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People who have never lived through a catastrophe love to ask why America spends billions of dollars building giant nuclear aircraft carriers. Tell them to ask the mothers of Banda Aceh, Indonesia what they saw on the ocean horizon in January 2005. When the Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than two hundred thousand people, the entire coast of Sumatra was erased. Every bridge, road, and water pipe was gone. Tens of thousands of children were dying of thirst in the mud, and no truck on earth could reach them. Two thousand miles away in Hong Kong, the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was on holiday port call. Within hours of the news, young American sailors walked out of restaurants and hotels, left their vacation behind, ran back up the gangway, and pushed the ship's two nuclear reactors to flank speed. When the Abraham Lincoln dropped anchor off the shattered coast of Aceh, it did not launch a single fighter jet. Instead, the American sailors turned their nuclear warship into the largest floating water factory on earth. Using the ship's four massive steam distillation plants, the crew purified nearly 100,000 gallons of fresh drinking water from the sea every single day. For weeks without sleep, young sailors stood on the hangar deck filling five-gallon plastic jugs by hand, while seventeen Seahawk helicopters flew nonstop from sunrise to sunset. They flew more than 1,500 missions into jungle clearings, delivering over 400,000 gallons of pure water and nearly six million pounds of food and medicine to people of a different faith who had been taught for years to fear the United States. America did not ask for one barrel of oil or one dollar in return. When the local hospitals were running again, the giant gray ship quietly raised its anchor and sailed away. A small mind looks at an American aircraft carrier and sees only a weapon. A survivor looks at that flat gray deck and sees five thousand young Americans bringing water from the sea.

It takes thirty minutes to load live missiles onto an F-16 fighter jet. On the morning of September 11, 2001, America did not have thirty minutes. After the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were hit, a fourth hijacked airliner, United Flight 93, turned and raced toward Washington, D.C. at five hundred miles per hour. At Andrews Air Force Base, Colonel Marc Sasseville and twenty-six-year-old First Lieutenant Heather Penney sprinted out to two F-16 jets that had just returned from training. Their wings had zero missiles. Their guns had only dummy practice rounds. They knew there was only one way to stop that plane from hitting the Capitol. They were going to use their own bodies and their own aircraft as the weapon. As they ran up the boarding ladders without even finishing their pre-flight checks, Colonel Sasseville looked across at twenty-six-year-old Heather Penney. "I'm going to go for the cockpit," he told her. She did not blink. She did not hesitate for half a second. "I'll take the tail," she answered. Think about that courage. A twenty-six-year-old woman strapped herself into an unarmed jet, pushed the throttle to full afterburner, and roared into a clear blue sky praying only that she would not miss the tail of the airliner when she rammed it at supersonic speed. Yet she and Colonel Sasseville never had to crash their planes that morning. Why? Because forty ordinary American citizens sitting in the back of Flight 93 had already taken a vote in the aisle, whispered one last prayer to their families over the airphones, and charged the cockpit doors behind Todd Beamer's two immortal words: "Let's roll." Those forty unarmed citizens on Flight 93 did not just save the United States Capitol. They saved the lives of the two fighter pilots flying out to die for them. A nation where pilots fly into the sky with no weapons and citizens charge the cockpit with bare hands can never be conquered.