Sergeant Major Robert Errol Russell

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 4 ROBERT E RUSSELL SGM USA Ret

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-1 Robert E. Russell

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Sergeant Major · United States Army - and afterwards a budget analyst at the Pentagon

1949 2001

Columbia, South Carolina The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Worked at U.S. Army Civilian. Served with United States Army - and afterwards a budget analyst at the Pentagon.

United States of America

His life

Sergeant Major, United States Army, retired - twenty-three years, and afterwards a supervisory budget analyst at the Pentagon.

He was born at Columbia and lived there with his grandmother until he was eight, then went to Washington to his mother and five younger brothers and sisters. As the eldest he helped raise them, and they went on relying on him - for money, for advice, for steadiness - all his life. After his stepfather died and his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, he took her to her day centre every morning; the staff there loved him.

He met his wife at her sixteenth birthday party, to which he had not been invited. She found him going through her records and asked what he was doing. He put Ooh Baby Baby on the phonograph and said: I'm dancing with you. They married four years later in Iowa, and shortly afterwards he left for his first tour in Germany.

He served two tours in Germany, one in Korea and one in Belgium, and retired as a sergeant major in April 1993.

They bought a seventeen-room farmhouse at Oxon Hill and he spent fourteen years making it into a home - a self-taught renovation expert, as he liked to say. He was the calm one, the one people came to. And he cooked: his Hershey pound cake and his pineapple ice cream were in constant demand, and both families spent every holiday at his house because they knew Bobby would be cooking.

The weekend before, his whole office came to a crab feast at the house to mark the end of the budget year. Every person who was there was in the building on the eleventh.

Survived by

His wife Teresa, his three children and seven grandchildren, his mother Mildred, and his 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 →

Media