Major Dwayne Williams

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 5 DWAYNE WILLIAMS MAJ USA

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-74

Major U.S. Army

What he earned

Kuwait Liberation Medal (Govt. of Kuwait)

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Major · Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, the Pentagon

1961 2001

Jacksonville, Alabama The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Lorton, Virginia. Worked at U.S. Army as Major. Served with Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, the Pentagon.

United States of America

His life

Major, United States Army - joint officer distribution manager in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, where he had reported in June 2001 straight from Command and General Staff College.

He had been through the basic airborne course, jungle warfare school, Ranger school, and the Adjutant General's basic and advanced courses. He wore the Ranger tab and parachutist wings.

The Army's own account of him says he loved his job, his Army and his country; that he mentored young officers and gave sound counsel to his soldiers and noncommissioned officers; and that America's soldiers were well cared for and well trained under him.

His daughter Kelsie was thirteen. A week after, at school, she wrote:

I feel the pain of my father on my heart.
I touch my father's face as if he were beside me.
I worry if my father is alive or dead.
I cry for all the people that have lost someone special.
I understand the frustration of not knowing where your loved ones are.
I say to myself that he is alive.
I dream that he is walking in the door of my house and saying that he is okay.
I try to keep hope alive.

Survived by

His wife Tammy, his son Tyler and his daughter Kelsie.

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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