Lieutenant Commander Ronald James Vauk

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 5 RONALD J VAUK LCDR USN

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-73 Ronald J. Vauk

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Lieutenant Commander · Naval Command Center - and the submarines Glenard P. Lipscomb and Oklahoma City

1964 2001

Nampa, Idaho The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Mount Airy, Maryland. Worked at U.S. Navy Reserve as Lieutenant Commander. Served with Naval Command Center - and the submarines Glenard P. Lipscomb and Oklahoma City.

United States of America

His life

Lieutenant Commander, United States Naval Reserve, watch commander in the Naval Command Center. He was on the second day of his annual reserve duty.

He was the youngest of nine children, born at Nampa, and went to the Naval Academy from Nampa High School, graduating in 1987 with a degree in political science. After nuclear power school he served aboard the submarines Glenard P. Lipscomb and Oklahoma City, and left active duty for the reserve in 1993.

He worked as a project manager and then in the submarine technology department of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, took a master's in business at Maryland in 1999, and rose quickly to assistant group supervisor.

He married Jennifer Mooney, whom he had met at the Academy, in August 1987. Their son Liam was born in 1997. Their daughter Meaghan was born on the seventh of November 2001, two months after he was killed.

He took his family back to Idaho at least once a year, and was at his wife's family's table in Baltimore most Sundays. Just before this duty he had been at the beach at Fenwick Island with them all, taking his son into the sand and onto the rides, and got in one round of golf.

He worked wood. He had just finished the basement of the house at Mount Airy - a family room and a bedroom with large cupboards and a bath - and everyone who saw it said how warm he had made it.

Survived by

His wife Jennifer, his son Liam, his daughter Meaghan, his parents Dorothy and Hubert, and his eight brothers and sisters.

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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