She was just two days short of her 22nd birthday

I love Gail Heriot's writing at Instapundit. She does not write often but when she does, it is always first rate. Either vignettes about something you do not know, had forgotten or deep insights on things you thought familiar.

In today's instance, a vignette:

ON THIS DAY IN 1986, FLIGHT ATTENDANT NEERJA BHANOT DIED SAVING THE LIVES OF PASSENGERS ON PAN AM FLIGHT # 73: She was just two days short of her 22nd birthday.

Flight #73 originated in Mumbai and was ultimately bound for New York. It was initially carrying 394 passengers, 9 infants, 19 Indian flight attendants and an American pilot and co-pilot.

During a stopover in Karachi, four heavily-armed hijackers—part of the Abu Nidal Organization–stormed the plane. Alerted to the hijacking, the pilot and co-pilot escaped from the cockpit via the Inertial Reel Escape Device, thus leaving the aircraft immobilized on the ground.

Realizing that the plane was pilotless, the hijackers sought out an American passenger, eventually singling out a 29-year-old Californian named Rajesh Kumar. Kumar was ordered to kneel facing the front of the aircraft with his hands behind his head. They threatened to kill him if Pan Am’s negotiators did not send them a flight crew immediately.

Bloodthirsty and dissatisfied with the speed of the negotiators’ response, the chief hijacker shot Kumar in the head and dumped him onto the tarmac. He died before he reached the hospital. Thereafter, they told the negotiators, a passenger would be executed every 15 minutes until a pilot was produced.

The hijackers then turned to purser Neerja Bhanot, who remained calm and collected even when a gun was put to her head. They demanded that she and the flight attendants under her control collect the passports from all passengers. Believing that the hijackers intended to kill the more than 40 Americans on board, she had the flight attendants hide some of the American passports in the seats and dumped the rest of them down the rubbish chute.

Read the rest of it. We really should be celebrating quiet heroes such as Neerja Bhanot rather than focusing on self-designated victims who seem to crowd the headlines.