Lieutenant Colonel Michael L Selves

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 4 MICHAEL L SELVES LTC USA Ret

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-75 Michael L. Selves

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Lieutenant Colonel · Information Management Support Center, the Pentagon

1947 2001

Pendleton, Oregon The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Fairfax, Virginia. Worked at U.S. Army Civilian as Director of Information Management, Retired Lieutenant Colonel. Served with Information Management Support Center, the Pentagon.

United States of America

His life

Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army, retired - and from 1996 the civilian director of the Army's information management support center at the Pentagon.

His office was on the first floor of the E ring, at the point where the aircraft struck first. Near his desk were photographs of the lakes and mountains around Pendleton, where he came from. He took his degree at Oregon and was an ardent supporter of the Ducks.

Over twenty years in the Army he served in South Korea and in Italy. He and his wife Gayle - both keen golfers, married six years before at a golf club in Centreville - were counting the days to his retirement and a move to Hilton Head. They had friends there and had been looking at houses.

He was as good with a joke as with a putter, and made friends everywhere. Most of the people who worked for him and were moved on went unwillingly. He knew how to liven up a dull meeting: a colleague remembered him at a seminar two years before, slowly stripping down to his undershirt and a bathing costume while he talked.

His wife said: all of the people he worked with were just devastated, because he was really loved. His sense of humour is probably what made him so special to everyone. He could make just about anyone laugh.

Survived by

His wife Gayle.

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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