Lieutenant Colonel Karen J. Wagner

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 5 KAREN J WAGNER LTC USA

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-74

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Lieutenant Colonel · Office of the Army Surgeon General and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel

1961 2001

San Antonio, Texas The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Richmond, Virginia. Worked at U.S. Army. Served with Office of the Army Surgeon General and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel.

United States of America

Their life

Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army - medical personnel officer in the Office of the Army Surgeon General and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, a promotion she had received the month before.

She grew up in a military family in San Antonio, played guard for the women's basketball team at Nevada-Las Vegas and came out of its ROTC programme in 1984, and took a master's in health services administration in 1992.

She was adjutant of the 85th Medical Evacuation Hospital at Fort Lee, executive officer and company commander of D Company in the 187th Medical Battalion at Fort Sam Houston, and chief of personnel for the 57th Evacuation Hospital at Würzburg, and ran the personnel services branch at Walter Reed.

Seventeen years in, she was sketching out a second act. She watched the Food Network and ran to clear her head, and she and her sister talked about retiring at the same time - teaching in Texas first and then abroad, or a cooking programme together. Her sister said: her shtick was baking, mine was cooking.

Her sister also said: she never met a stranger. She was the kind of person who, when you met her, would never forget you - she'd talk to you like she'd known you forever.

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

Her sister Kim.

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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