Captain Robert E. Dolan Jr.

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 1 ROBERT E DOLAN Jr CAPT USN

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-73 Robert E. Dolan, Jr.

Captain U.S. Navy

What they earned

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Captain · Strategy and Concepts Branch, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations

1958 2001

Florham Park, New Jersey The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Alexandria, Virginia. Worked at U.S. Navy. Served with Strategy and Concepts Branch, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations.

United States of America

Their life

Captain, United States Navy. He began at the Naval Academy and at forty was in command of the John Hancock, whose motto was First for Freedom.

Over twenty years he served in Bahrain, the Arabian Gulf, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, at various naval stations and on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the middle nineties, and took a master's at the National War College.

He kept up with the friends he had made in kindergarten at Holy Family School in Florham Park. He coached his son's Little League every week and chaperoned his daughter's school dances. A friend of forty years said that living for duty, honour and country did not make him a one-dimensional man - he could quote Shakespeare and Monty Python in the same sentence.

In 2000 he moved his family to Alexandria and went to the Pentagon as head of the strategy and concepts branch under the Chief of Naval Operations, into a newly refurbished office on the first floor of the D ring. That is where the aircraft struck.

His wife wrote afterwards that he was the best and the brightest this country had to offer to the altar of freedom.

How they died

Killed at the Pentagon on the morning of 11 September 2001, when American Airlines flight 77 struck the western face of the building at 9:37. A hundred and twenty-five people inside and fifty-nine aboard the aircraft were killed.

Survived by

His wife Lisa, his son Beau and his daughter Rebecca.

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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