Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Neil Hyland Jr.

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 2 STEPHEN N HYLAND Jr LTC USA

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-74 Stephen N. Hyland, Jr.

Lieutenant Colonel U.S. Army

What he earned

Also kept at

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

1954 2001

New York City, New York The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

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

United States of America

His life

Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army, working on personnel at the Pentagon. October would have been his twenty-first year in the service.

Twenty years before, he told a friend what he would like on his stone: born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Those who loved him say it fitted him exactly.

His father said you look back and all you think about is him laughing - that when he was in a room everybody gathered round him. He made everyone laugh and never told a joke.

He moved about as a child and the family settled in southern California, where he went to Damien High School. He took a degree in English literature at Notre Dame and was proud of it.

His house at Burke was a hub: the first piece of furniture to arrive when he moved in was a pool table, and a friend said it was not for himself, it was an attraction for friends. Weekends were barbecues and laughter. During the week he took the work seriously - his father said he was so elated to be working at the Pentagon.

His sister said simply: I am proud that Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Neil Hyland is my brother.

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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