Chief Warrant Officer 4 William Roderick Ruth

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 4 WILLIAM R RUTH CW4 USA

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-74 William R. Ruth

Chief Warrant Officer 4 U.S. Army

What he earned

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Chief Warrant Officer 4 · 29TH AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL GROUP

1943 2001

Knoxville, Tennessee The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Mount Airy, Maryland. Worked at U.S. Army Reserve. Also served in U.S. Marine Corps.

United States of America

His life

Chief Warrant Officer 4, United States Army Reserve - a veteran of two wars, an aviator for thirty-six years, and a social studies teacher for nearly thirty.

He was born in 1943 and grew up with family ties to Alliance, Ohio, where his brother and sister lived and where he now lies. He took a bachelor's degree at Bowling Green State University in 1971 and a master's there in 1973, and studied further at Ohio State.

He flew helicopters with the Marines in Vietnam, with Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 363 in 1966 and 1967, under the call sign MURRAY, and would tell friends about the missions: evacuating the wounded and the dead. The other pilots called him Baby Ruth.

Afterwards he taught, for nearly thirty years in the Montgomery County schools in Maryland - Thomas W. Pyle Middle School in Bethesda, and last John T. Baker Middle School in Damascus, where he ran the air gun club. A colleague called him an absolute intellect, a voracious reader who taught history deeply, and a caring mentor who took children on field trips and looked after the younger teachers. He was a licensed amateur radio operator, W3HRD, and one of his students went into electrical engineering because of it.

He never left the service. He flew for the Maryland Army National Guard for more than twenty-five years out of the aviation facility in the Edgewood Area at Aberdeen Proving Ground, and when the Gulf War came he was pulled out of the classroom and sent to the Middle East as an air traffic control warrant officer with the 29th Air Traffic Control Group. Between Vietnam and Desert Storm he flew more than eight hundred combat missions.

In 1997 he retired from teaching and took an Army post at the Pentagon, in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel. On the evening of 10 September 2001 he cut a holiday short to preside over his first meeting as commander of his VFW post in Mount Airy. The next morning he was at his desk when American Airlines flight 77 struck the western face of the building, into the offices of the very staff he served. He was fifty-seven.

His post is now the CW4 Bill Ruth VFW Post 10076, renamed for him, and on 13 December 2012 the Maryland Army National Guard dedicated the aviation maintenance facility at Edgewood in his name. "He made a career of sacrificing for others," the general said that day, "until the day he made the ultimate sacrifice."

How he 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 son Sean. His mother Jane, his brother David and his sister Martha, of Alliance, Ohio. His elder son Chad died in a car accident about a year before him; Chad's organs were donated, and Bill met the man who was given his son's heart.

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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