Commander Patrick Dunn

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 2 PATRICK DUNN CDR USN

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-72

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Commander · Navy Command Center, the Pentagon

1962 2001

Woodbridge, New Jersey The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Springfield, Virginia. Worked at U.S. Navy. Served with Navy Command Center, the Pentagon.

United States of America

His life

Commander, United States Navy, a planner and strategist at the Navy Command Center.

He came from a Navy family - his father served in the Second World War and in Korea, and he and one of his brothers were Naval Academy men. He was the son of a Newark policeman.

He had been executive officer of the LaSalle in Italy. His wife would hear three blasts of her horn leaving the berth and one more as she turned for the Gulf of Gaeta, and would take the Academy flag up onto the roof and wave him out.

His wife said his home was at sea: if the ship was rocking, he was happy; it was in his blood.

On the morning of the eleventh he kissed her before leaving for work, and then, for the first time, he kissed her stomach. She was two months pregnant with their first child. He telephoned later to tell her about New York. When he did not call again she knew.

He is buried at Arlington.

Survived by

His wife Stephanie, and their child.

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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