Captain Gerald F Deconto

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 1 GERALD F DeCONTO CAPT USN

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-72 Gerald F. DeConto

Captain U.S. Navy

What he earned

Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Captain · Current Operations and Plans, Navy Command Center

1957 2001

Halifax, Massachusetts The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Alexandria, Virginia. Worked at U.S. Navy as Captain. Served with Current Operations and Plans, Navy Command Center.

United States of America

His life

Captain, United States Navy, director of the current operations and plans branch of the Navy Command Center. He was organising the Navy's response to the attack on New York when the aircraft reached the Pentagon.

The son of a schoolteacher and a town building inspector, he took a degree in physics at the Naval Academy in 1979, where he played rugby and was known as Fish. He served in the Excel as damage control assistant, engineering officer and executive officer, and became operations officer of the Fresno in 1982. He took a master's in mechanical engineering at Monterey, was chief engineer of the Hewitt, aide to the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Surface Warfare, and executive officer of the Lake Erie.

He was assistant operations officer for Carrier Group 7, took a second master's at the Naval War College, commanded the Simpson from 1998 to 2000 and was chief of staff of the Standing Naval Force Mediterranean until May 2001. Unknown to him, he had screened for major command on the first of September.

What he wanted was his own ship again. His mother said: once they're captain, they're never satisfied with another job. That's what he was waiting for.

The weekend before, he drove to a family reunion in Connecticut and then took his mother home to Cape Cod. That night he emailed to say he had arrived safely in Alexandria. She had just opened an email account; it was the first message she ever received, and the last.

He is buried at Arlington.

Survived by

His mother Patricia, his brothers David and Raymond, his sisters Marie and Dale, five nieces and a nephew.

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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