903 with a pistol taken off a guard, and then could not figure out how the pistol worked. A man on the street who happened to know that model took him back into custody. So on November 20, 1903, one day short of his 43rd birthday, they walked him out to the gallows in Cheyenne. That gallows had been built by a local architect named James Julian. Julian had come through the Civil War, and he had thought a long time about what it does to a man to be the one personally responsible for killing another. So he engineered the person out of it. The condemned man stood on the trapdoor. His own weight tipped a lever that opened a valve on a water tank. The water ran out of the tank into a pan below, and as it drained the balance shifted, and when enough had run the mechanism pulled the bolt and the floor opened. Nobody pulled a lever. Nobody gave a signal. The man walked onto the platform, started the clock with his own body, and then stood there listening to water run. For Tom Horn it took about 35 seconds. A newspaper of the day described the machine as a device that simply compelled the condemned to commit suicide. Tom Horn had spent his career being the instrument that wealthy men used so that they would never have to be the ones who pulled the trigger. Wyoming killed him with a machine built on exactly the same idea.

You can just do stuff. The “Let the Band Play Dixie!” Tee *and* a new Historical Figure Tee- both dropping next week. First person to guess who’s on the Historical Tee is gets a free one. (Hint- It hasn’t been guessed yet) Stay tuned.

The frontiersmen who beat the British at Kings Mountain came from a people who had been fighting the English crown for 400 years. The Overmountain Men's ancestors were the Border Reivers, the raiding clans of the lawless frontier between England and Scotland. For three centuries they were loyal to their family names over any king. When the crown finally beat them in the 1600s, it shipped many to northern Ireland. Generations later, their descendants crossed the Atlantic and pushed into the most dangerous edge of colonial America, the Appalachian backcountry. They were the Scots-Irish. And when a British officer threatened to march over their mountains, hang their leaders and lay their country waste with fire and sword...they did what their ancestors had done for 400 years. At Kings Mountain in 1780, they surrounded Major Patrick Ferguson's force and destroyed it in an hour.