LOS GATOS — Twenty years later, Alice Hoagland isn’t here any longer to tell the story of her son, Mark Bingham — of how he and fellow passengers on Flight 93 tried to wrestle the hijacked plane back from terrorists and perished when it crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside.

She died in her sleep nearly a year ago, at age 71, but in unexpected and little-known ways the story endures.

Alice Hoagland and her son, Mark Bingham share a hug during Christmas day, 1999. Bingham was a victim of Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11. (Photo Courtesy of Alice Hoagland) 

In interviews and documentaries and at 9/11 memorials, the Los Gatos mother became a familiar face over the last two decades, preserving the memory of her son, a 31-year-old public relations executive and former Cal Berkeley rugby player whose courage helped a bewildered, grieving nation believe all was not lost. He was her only child.

Another part of her life, however, was mostly private. Six months before the attack, at 51, she gave birth to triplet boys — Harrison, Garrett and Bryce — as a surrogate for her younger brother and his wife. A year and a half earlier, she had delivered them a daughter, Jillian.

Now, on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, those children consider it their responsibility to share the legacy of their courageous cousin and Auntie Alice with their own generation, the ones too young to understand the terror and true heroism of that day.

“You have to keep the memory alive,” said Bryce, who is 20 now. “If you don’t, it’s like him dying twice.”

Each is fulfilling that promise in their own way. They’ve made a pilgrimage to the crash site outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, written essays and shared painful conversations with friends. Harrison joined the Marines. He bears a tattoo of the Twin Towers on his chest with the words “Never Forget.”

‘Life change forever’

Jillian and Savannah, her sister from another surrogate, were barely 2 and their triplet brothers were six months old when the call came in from United Flight 93 at 6:44 a.m. But they all know the story by heart. It’s been told from every member of the family, from their Uncle Keith who keeps a shrine to Mark in the entryway of his Grass Valley home to their mother, Kathy Hoglan, who took one of the first calls from Mark and, of course, to Auntie Alice, a veteran United Airlines flight attendant.

File photo of Alice Hoagland preparing to feed lunch to her triplet nephews (l to r) Bryce, Garrett and Harrison Hoglan as her sister, Candyce Hoglan (r) helps out on Feb. 28, 2002. Alice is the mother of Mark Bingham, one of the victims of Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11. Alice is also the surrogate mother to the triplets. At age 51, she decided to become a surrogate mother for his brother’s wife. The triplets will be one-year-old on March 14. (Gary Reyes/Bay Area News Group Archives) 

Alice Hoagland — who changed the spelling of her last name to an early Dutch version — was just waking up that morning at Vaughn and Kathy’s Saratoga home where she had been helping with the babies born six weeks premature and pumping her breast milk for them. She was holding Garrett in her arms when Kathy handed her the landline. Mark was calling his mother from a GTE Airfone at the back of the airplane to say he may never see her again.

“I’m on a flight from Newark to San Francisco,” Alice recalled her son telling her, in a 2011 interview with the Bay Area News Group. “Three guys on board have taken over the airplane. They say they have a bomb. You believe me, don’t you, Mom?”

Mark told his mother that he loved her before the line went dead.

“Everything was surreal from that second forward,” said Kathy Hoglan, who remembers her sister-in-law’s awful expression. “It was a life change forever.”

As they watched the news of planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Alice tried calling her son back twice, leaving frantic messages on his cell phone. The hijackers were “hellbent” on a suicide mission, she said. He must gather fellow passengers to take back the plane.

Mark never received her voicemails, nor the dozens of others left by friends and family that day.

What happened next on Flight 93 is the stuff of legend, recounted by relatives who also spoke with loved ones in their final minutes on the doomed flight, discovered on the cockpit voice recording played for family members months later and memorialized in movies and documentaries.

Several passengers, including Tom Burnett from San Ramon and Mark Bingham’s fellow Los Gatos High graduate Todd Beamer, who uttered what has become an American rallying cry — “let’s roll” — stormed the cockpit, using the beverage cart as a battering ram. One of the last passenger voices on the recording says something like “pull it up.”

Instead, the terrorists pitched the plane into a Pennsylvania field.

A family picture shows Alice Hoagland and her brother Vaughn Hoglan at a family gathering to honor Hoagland’s son, Mark Bingham, who died a hero on Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001. (Courtesy of the Hoglan family) 

‘Greatest gift’

From an early age, the Hoglan children have known the story of Bingham’s heroism, as well as they have known the unique story of their own births.

“Even in elementary school when I was very young, too young to know what it really meant, I’d say, they took this sperm from my dad and the egg from my mom, they put it together and they put it in my aunt,” Jillian said.

After trying unsuccessfully for years to get pregnant, her parents hoped for the best when Alice, a marathon runner, and another family friend became surrogates. Both became pregnant with girls, and Jillian and Savannah were born nearly a month apart in 1999. They consider themselves twins.

Family photos show Vaughn and Kathy Hoglan’s children, Savannah and Jillian (in the left photo) and Garrett, Harrison, and Bryce (in the center photo). (Courtesy of the Hoglan family) 

The triplets were born in March 2001.

“It was the greatest gift anyone could give you,” Kathy said. “She created four of my children. It was definitely a godsend.”

In the weeks after the terrorist attacks, Alice became a sought-after media guest — ever articulate, thoughtful and composed. As a flight attendant, she spoke to airline security failures. As a mother, she expressed her brimming pride and intense grief. She took leadership roles in organizing relatives of Flight 93 as memorials were designed and became a darling of Mark’s gay rugby club, which she championed in her newfound quest for gay rights. She told stories of Mark running with the bulls, clobbering a mugger, tackling the Stanford tree mascot — stories the Hoglan children knew equally well.

Alice was just 19 when Mark was born. She and his father divorced when she was 21. Mother and son settled into the Santa Cruz Mountains cabin in Redwood Estates off Highway 17 and when he grew up, he hung a banner in his San Francisco office — one he marched with at a gay pride parade in New Orleans — that read: Alice Hoglan is a goddess.

After Mark’s death, the Hoglan children felt the same adoration toward Alice. She tutored the boys after school and shot hoops with them during breaks. She attended all the girls’ school events and kept a “bonus basket” for the kids to rifle through when a celebration was in order.

LOS GATOS, Calif. – September 07: Vaughn and Kathy Hoglan’s children, Jillian, right, and Garrett discuss the impact of their cousin Mark Bingham’s heroism on Flight 93 and their late aunt Alice Hoagland’s crusade against terrorism before her death last year, in Los Gatos, Calif., on Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2021. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group) 

‘I was related to Mark Bingham’

Flight 93 was the only one of the four hijacked planes on 9/11 that failed to hit its intended target, presumably the U.S. Capitol. The lives saved that day because of the passengers’ revolt hit home for Jillian when she wrote an essay for her English class. She remembers the day her teacher, Ashleigh Tighe, pulled her out of another class to speak to her.

“I went into her classroom and she was crying. She said that she was in the Capitol building on 9/11 and she had no idea that I was related to Mark Bingham,” Jillian said.

A number of Bay Area families lost loved ones on Flight 93, including the relatives of pilot Jason Dahl, who graduated from San Jose State University. But most victims were from the East Coast, so Jillian was shocked at the connection with her teacher.

“She just wanted to say thank you. I started crying, too.”

It was two years ago, and Harrison had been in boot camp for nearly 11 weeks when he finally shared his cousin’s story. It was about 2 a.m., he said, and he and his platoon had been up for nearly 60 hours straight to complete the exhausting training called “The Crucible.” They were about to perform the final test of leadership and teamwork to become Marines — climbing “The Reaper,” the steepest hill at Camp Pendleton.

“We were at our wit’s end. It was the final push we had to make,” Harrison said. “I gave them the whole, classic Mark Bingham speech — imagine you were there on that day, imagine the courage it took to do what he did. Can you stand here and say you would have done the same thing he did?”

The young Marines put their heads down as they listened to the story. Then they bolstered themselves and headed outside for the grueling climb.

Rylee McCollum, who slept in the bunk beneath Harrison, was among them.

Late last month, McCollum, with a pregnant wife at home in Wyoming, was killed along with 12 other U.S. service members by a suicide bomber outside the Kabul airport. Like Harrison, he was 20 years old.

“Mark sacrificed his life saving those in our nation’s Capitol building,” Harrison said, “and Rylee protecting fleeing Afghan men, women and children, Afghans seeking a better life in America, away from the same oppressive regime that harbored terrorists almost 20 years ago.

“Both exemplified all that it means to be an American.”

David Beamer looks on as Alice Hoagland speaks at the dedication ceremony for the Flame of Liberty veterans memorial in the Civic Center Plaza in Los Gatos. The memorial honors Beamer’s son Todd Beamer and Hoagland’s son Mark Bingham, two Los Gatos High School graduates who tried to overpower hijackers on United Flight 93 on 9/11. (Photo by Tony Avelar) 

‘Hard to live up to’

Alice’s activism was an act of enduring love for her son, but the tragedy of Sept. 11 consumed her.

“She never drew a relaxed breath after that,” her brother, Vaughn, said. She suffered from Addison’s Disease, a disorder that causes weakness and fatigue, but Alice told Kathy that she would “spend every ounce of energy she had to crusade for this not happening again.”

“I don’t know that she was happy,” Kathy said. “I don’t think she enjoyed life after that, with the exception of the children.”

To the five Hoglan children, though, Auntie Alice “was selfless. That’s probably where Mark got it from,” Jillian said. “She’s extremely self sacrificing and loyal.”

The family tried to ease Alice’s burden, accompanying her or taking her place at anniversaries and events. When a bench was dedicated to Mark in downtown Los Gatos, they all gathered. At Los Gatos High — where both Mark and Beamer attended a year apart — the twin girls continue to hand out annual scholarships in his name.

In 2019, Harrison joined Alice on a trip to Guantanamo Bay for the military trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the so-called mastermind of the attacks. Through protective glass, they glimpsed him before proceedings were delayed, another demoralizing injustice for Alice.

Her death in December, like her son’s nearly 20 years earlier, was unexpected, a shock that rocked the family to the core. This Thanksgiving, the empty chair at the table they reserve for the memory of Mark and other missing relatives will now also honor Alice.

The legacies of both mother and son are “hard to live up to,” Bryce said.

But in their own ways, they will try nonetheless.

He and Garrett are still in school, both at West Valley College, figuring out their futures. Jillian is earning a graduate degree in business in London, and Savannah is finishing her degree in Rhode Island.

On the 20th anniversary Saturday, they will think of Alice and remember Mark and pray the country may put aside its differences, like it did in the months after the attack. Savannah plans to plant a flag in the grass on campus in Mark’s honor.

“We have to do what we think he would have wanted to do,” Bryce said, and “try our damndest to keep his memory alive.”

A family picture shows Mark Bingham, who died a hero on Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, kissed by his uncle Vaughn Hoglan, left, and Hoglan’s wife, Kathy. (Courtesy of the Hoglan family)