Defiant

To the magnificent men and women who do it—because there is no other choice.

Winston told the English boat owners there was a British army in trouble on the far shore. So they set sail by the smoke of Dunkirk and brought off 300,000 embattled Tommies and Frenchmen. No one knows the price they paid.

In ‘44 off Sumar, six escort carriers desperately needed time to run. Three destroyers didn't question their orders, but turned bows on to the entire Japanese Battle Fleet, setting a course from which none returned.

On September 11, a smoking bier told American boat owners that hundreds of thousands needed to be taken off Manhattan. With no orders given, no commands spoken, ferries and taxies, tourist boats and tugs, anything that could sail and carry weary workers, set sail for the sea wall at the Battery to take them home. Upriver, professional divers were working on a bridge pier. They knew, with that many boats in close quarters, someone's rope would wrap itself around another's prop. Without instructions or promise of pay, those workmen dropped what they were doing and sailed for the smoke. A half-dozen lines or more later, their work was done. And an uncounted fraction of a million got home that night.

And the passengers of Flight 93 made their fateful calls. It was their families who drew the heavy duty of telling loved ones they only wanted home that fate now stood in the way. And those souls who were no different from a quarter billion other Americans—except for the tickets they bought—showed a wondering world the true mettle of free men and women.

We do what we have to do, because there is nothing else to do.