The first thing a visitor notices outside the Shanksville, PA, Volunteer Fire Department is the 12-foot-high steel cross adorning the front lawn. How odd that a religious icon would abut a municipal agency in this age of acute political correctness. A Star of Life on a church steeple would be just as peculiar.

   The giant cross is a gift from New York City's Fire Family Transport Foundation. The vertical and horizontal beams are worn and warped, just as they were when they were pulled from a five-story, 16-acre pile that had been the World Trade Center. Delivered by that city's fire department (FDNY) in 2008, then mounted on a pentangular base, the structure is a reminder that there were not one, nor two, but three Grounds Zero on 9/11. Shanksville Chief Terry Shaffer inherited the third.

   Shaffer was one of millions of Americans that morning watching miscreants use commandeered jetliners to slaughter thousands in massive structures thought to be impregnable. Like most of us, Terry's reaction was buffered by distance and disbelief. Until his wife called him at work.

   "Are you aware of what's going on?" she asked. Shaffer assumed she meant the carnage in New York and Washington, and assured her he was following the news.

   "Well, you have a plane down in your district, and you need to come home right now."

   Terry thought she was joking, or he'd misunderstood her, because there were no other conceivable scenarios. He called a dispatcher for confirmation, then raced from Johnstown to the crash site, 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Forty minutes after United Airlines Flight 93, inverted and ballistic, struck an abandoned strip mine two miles from the Shanksville-Stonycreek School, Chief Shaffer stood at a 50-foot crater made by the fuel-laden Boeing 757 traveling at Mach .74.

   "There was debris everywhere," Shaffer recalls. "Lots of wiring and thousands of pieces no bigger than my fist. The only things that looked like airplane parts were a turbine and some tires. You could smell jet fuel and burnt flesh."

   It was evident to all who responded--fire, EMS, police--that their mission would be recovery, not rescue. Somerset County Coroner Wally Miller spotted just one body part--a spinal cord with five vertebrae--during his initial walk-through. Miller subsequently identified all 37 passengers, seven crew members and four hijackers from 1,500 discrete human remains weighing approximately 600 pounds--only 8% of the theoretical total. The rest had likely vaporized on impact.