Colonel David Martin Scales

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 4 DAVID M SCALES COL USA

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-74 David M. Scales

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Colonel · Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, the Pentagon

1956 2001

Cleveland, Ohio The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Arlington, Virginia. Worked at U.S. Army as Colonel. Served with Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, the Pentagon.

United States of America

His life

Colonel, United States Army Reserve, personnel policy integrator in the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel.

He was a perfectionist who could not rest until a job was done - early in, late out. A colonel who knew him called him an extremely professional, dedicated officer; a former superior said that if she had to describe him in one word it would be brilliant.

He was a talented pianist and took his degree in music composition at Cincinnati, and an MBA at Southern Illinois. He was commissioned through ROTC in 1978 and served in Ohio before going to South Korea in 1979 as an ambulance platoon leader, and later in Denver, Aurora, St Louis and at Fort Monroe.

In the minutes before his office was destroyed he sent an email to his wife in Arizona. She replied. She thinks it may have been what he was reading.

She said his smile lit up a room, and that he was a loving, faithful husband and a dedicated father who always found the silver lining in every dark cloud. He made up stories for his twelve-year-old son and had spent a week with him at Busch Gardens in July.

Survived by

His wife Patricia and his son Ashton.

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 →

Media