It took a while
for Alice Hoglan to muster the courage—not to mention
the technological know-how—to check the
messages on her son’s mobile phone. Mark
Bingham had had the phone with him when he boarded United
Airlines Flight 93 nearly two months earlier. So, of
course, it was destroyed along with everything else on
board when the plane crashed in a field in Somerset
County, Pa. But like some sort of space-age time capsule
that captured the terror and the confusion that has
become known as September 11, Bingham’s voice
messages sat on an AT&T Wireless computer waiting
to be retrieved.

Hoglan knew there
were at least two messages because she had left them
herself. Mark woke her up at 6:44 a.m. Pacific time with an
air phone call to tell her that his flight had been
hijacked. However, it wasn’t until after the
call was disconnected and Hoglan turned on the TV that
she realized the hijackers’ probable plan for her
son’s plane.

“Mark,
this is your mom,” she said in her first message.
“It’s 9:54 a.m. [Eastern time].
It’s a suicide mission, and the hijackers are
planning to use your plane as a target.” Today,
she corrects herself when she repeats the message:
“Of course I meant to say
‘weapon.’”

Her messages were
two of the 44 left on Mark’s phone in the wake of the
hijacking. One was from Mark’s father, Jerry Bingham,
in Florida. “I’m looking at this big
wreck and I’m hoping you’re nowhere near
it,” he said, according to Hoglan. Others were
from rugby teammates, fraternity brothers, business
associates, and boyfriends. And at least one was from
his roommate in New York City, Amanda Mark. “Mark,
call me!” she pleaded.

Mounting evidence
suggests Mark had access to the information his mother
was trying to get to him. Cockpit recordings support the
theory that he and the others on board took amazing
measures in attempting to overcome the hijackers. The
victims of Flight 93 have been heralded as citizen
soldiers who, when faced with then-unimaginable
circumstances, gave their own lives to save thousands
of others. Mark, meanwhile, has been singled out by
the media as the “gay hero.”

It’s a
distinction that makes many of those who were close to him
uneasy. Not that they were uncomfortable with
Mark’s sexual orientation. Most of them
don’t hesitate to mention his nickname, “Bear
Trap.” He liked his men big and hairy, they
say. It’s just that the moniker “gay
hero” says so little about a man who was as
varied as the 44 unheard voice messages his mother
found on his phone.

The word giant
better represents Mark Bingham, his friends might say. But
even then they wouldn’t be talking about his
6-foot-4, 220-pound frame. They would be describing
the life they watched him lead.

One of Alice
Hoglan’s most vivid memories is from the summer of
1970, when she split from her husband and moved from
Phoenix—the town in which Mark was born on May
22 of that year—to Miami. “I ran to the
airport with him stuck like a football under my
arm,” she says.

Mark—who
at the time was called Jerry, after his father—knew
that day only through the stories his mom told him.
But it was nevertheless one of the most significant in
his life in that it marked the start of his
partnership with his mother.

“We were
always a team, and I depended on him way too much,”
Hoglan says. “It was too much emotional strain
for a little boy to have a single mom thrashing about
for support.”

After eight years
in Miami, where Mark and his mother lived on a
houseboat in the shadow of the Orange Bowl—hence
Mark’s lifelong obsession with the Miami
Dolphins—the pair moved to California.

Soon after her
divorce, Hoglan decided to take the K from her son’s
middle name, Kendall, and call him Kerry—a name she
says he hated because “it sounded like a
girl’s.” So when her son was 10 and about to
start a new school in Redlands, Calif., she gave him
an opportunity few people ever have. “I said,
‘Kerry, you’ve been complaining about your
name, and now’s the time to change it, because
people here don’t know you yet.’”
After thinking about his mom’s proposition for just a
minute, he responded, “OK, I’ll be
Mark.”

“It was a
brave and very definite thing. He just chose it,”
Hoglan remembers. “And when we got to the
classroom and the teacher said ‘This is Mark
Bingham,’ I heard a kid say, in a whining voice,
‘Another Mark!’”

The two of them
didn’t stay anywhere long those first few years in
California. In addition to Redlands, they were in Riverside,
before being inspired by one of Hoglan’s
favorite authors—John Steinbeck—and moving to
Monterey. There they lived in the back of a pickup for a few
weeks while Hoglan looked for work and, more than a
couple of times, depended on the fish Mark could catch
at the wharf for supper. “I look back on it now and
say, ‘Wow, that was a really cool, character-building
experience,’ ” Hoglan says. “But
it was pretty grim. There was never a lot of money, and
that may have been the nadir of our existence.”

Mark was a
sophomore at Los Gatos High School in Los Gatos,
Calif.—where he and his mom had moved a few
years earlier—when he met Todd Sarner. “I
think what brought us together originally is that we
didn’t fit into any of the cliques,”
says Sarner, also a sophomore at Los Gatos at the time.
“We weren’t really jocks, and we
weren’t really the nerdy, brainy kids.”

Sixteen years
later their relationship was so strong that Mark had been
the best man at Sarner’s wedding, and Sarner was the
one who dropped Mark off at the San Francisco airport
in late August for what turned out to be his last
flight out of the city. But Sarner is the first to tell you
that their friendship didn’t start out that
way.

“We kind
of had a cantankerous relationship at the beginning,”
he says. “Back then a lot of the fights were
about what heavy metal band was the best. Mark was
really into a band called Queensryche, and I was into a
Japanese metal band called Loudness.”

Sometimes Mark,
Sarner, and other friends would collaborate on music
videos—complete with big hair, makeup, and air
guitar—that they would videotape at
Mark’s house, usually when Hoglan, who is a flight
attendant for United Airlines, was away on a trip.
“They would get made up in these outrageous
Metallica and Iron Maiden getups, using my makeup,”
Hoglan says.

Mark and Sarner
also collaborated on the rugby field. And though the
sport didn’t exactly suit Sarner, it was perfect for
Mark. As physical a sport as rugby is, it no doubt
helped cultivate the sense of fearlessness in Mark
that Sarner later addressed in his eulogy on September 22 in
Berkeley, Calif. “I tend to believe that the truth is
that Mark did have fear,” he said, “but
that he took action anyway.”