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Alice Hoglan's son Mark Bingham died on Flight 93, in a final struggle captured on cockpit tapes heard only by family members. With pride, grief and anger, she tells what happened.
Jul 23, 2004 | Alice Hoglan doesn't read the news like you and I do. The final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, made public in its entirety Thursday, exposes the incompetence of America's intelligence agencies. It whisks open the White House doors to reveal an administration asleep to the imminent threat of Osama bin Laden, even with alarm bells about al-Qaida going off all around it.
But at first glance, Hoglan doesn't see policy failures in the report, the government's definitive word on events surrounding Sept. 11. Hoglan sees her only son, Mark Bingham. She sees the magnanimous, crazy, irrepressible guy she raised alone flying home to San Francisco to act as an usher in the wedding of his Egyptian college buddy, Joe Salama. As she has for nearly every day of the past two and a half years, Hoglan imagines the desperate last moments of Mark's life, when his plane, United Flight 93, crashed into a dry field in Shanksville, Pa.
Only later does Hoglan allow the report, rough drafts of which have been available online for the past year, to flood her consciousness. There they are, the CIA, FBI, State Department and Department of Defense bumbling around overseas like a hapless group of private detectives, each unaware of what the other was uncovering, incapable of sharing what they found. Hoglan can only sigh when she reads the testimony of former CIA director George Tenet, who summarized the mangled communication by confessing, "The victims and the families of 9/11 deserve better."
Really, what more can she say about what's in the report? "It's very discouraging," she says. "It's horrible, just horrible. For good reason, a lot of Sept. 11 families are up in arms about it." Up in arms is an understatement. For many family members, the pain of losing their loved ones on Sept. 11 remains as raw as ever. You feel it when you talk to them; your heart, like theirs, still breaks.
Hoglan has spent the past two years summoning all her strength to prevent her anger from swallowing her. "And it's a whole other kind of strength and internal fortitude," says Todd Sarner, 33, a therapist and one of Mark Bingham's best friends since high school. "Alice is a survivor. Not just an 'I'm-getting-by survivor.' But, 'I'm absolutely not going to be a victim, I'm going to do whatever I can with my life.' She's like a soldier: Let's move on and do positive things."
Indeed, in the "wreckage of her life," as Hoglan says, she has found the voice of an activist. A flight attendant for 18 years with, of all airlines, United, Hoglan now canvasses the country, arguing that the greedy airlines need to get off their bottom lines and invest in more rigorous security. Bingham was gay and so Hoglan often appears at public rallies to undercut stereotypes about sexual preference. One wry comment is pretty much all it takes. "I don't think sexual orientation was discussed in the pitching aircraft that was Flight 93," she says. As passengers and crew banded together to charge the hijackers, "I'm pretty sure there was no screening."
Given her activism, Hoglan has become that peculiar American phenomenon, a minor celebrity for all the wrong reasons. "Some people think she has done too many interviews," says Sarner. "But her point has always been that talking about Mark helps her. She is partly dealing with her grief by telling the world about her son."
It's true. You never get the feeling while talking to Hoglan, 54 -- whom you might call your basic hippie mom from the Santa Cruz Mountains, where she still lives -- that she's exploiting Sept. 11 for any personal gain or profit. You sense a genuine selflessness in her goals, a warmness in her levity and soft laughter. After all, at age 51 Hoglan acted as a surrogate mother for her sister-in-law and gave birth to triplets. "Just lending out the womb," she says with a grin. At times, though, you are stopped short by her unknowable despair.
It's a despair shared by all the 9/11 families. Coincidentally, just minutes before he picks up the phone in his New Jersey home, Jerry Guadagno and his wife, Beatrice, have returned from visiting the cemetery where the ashes of their son, Richard, are entombed. A dedicated naturalist, unswervingly serious about law enforcement, Richard Guadagno had recently been appointed manager of the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge, when he perished on Flight 93, surely in revolt with all the other passengers and crew. Jerry Guadagno, 79, speaks haltingly but intently about his son. He hasn't studied the National Commission report and is not sure he will. The stress of reliving his son's death is getting, simply, too much to bear. "When you lose a son, there's nothing worse than that," he offers. "Nothing comes close to losing a child. It's been devastating to our family. Life is just not the same."
But Guadagno is grateful for the final report -- if for no other reason than what has made him angrier than anything over the past two years is how President Bush and a truculent administration consistently stifled a full-scale investigation, refusing to release White House files and documents. In fact, if it weren't for the zealous lobbying of outraged family members of Sept. 11 victims, the National Commission report would never have seen the light of day.
"When the investigation was first met with stonewalling by the administration, I was terribly hurt," Guadagno says. "My son was murdered, and all I was doing was looking for some answers. For the administration to stonewall like that is unforgivable."
