Lieutenant Commander Patrick Jude Murphy

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 3 PATRICK J MURPHY LCDR USN

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-73

Lieutenant Commander U.S. Navy

What he earned

Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Lieutenant Commander · Navy Command Center - and the USS Sand Lance

1963 2001

Flossmoor, Illinois The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. Worked at U.S. Navy Reserve as Lieutenant Commander. Served with Navy Command Center - and the USS Sand Lance.

United States of America

His life

Lieutenant Commander, United States Naval Reserve. He was two weeks into a three-week assignment with the Navy Command Center, standing duty, when the aircraft struck.

He finished at Marian Catholic High School in 1981, took ROTC and a degree in chemical engineering at Mississippi in 1986, and was commissioned an ensign that May into the nuclear propulsion programme. He married Masako Nagasawa the same year.

After nuclear power training he served aboard the submarine Sand Lance, leading the electrical, reactor control and damage control divisions. He left active duty in 1991 for chemical engineering and worked for confectionery and consumer goods firms in Chicago, took an MBA at Chicago, and moved his family to New Jersey - keeping his reserve commission throughout, and completing a course in international relations and strategic studies at the Naval War College in 1999.

He was well travelled and a student of history, and had been through much of Europe and Asia; his family say he liked meeting people and learning how they lived. Most of all he liked being with his family.

Survived by

His wife Masako of fifteen years, his children Mitchell and Casey, his mother Joan, his brothers John and David, and his sisters Kathleen, Susan and Gwynne.

The Pentagon

September 11, 2001

American Airlines flight 77 struck the western face of the Pentagon at 9:37. A hundred and twenty-five people inside the building were killed, and fifty-nine aboard the aircraft.

They were military and civilian alike - officers, analysts, budget staff, contractors, a group of schoolchildren and their teachers travelling on a National Geographic trip. No police officer died here.

The nation afterwards set aside Arlington's own rules of eligibility and buried the civilian dead in national ground, together with the remains that could not be identified, in Section 64. It had decided that on this day the distinction did not apply.

Everyone taken by The Pentagon →

September 11, 2001

On a clear Tuesday morning, four airliners were taken. Two were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one into the western face of the Pentagon, and one came down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the passengers and crew went forward at the cockpit door.

Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven people were killed. Three hundred and forty-three were firefighters of the New York City Fire Department. Seventy-one were law enforcement officers. Eight were paramedics and emergency medical technicians. One hundred and twenty-five died at the Pentagon, military and civilian together. The rest - some two thousand four hundred of them - had gone to work, or boarded a plane, and belonged to no service at all.

None of them began that morning as heroes. A great many of them ended it as heroes: men and women who carried strangers down stairwells, who stayed with people who could not walk, who held a door, who went back up. Four men on a flight over Pennsylvania, who had thirty minutes of telephone calls and knew what had already happened, decided where their aircraft would come down.

At Arlington, the nation set aside its own rules of eligibility and buried the Pentagon's civilian dead in national ground. It had decided that on this day the distinction did not apply.

Everyone taken by September 11, 2001 →

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