passengers were in the hands of nine crew members: the two pilots plus seven flight attendants. Perhaps the biggest difference between the United and American flights to Los Angeles on the morning of September 11 was the sounds inside the cabins: only adults boarded Flight 11, while the high-pitched voices of young children rang through United 175.
Heading home to California from a vacation on Cape Cod, three-year-old David Gamboa Brandhorst, who had a cleft chin and a deep love of Legos, sat in business class Row 8 between his fathers. To his left sat his serious “Papa,” Daniel Brandhorst, a lawyer and accountant. To his right sat his happy-go-lucky “Daddy,” Ronald Gamboa, manager of a Gap store in Santa Monica.
Nestled in 26A and 26B of coach were Ruth Clifford McCourt and her four-year-old daughter, Juliana. They’d driven to the airport and spent the previous night with Ruth’s best friend and Juliana’s godmother, Paige Farley-Hackel, who was heading to Los Angeles aboard American Flight 11. Blond and big-eyed, with porcelain skin, Juliana loved creatures large and small. She’d tell anyone who’d listen that she had recently learned to ride a pony. That day she’d smuggled aboard an unticketed passenger: a green praying mantis she’d found in the garden of her family’s Connecticut home. It resided in an ornate little cage on Juliana’s lap, her companion for when they reached California. Her mother, Ruth, a striking woman who spoke with a trace of her native Ireland, carried a special item, too: a papal coin from her wedding at the Vatican, tucked safely into her Hermès wallet.
The third little passenger of Flight 175 sat in Row 19: Lee and Eunice Hanson’s granddaughter, Christine Lee Hanson, flanked by Peter and Sue. Surrounding the Hansons and the other families on United Flight 175 were a mix of business and pleasure travelers.
The Reverend Francis Grogan, heading west to visit his sister, occupied a first-class seat with a ticket given to him by a friend. After serving as a sonar expert on a Navy destroyer during World War II, Father Grogan had traded conflict for conciliation. He spent his life as a teacher, a chaplain, and a parish priest.
In business class sat former pro hockey player Garnet “Ace” Bailey, a fierce competitor who spent ten seasons in the National Hockey League and won two Stanley Cups with the Boston Bruins in the 1970s. Hardly a delicate ice dancer, Bailey served a total of eleven hours in the penalty box during his bruising NHL career. At fifty-three, still tough, Ace Bailey had become director of scouting for the Los Angeles Kings of the NHL. He’d also cemented a relationship as friend and mentor to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, in part by helping Gretzky to overcome his fear of flying. When Ace wasn’t on the road, he treated his wife, Kathy, and son, Todd, to a dish he called “Bailey-baisse,” a medley of sautéed meats baked with onions and tomatoes. A few rows back, in coach, sat the Kings’ amateur scout, Mark Bavis, a former hockey standout at Boston University. Training camp would soon begin, and Bailey and Bavis were needed on the ice in Los Angeles.
Retired nurse Touri Bolourchi expected to be home in Beverly Hills by the afternoon, after visiting her daughter and grandsons in Boston. An Iranian-born Muslim, she’d fled to the United States two decades earlier when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini closed the schools. Touri added to Flight 175’s international mix: also aboard were three German businessmen, an Israeli woman, and a British man.
Among the crew members were two flight attendants in love: Michael Tarrou, a part-time musician, and Amy King, a onetime homecoming queen. They’d recently moved in together, and they had arranged to work the same flight so they could spend time together during a layover. All signs pointed to marriage.
Two other flight attendants had recently switched careers: Alfred Marchand had turned in his badge and gun as a police officer to become a flight attendant a year earlier; and Robert Fangman had begun flying for United just eight months earlier. He gave up half his income and a job he hated, as a cellphone salesman, to follow his dream of international travel.
Airplanes bring together people from different worlds and worldviews. On Flight 175, that held true for two strangers, Robert LeBlanc and Brian “Moose” Sweeney, one old, one young, one a pacifist, the other a U.S. Navy veteran of the Iraq War who considered himself a warrior and imagined himself to be the descendant of Vikings. The two men sat in window seats on opposite sides of the coach cabin.
THE PREVIOUS DAY, with many miles ahead on a seven-hour drive, Robert LeBlanc gripped the steering wheel of his Audi sedan and prepared to pop the question. He was seventy years old, spry and fit, a snowy beard and tanned, craggy face giving him the look of an arctic explorer.
After a weekend visiting Rochester, New York, Bob and his driving companion were headed home to the little town of Lee, New Hampshire. A retired professor, Bob would be leaving before dawn the next day, September 11, for a geography conference on the West Coast. Now he’d reached a decision: he knew how he wanted to spend his remaining seasons, and with whom. He turned toward the woman he loved.
“I have a ten-year plan,” Bob said. “I know you might not be ready, but I want you with me.”
Sitting in the passenger seat, Andrea LeBlanc understood what Bob was asking. After all, she’d been married to him for twenty-eight years. Bob hoped Andrea would dramatically scale back her busy veterinary practice so they could travel the world together. Bob’s ten-year plan involved “hard” trips to developing countries at the farthest corners of the globe, after which they’d ideally spend a decade visiting the “easy places.” That is, if Andrea would agree.
Bob was asking a lot, and he knew it. Along with raising their children—two from her first marriage, three from Bob’s—Andrea’s Oyster River Veterinary Hospital had been her life’s work. Nearly fourteen years his junior, Andrea would have to choose between spending the bulk of her time with her four-legged patients or with her best friend. As they drove, Bob’s question hung in the air long enough for Andrea to consider the man she loved and the life they shared.
Born in 1930, Bob grew up in the French Canadian neighborhood of Nashua, New Hampshire, at the time a spent mill city. A restless boy, he often rode his bicycle downtown to see trains pull in from Montreal. Bob grew fascinated by why people lived where they lived, and how their physical world shaped their culture, from language to music, religion to livelihood, relationships to diet.
After high school, Bob enlisted in the Air Force. After a flirtation with geology at the University of New Hampshire, he earned a doctorate in cultural geography from the University of Minnesota. Then Bob returned to UNH as a professor and remained there for thirty-five years, until he retired in 1999. Along the way, he developed a reputation as a gifted teacher, frugal toward himself and generous toward others; a master cook who loved candlelit dinners; and a passionate traveler whose been-almost-everywhere map included Nepal, Bhutan, China, Morocco, Peru, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Burma.
On a 1999 trip to Java, Bob led Andrea to the world’s largest Buddhist temple, called Borobudur. While he explored, Andrea set off in search of a rare bas-relief panel that depicted the Buddha among animals. Ten Muslim teenagers followed her, inching closer in the hope of practicing their English. Eager to return to quiet contemplation and her search for the sculpture, she made a suggestion.
“Go look for a man with a white beard,” Andrea told them. “That’s my husband. He’d love to talk with you.”
Forty minutes later, as she neared an exit, she heard gales of laughter: Bob was leading an impromptu class, asking questions, drawing his new friends into his sphere. Andrea snapped a photograph of the Muslim teens squeezed against a smiling Bob.
Two years earlier, in Chiapas, Mexico, they had watched as leftist Zapatista revolutionaries marched through the streets. Andrea asked Bob what drove the young men to take up arms. “When people aren’t heard long enough,” he said, “they’ll resort to violence.”
During
