When the design for the Flight 93 permanent memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was first announced in September 2005, there was a minor eruption. The winning plan, titled "Crescent of Embrace," was remarkable. Like many modern monuments, it was intentionally antisymbolic. Nothing about it would evoke the heroism of the passengers who rushed the hijackers of their plane on September 11, 2001, likely sparing the U.S. Capitol or White House from a direct hit. The proposed monument, composed of trees, fields, and a wetland area, had more in common with Yellowstone National Park than, say, the Lincoln Memorial. Yet for all their studied indifference to symbolism, the designers inadvertently created one very large and inappropriate symbol: From the air, the red maple trees that dominated the memorial formed an enormous crescent, which, coincidentally, is the most common emblem of Islam. During the final seven seconds before Flight 93 dove into the ground, the cockpit voice recorder captured a terrorist shouting "Allah is the greatest" nine times.

Many people, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and Rep. Tom Tancredo prominent among them, objected to the "Crescent of Embrace," seeing it as a sign of capitulation to the enemy. Eager to avoid controversy, the National Park Service and the architects went back to the drawing board and hastily rejiggered the plan, changing its title and adding more trees so as to turn the "crescent" into a "bowl." Critics of the original design were mostly mollified and the long march toward construction continued.

The crescent flare-up took on the aspect of a skirmish in the culture war, but the process of planning that produced the sadly anti-heroic Flight 93 National Memorial is a more complicated story than a simple conflict between left and right, between conservatives and multi culturalists. Indeed, it is a depressing tale which suggests that, no matter how noble the deed we set out to commemorate, in modern America we are doomed to get unmonumental memorials.

As it happens, although the Flight 93 National Memorial is still in the fundraising stage and won't break ground for some time, there is already a memorial next to the Flight 93 crash site. Shanksville, population 245, was transformed on September 11. The tiny town in rural Somerset County became famous when the 40 passengers and crew on Flight 93 fought back against the 4 terrorist hijackers. The plane crashed into an empty field situated between a handful of modest residences and an old strip-mining operation. Within hours, Shanksville was overrun by police, emergency responders, the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board, and other officials and members of the media. The townspeople and nearby residents immediately went into motion providing for these hundreds of workers, bringing them food and welcoming them into their homes for the duration of the investigation and clean-up, which took several weeks.

Towards the end of September, one of the residents of Shanksville set up a small memorial for Flight 93 in her front yard. She woke one morning to find a bouquet of flowers next to it, with a card that read, "Thanks for saving our lives--The Capitol employees." It was the first of a stream of tributes that would be left in Shanksville.