Petty Officer First Class Joseph J. Pycior Jr.

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 4 JOSEPH J PYCIOR Jr AW1 USN

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-72 Joseph J. Pycior, Jr.

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Petty Officer First Class · The Pentagon - and the USS George Washington and USS Seattle

1961 2001

Carlstadt, New Jersey The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Landover, Maryland. Worked at U.S. Navy. Served with The Pentagon - and the USS George Washington and USS Seattle.

United States of America

Their life

Aviation Warfare Systems Operator First Class, United States Navy.

For as long as his parents could remember he had wanted the Navy. There was an organisation in Carlstadt called the Naval Brigade for children of eight and nine and up - blue uniforms in winter and white in summer, tailored small, meeting every week in a building they called their ship, run by Navy rules. He was in it.

He and his wife Terri were both in the Naval Junior ROTC at Becton Regional High School, where they met; he was company commander in his last year and went into the Navy as soon as he graduated in June 1980. His father, a Navy veteran of Korea, said: both my sons were interested in the service.

He served aboard the George Washington and the Seattle and in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm, and came to the Pentagon in early 1999, where he compiled the information for press conferences. His father said: I felt he was at the safest place in the world - the nerve centre of the whole armed forces.

He was a Cub Scout den leader. His wife said: he's happy, outgoing, funny, he loves children, everyone he works with loves him, and he's the perfect dad and husband.

That morning he telephoned home and spoke to his ten-year-old son about New York, and rang his mother-in-law to tell her to go outside and look. She could see the smoke.

He was about to finish a degree in history, and had put in his retirement papers. They meant to move back to New Jersey in January.

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 Terri, his sons Joseph the third and Robert, and his parents Joseph and Arlene.

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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