Heroes and villains

The radicalization of Ziad Jarrah is just one of the mysteries of Sept. 11 that remain mostly unilluminated by these two books. Longman, who has to set his portrait of Jarrah against his depictions of some of the 40 crew members and passengers on Flight 93, seems particularly wobbly when it comes to the task. "Among the Heroes" is, in bulk, a compendium of tributes to the Americans who died in the plane crash; the format of those tributes conforms to that of the New York Times' "Portraits in Grief" feature in A Nation Challenged (pieces later compiled into a book).

Responses to "Portraits in Grief" vary a lot -- some people are tremendously moved by them, but to my mind they start to feel pretty formulaic by the time you've read a dozen or so. Writing them must be an unenviable task; they mostly serve the needs of the deceased's loved ones, and like most postmortem testimonials they're heavy on the praise and light on the deprecation. Any abrasive qualities the individual possessed come enrobed in a thick coating of retrospective fondness; profligacy becomes generosity; tyranny becomes "demanding the best," and so on. The problem is, our faults are often the most interesting and revealing things about us, so in satisfying the need of survivors to lionize their dead, the "Portraits in Grief" often seem generic, like the self-descriptons in personals ads.

Longman tries to gin up some interest in these stretches of the book by explaining that the passengers on Flight 93 "were not ordinary citizens placed in an extraordinary situation, as they have often been portrayed," but rather were "people who were at the top of their game." This means either that they were successful businessmen (not too surprising for passengers on a weekday flight, and almost inevitable in first class) or individuals with backgrounds that especially suited them to dealing with the crisis -- the flight attendant who had the ingenious idea of boiling water to throw on the hijackers, for example, was a former police detective. But in truth, these people do seem "ordinary" in the way that all of us (except perhaps celebrities) are -- full of hidden dimensions that remain stubbornly hidden. Then "Among the Heroes" indulges in the usual lingering over the kind of coincidences that must be torturing the passengers' loved ones -- the decision not to blow off that out-of-town conference, or the gratified impulse to hop on an earlier flight.

Most of the above feels like grist for water-cooler philosophizing about the nature of fate and, at worst, like sops to the victims' families to avoid charges of ghoulish opportunism. (Only one family member declined to participate.) What the average reader will seek here is a solid account of what happened in the minutes before Flight 93 hit the ground. This story -- the story of the passengers and crew who realized what the hijackers had in mind, put their heads together and decided to storm the cockpit -- is one of the few heartening tales to be extracted from the vast tragedy of Sept. 11. (The bravery of New York's firefighters is another.) While there is definitely something voyeuristic about wanting to know just what happened on that plane, our reasons are legitimate enough: We want to believe that in this case, once they knew the true score, Americans refused to be victims and fought back in the face of near-certain death. We want to tell ourselves that we would, too.

The problem is, there just isn't that much hard data about those final minutes. The cockpit tape-recorder produced a garbled, often unintelligible record of the events. Longman, like the authors of "The Cell," is nothing if not a conscientious reporter; if he can't substantiate something, he's not going to fudge it. So the climax of his story is little more than a series of questions -- we can't even be sure if the passengers succeeded in storming the cockpit, let alone if they got in and made a last-ditch attempt at pulling the plane out of its descent. Plus, even asking such questions as "Who did the storming?" (if such storming occurred -- investigators think the passengers might have used a food tray to batter the cockpit door) have become loaded. Some family members feel that it turns the tragedy into "an Olympic contest, where some passengers deserve gold and the others only silver and bronze."

Longman, to be fair, is hemmed in by both the lack of evidence and the delicate protocols of bereavement; maybe it's unfair to ask him to spin straw into gold. Still, you sometimes wonder if he could spin even gold into gold; there are sentences in "Among the Heroes" that are truly wince-inducing. He describes Jarrah's face as resembling "the pasty-murderer look that Lee Harvey Oswald had in his pursed lips of history altered," the passengers as "people who would not allow forced enormity" and President George W. Bush as sporting an impossible "look of stunned nonchalance on his face."

But even if we had all the facts about Sept. 11, if we knew who did what just before Flight 93 crashed, or how the other hijackers managed to overpower the crew and passengers on the other planes, there would still be questions. Some are specific to individuals -- What turned the cheery Ziad Jarrah into a mass murderer? for example -- while others are political -- Is the kind of terrorism we suffered on Sept. 11 avoidable, and does it have any grounding at all in legitimate grievances? Still others are existential -- Why do such terrible things happen to innocent people and how do we go on once we're forced to understand that they do and that all the homeland security in the world won't make life completely safe? These are some of the mysteries that only our best writers and thinkers can come close to plumbing. But if "The Cell" and "Among the Heroes" are any foretaste of the tidal wave of Sept. 11 books about to descend on us, we shouldn't expect them to do so anytime soon.

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