Tears, flags and doves of peace at site of 'first battle in the war against terror'

In the games room of Shanksville Volunteer Fire Company Station 627, around an improvised table on which were piled untouched boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, people stood in silence as they watched a television screen.

One tearful woman had an American flag folded and tucked under her arm, one man had another tied around his head as a bandanna, yet another Stars and Stripes had been used as the backdrop for a child's poster pinned to a wall which read: "Dear rescue workers, Thank you for saving people's lives." It was signed by a boy called Daniel.

Doughnuts, flags and volunteer firefighters. Under a grey sky in Shanksville, another American emblem was formally anointed at the memorial service for those 40 passengers and crew from United Airlines flight 93 who died a year ago: the defiant hero. In the years to come it will be here in Shanksville that Americans will come and pay tribute to those who hit back at the terrorists who had struck their nation.

"It think about a lot of things," said Lt Roger Bailey, a volunteer firefighter who spent two exhausting weeks working through the wreckage of the Boeing last year but who, because only limited numbers were allowed at the site, was watching the memorial service on the television in the fire station. "I remember the heroes of that flight. We [firefighters] were doing our job. They were the heroes. We did nothing more than what we were trained to do. I am just remembering them today."

As with Mr Bailey, it is already for ever fixed in the minds of most people in America that flight 93 crashed at 10.06am into a gently sloping hillside two miles from this tiny Pennsylvania town because those 40 people decided to take on the four al-Qa'ida hijackers, knowing they would lose their own lives but hoping their sacrifice would prevent a greater loss of life by preventing the plane reaching its intended target of the White House or the Capitol building, 125 miles away in Washington.

Indeed, at the site of the temporary memorial overlooking the crash site, that idea is set in stone with a small granite monument recalling the battle cry of Todd Beamer, the passenger whose last words to a telephone operator before he led his fellow travellers towards the cockpit door were, "Let's roll".

It is precisely because of this that the reclaimed open-cast coal mine into which San Francisco-bound flight 93 ploughed into at a speed of around 500mph will be remembered and honoured in a way quite differently to either ground zero or the wall of the Pentagon. For a nation so stunned by the outrageous attack of 11 September, for a public still genuinely bewildered that its soft underbelly could be so viciously attacked while it stood by helplessly, Shanksville will be remembered as the place that America first fought back.

Tom Ridge, the director of Homeland Security, said as much when he told the 4,000 people gathered for the service that this field of dark soil and thin grass represented "the first battle in the war against terror". His remarks were followed by a rifle salute and the release of 40 doves.

This time last year he was governor of Pennsylvania. Now, as a member of the cabinet, he works on Pennsylvania Avenue. He said a number of his Washington staffers had joined him in Shanksville to honour and thank the "citizen soldiers", the people who perhaps saved their lives by averting a second strike on the nation's capital.

"There were no survivors in this field on September 11. But have no doubt that hundreds, if not thousands of Americans, some perhaps joining us this day, survived that crash," he said, looking towards the mound of earth bordered by a forest of hemlock trees where the fuselage of the plane finally shuddered to a halt.

Sandy Dahl, the widow of flight 93's Captain, Jason Dahl, told the crowd, which included 500 relatives of those who died: "In the air, a wave of courage made its way from the cockpit to the rear of the aircraft and back again, with all persevering to the end. Adversity does not build character; adversity reveals character."

Perhaps. Despite everything, despite the stories, the legends, the books that have been written and the words that have been carefully chiselled into the black granite monument, it is far from certain that Mr Beamer and his fellow passengers actually saved the day. The cockpit voice recorder from flight 93 gives only a partial record of what transpired and there are some who claim that it is more probable that the plane was destroyed by a bomb carried by one of the hijackers or else – the scenario no one really likes to consider – that it was shot down by a military jet.

And yet, oddly enough, in Shanksville yesterday that did not seem to matter. With President Bush making his first visit to the site and meeting privately with the relatives of those who died, it may not have been the perfect day to stop people in the street and have them question a newly enshrined fundamental.

But it was a question the people of this small, friendly community, still shocked to hear their town mentioned in the same sentence as the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, were prepared to confront head on. And asking them, it rapidly became clear that whether it is fact or fiction, the story has become one of this nation's accepted myths.

"It doesn't matter [if they did not actually bring the plane down]," said Donna Martin, a former shop assistant who gave up her job after 11 September to raise funds for volunteer firefighters. "You hear a lot of things, but those people were in the process of doing it. They were doing what they needed to do."

Frank Costello, a biker with a Stars and Stripes bandanna knotted around his brow, had come to Shanksville on his Harley, setting out with this wife, Woodie, from their home in Philadelphia at 5am. He said he had come to reflect, but also because the story of the passengers fight back had been the one thing that many Americans had clung to in the dark days after the attacks. "That was out little ray of sunshine," he smiled. "We loved that somebody had an opportunity to fight back and to stop something that was a lot worse. They made the sacrifice, that is what we cling to. It is a belief."

Whatever else the field on the outskirts of town will become – a battlefield monument in the style of Gettysburg, a must-see on the tourist itinerary – it is also a graveyard. The Somerset County Coroner, Wally Miller, said he believed 98 per cent of the human remains were never recovered, the blast from the impact scattering everything over a radius of several thousand yards.

This funereal aspect was reflected in the memorial service when shortly after 10am, a 100-year-old bell borrowed from a Franciscan friary was rung once for each of the 40 passengers and crew who died, their names read out and mingling with the peal of the bell.

It was also reflected in the words included in the service sheet printed for the formal dedication in the afternoon of a church on the outskirts of Shanksville, built in 1902, but restored and renamed as the United Airlines Flight 93 Memorial Chapel. They read: "Tread gently on our hills. Welcome visitor, tread gently. You are on hallowed ground."