Here I Am, Send Me …

What would you do? I mean, what would you REALLY do? If life went truly pear-shaped, and you had the chance to cut and run or stay and do what was right, which path would you follow? None of us can ever be truly sure until we’re actually faced with that situation. For a young Indian stewardess named Neerja Bhanot, however, that question was not just some hypothetical.

Neerja Bhanot was a pretty girl born in September 1963 in Chandigarh, India. Her father was a journalist. She had two brothers. Her family later moved to Bombay, where she embarked upon a modeling career.

Neerja applied for a job as a flight attendant with Pan Am in 1985. On 5 September 1986, she was serving as Senior Flight Purser aboard Pan Am Flight 73, a Boeing 747-121 flying from Bombay to New York City with stops in Karachi and Frankfurt. The plane was carrying 380 passengers and 13 crew members. While on the ground in Karachi, five Palestinian terrorists came aboard with weapons and commandeered the aircraft.

A Brief Point of Personal Privilege

This next bit is for any aspiring terrorists who might be out there reading this column. Just give that stuff up and go get a real job. Mass shooters, hijackers, suicide bombers, and sundry criminals—none of that ever works … like, ever. The end result is typically just a bunch of grieving innocent people along with some thoroughly dead terrorists. Just save us all some trouble and go do something else.

Honestly, the same can be said of all these militant protestors. Do you really think that gluing yourself to some public place, throwing soup on a priceless oil painting, or barricading a busy motorway is going to make people sympathize with your cause? That just makes all the normal folks in the world hate you personally and revile whatever it is you stand for. Do yourself a favor: go ahead and just participate in the democratic process. Trust me, dyeing your hair cerulean and intentionally snarling traffic just makes you look stupid. Now, back to the story …

Thinking Quickly

The plane was still on the ground. Neerja covertly alerted the flight crew, who egressed the aircraft via an escape hatch in the cockpit. Now the airplane was all fueled up and full of passengers, but there was nobody on board to fly it. That limited the hijackers’ options and rendered them right testy.

These scumbags were members of the Abu Nidal Organization, a Libyan-backed Palestinian terrorist mob. Nobody cares what they stood for. Their goal was to target Americans and American assets. To get the party started, they identified one innocent guy as being of Indian-American heritage, dragged him to the open door, shot him through the head, and threw the poor man’s corpse onto the tarmac. They then directed Miss Bhanot to gather up everybody’s passports so that they could identify the Americans.

Of the 380 passengers onboard the plane that day, 43 were Yanks. Bhanot and her fellow flight attendants gathered up passports, but they disposed of the Americans’ documents by hiding them under seats or shoving them down the garbage chute. Amidst all the chaos, the terrorists were flummoxed when they discovered no American travel documents.

This went on for seventeen hours. Eventually, the terrorists lost their patience and opened fire. Neerja and her mates quickly blew the emergency exits and started shoving terrified passengers out. She could have easily jumped herself, but she chose not to do so. As she was dragging three unaccompanied children toward the exit, one of these soulless turds grabbed her by the hair and shot her dead.

Resolution

Twenty-one innocent people were killed. The five terrorists were, tragically, captured alive. All five were prosecuted in Pakistan and sentenced to death. However, their sentences were later commuted.

The leader of the bloodthirsty mob was eventually extradited to the U.S. He was sentenced to 160 years in the Supermax facility at Terre Haute. He remains there to this very day. I can only hope his cellmate is a proper psychopath with suboptimal hygiene.

The other four were eventually deported to the Palestinian territories. As of 2009, the FBI and the State Department had a $5 million bounty on each of their heads in an effort to bring them to justice. One of them was supposedly killed in a drone strike in 2010. Hope springs eternal …

The Rest of the Story

Neerja Bhanot’s tale of bravery and selflessness in the face of certain death inspired thousands. One of the seven-year-old children that she helped rescue went on to become an airline captain himself. He credits Neerja as his inspiration and says that he owes every day of his life to her selfless sacrifice.

While the loss of life was objectively horrible, it would have been so much worse were it not for Neerja’s quick thinking and cool head under pressure. She single-handedly prevented the plane from becoming airborne. She also kept the terrorists from identifying the American passengers for execution. When given opportunity to escape, she made a conscious decision to remain behind and rescue others. Real heroes don’t wear brightly colored spandex. Sometimes, they’re just pretty girls with the grit and determination to stand up and shake their fists at the darkness.

Those five terrorists are nobodies. They don’t matter now, and they didn’t matter then. Neerja Bhanot, by contrast, now that woman is a freaking legend. She has inspired books, movies, scholarships, and awards. Her story will live on decades after her murderers are dead and gone.

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

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