Major Stephen V Long

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 3 STEPHEN V LONG MAJ USA

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-73 Stephen V. Long

Major U.S. Army

What he earned

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Major · Total Army Personnel Command - and before it the 2nd Battalion, 75th Rangers and the 82nd Airborne

1962 2001

Georgia The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Alexandria, Virginia. Worked at U.S. Army. Served with Total Army Personnel Command - and before it the 2nd Battalion, 75th Rangers and the 82nd Airborne.

United States of America

His life

Major, United States Army - and a war hero long before that morning.

He enlisted in July 1981 and went through infantry training and the basic airborne course at Fort Benning, and was posted to the 2nd Battalion of the 75th Infantry - the Rangers - at Fort Lewis.

In October 1983, as a specialist, he parachuted onto Grenada in Operation Urgent Fury. He came back with the Army Commendation Medal for valour and the Purple Heart.

He was then chosen for a three-year ROTC scholarship and discharged to take it, read sociology at Augusta State, and was commissioned in November 1989 into the Quartermaster Corps. He was a platoon leader with the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg and deployed to Saudi Arabia in August 1990 for Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and came back to be a company executive officer and then an assistant brigade logistics officer.

He passed the combined logistics officer advanced course in 1995, served as a battalion logistics officer and commanded a company of the 601st Aviation Support Battalion at Katterbach in Germany, and came to Total Army Personnel Command in April 1998 as an assignment officer and later secretary of the general staff. He was promoted major on the first of November 2000.

He wore the Combat Infantryman Badge, the Ranger tab and parachutist wings.

Survived by

His wife Tina and his stepsons David and Tryon Hopkins.

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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