Hoglan and I saw "Fahrenheit 9/11" together. You could hear people in the theater catch their breath as Lila Lipscomb, the working-class mother from Flint, Mich., recounted the moment that she heard her son, Sgt. Michael Pederson, had been killed in Iraq: "The grief grabbed me so hard that I even fell on the floor. ... Why is it my son that you had to take? He didn't do anything. He wasn't a bad guy. He was a good guy. Why did you have to take my son?" You could only imagine what Hoglan was thinking. She was staring into her lap, crying.

Still, more often that not, you are infected by Hoglan's desire to set the record straight, to stave off the creep of historical amnesia. "I never want to grow complacent about that day," she says. "I never want the world to forget it." That often means stealing past the official remarks encompassing Sept. 11 and detailing her own agonizing experiences of events surrounding the infamous day.

Always, she remembers her son. A fit and muscular 6'4", the 31-year-old Bingham was a fearless athlete who had attended UC Berkeley on a rugby scholarship. Head of his own San Francisco public relations firm, hyping ambitious dot-coms, Bingham boomed down city streets with a huge spirit, lighting up everybody in his wake. He was also the crazy man, the guy who dove off the highest cliff in Maui, who ran with the bulls in Pamplona -- and wasn't happy until he got gored -- who grabbed a gun from a mugger one night in San Francisco's Castro District. Hoglan smiles with chagrin as she relates the time that Mark, three sheets to the wind during a Cal-Stanford football game, ran onto the field and tackled the Stanford mascot, a massively tall and awkward tree. He was handcuffed and carted off to a Berkeley jail.

The harrowing final half-hour of Flight 93 has often been recreated by journalists, dramatists, and surely, screenwriters by the score. Hoglan, however, describes the fatal descent with details missing from past accounts -- minute facts that have been sealed in her mind from listening to the plane's cockpit voice recorder twice. (Family members of Flight 93 are the only Americans, except for national security personnel, to have heard the tapes.) The story rushes out of her on a wave of pride for her son, her excited voice often cracking under the strain of her memory. Be assured, though, she says, she is only offering her own faithful interpretation of the facts, based on "examining all the documents and listening to every piece of testimony."

The cockpit voice recording lasts 31 minutes. In the first few minutes, says Hoglan, you hear one of one the United pilots yelling to a hijacker, "Get out of here, get out of here." Next comes a struggle and "this breathy, rapid conversation in Arabic, and someone laboring to breathe, gurgling. I guess I don't have to explain why that would indicate that he had received a bad throat wound." (When the FBI played the cockpit tapes for the family members of Flight 93, they flashed English subtitles on a screen for the Arabic dialogue.)

Two hijackers then drag the slain pilots out of the cabin, return to the cockpit and close the door. Following scuffling and fiddling around in the cockpit, Hoglan says, you hear one man telling the other in Arabic, "Sit, sit, sit." A third hijacker stands guard outside the cockpit door and a fourth herds the passengers into the back of the plane. The next 20 minutes of the cockpit tape, says Hoglan, "are consumed in a lot of sounds of automatic pilot being turned on and off, and occasionally you hear one of the other guys in the cockpit, chanting prayers, 'There is no God but God.'"

Around this time, Hoglan's son called home. "Mom, this is Mark Bingham," he said with a strange formality, suggesting, Hoglan says, his grace under pressure. "I just want to tell you that I love you. I'm on a flight from Newark to San Francisco and there are three guys on board who have taken over the plane. They say they have a bomb. You believe me, don't you, mom?"

"Oh, Mark, I believe you," Hoglan responded.

Hoglan now surmises that passengers in the back of the plane were beginning to advance toward the cabin. On the cockpit recorder, Hoglan says, comes the sound of one of the terrorists knocking at the cockpit door. "Let the fellows in now," a hijacker in the cabin says.

"I remember this well," she says. "You hear one terrorist saying to the other what sounds like 'iraq,' which means 'fighting.' In other words, 'Are passengers fighting in the back?' Then you hear this frantic knocking on the door. 'Let him in, let him in.' Then, 'Hold it up to the door so they will see it and be afraid.'"

The "it" is a fire ax mounted on the back of the cockpit. The hijackers believed that by brandishing the ax through the cockpit's peephole, the passengers would turn back. But the hijackers didn't know how a peephole works, Hoglan explains, they didn't know that passengers couldn't see through it from outside the door.

The last five minutes of cockpit tape, Hoglan says, are bone-chilling. "You hear the excruciating sound of the wind going over the wings because the airplane is flying at such a low altitude." You also hear a lot of muffled yelling, she adds, as if the passengers in the back of the plane had psyched themselves up like football players and were now ready to bolt madly down the field.

It was impossible to distinguish voices on the tape, or who was playing what position. But Hoglan knew Bingham had to be in the middle of the charge.

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