Two Weeks Before
In late August 2001, I was in Manhattan, kitty-corner from the Twin Towers, to deliver a web design course to community college instructors. I was there on behalf of the World Organization of Webmasters — WOW, for short an organization I founded in 1996.
On the final day of the course overview to the program managers, around 5:30 in the evening, I walked into the World Trade Center and rode up to the Windows of the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower. I was still wearing my WOW blue denim. The staff took one look at the shirt, assumed I was a friend of the owner, and treated me like one — a glass of wine, an open table, no questions asked. I sat there taking in the whole of Manhattan below me, having no idea what that room, and that building, would mean to the country two weeks later.
The Week Everything Changed
That week, the course was taught to the Borough of Manhattan Community College web design instructors — BMCC, just blocks from the towers. It would become a command center within hours of the attack.
My two trainers that week were themselves community college instructors, my partners on a national train-the-trainers program run in collaboration with Apple Education, part of a $1.2 million grant. Within an hour of the first plane hitting, my instinct took over: get them in a rental car and get them out of the city, to family in Pennsylvania. That drive — through a Manhattan that no longer had a skyline, past a country that didn’t yet know what was happening to it — is a memory I still carry.
I think about that room at Windows of the World often. The wine, the view, the ordinary kindness of strangers who thought I belonged there — and then, seventeen days later, a building full of people who did belong there, gone.
Let’s Roll
Todd Beamer was a passenger on United Flight 93 that morning, a civilian with no training for what came next. When the hijackers took the cockpit, he got on an airphone with a GTE supervisor named Lisa Jefferson, learned what had already happened on the ground, and then turned to the passengers around him. His last recorded words were simple: “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” [1] Minutes later, Flight 93 went down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania — the only hijacked plane that day that didn’t reach its target. [2]
Beamer a devoted husband and father wasn’t Navy. He wasn’t a first responder. He was a father of two who saw what needed doing and organized the people around him to do it. That’s the whole of the “Let’s Roll” campaign at Americans for a Stronger Navy: not a slogan borrowed for effect, but a standard. When something needs doing — for a shipmate, a fleet, a country — you don’t wait to be asked twice.
Why I Still Tell This Story
I didn’t lose anyone I loved on 9/11. I lost a room I’d sat in two weeks earlier, and I spent that week getting two people I was responsible for out of a city that had just become a battlefield. That’s a small story next to the ones this country carries from that day. But it’s mine, and it’s why “Let’s Roll” isn’t an abstraction to me — it’s a debt.
Beamer saw the writing on the wall before anyone else on that plane did, and he acted. That’s the point of this story, and it’s the point of everything we do at Americans for a Stronger Navy: the world isn’t getting safer, and the Navy is going to carry more of the weight of that fact, not less. The 2026 National Defense Strategy says as much. We don’t have the luxury of waiting to see how it plays out. Every year on this day, I pay a little of that debt forward — it’s time to roll.
“Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.”
— Todd Beamer, United Flight 93, September 11, 2001
Non sibi sed patriae. Not self, but country. Let’s roll.
References
[1] “Let’s roll,” Wikipedia, accessed September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_roll
[2] Daily Herald, “‘Let’s roll’: Todd Beamer’s father on the valiant fight for Flight 93,” accessed September 2026, https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20210910/lets-roll-todd-beamers-father-on-the-valiant-fight-for-flight-93