Specialist Chin Sun Pak Wells

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 5 CHIN SUN PAK WELLS SPC USA

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-74

Specialist U.S. Army

What they earned

Also kept at

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

1976 2001

Tongduchun, Korea The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Woodbridge, Virginia. Worked at U.S. Army as SP4-E4. Served with Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, the Pentagon.

United States of America

Their life

Specialist, United States Army, administrative assistant to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel. Known to everyone as Sunny.

She was born at Tongduchun in Korea and the family moved to Lawton, Oklahoma when she was four; she lived there eighteen years. She was one of three children, was inducted into the National Honor Society at Eisenhower High School and played basketball and softball there, and gardened and took photographs and listened to music. She worked two years as a customer service manager at Wal-Mart before enlisting.

She joined the Army in 1998, trained at Fort Jackson, served a tour in Korea, and came to the Pentagon. She was qualified as a combat lifesaver and expert with the rifle.

She meant to leave the Army the following year and go to college to study medicine.

Survived by

Her parents Norman and Kum Wells and her brothers Chin Sok and Chin Yong.

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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