Let's roll

The protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees, Colonel Dick Cantwell, based on World War II commander Charles "Buck" Lanham, uses the phrase to his driver.

On September 11, 2001, Todd Beamer, a passenger on the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, tried to place a call through an air phone, but he was routed to a customer service representative instead, who passed him on to supervisor Lisa Jefferson.

Beamer reported that one passenger had been killed and that a flight attendant had told him that both the pilot and co-pilot had been forced from the cockpit and may have been injured.

Later, he told the operator that some of the other passengers were planning to attack the hijackers and regain control of the aircraft, after they learned about what happened at the World Trade Center and The Pentagon.

"[1] In a November 8 address from the World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia, President George W. Bush invoked Beamer's words: "Some of our greatest moments have been acts of courage for which no one could have been prepared.