Lawrence D. Getzfred

Captain, United States Navy, branch head for joint operations and plans at the Navy Command Center.

One of five brothers who followed each other into the Navy and who between them gave it a hundred years. He enlisted in October 1963 after finishing at St Boniface High School in Elgin, and began as an antisubmarine warfare technician on P-3 patrol aircraft - the aeroplane that shaped his whole career.

He left active duty after four years, stayed in the reserve, and took a degree in mathematics at Santa Clara in 1972 and a California teaching credential. Then he went back: officer candidate school at Pensacola, commissioned that December, and his wings as a naval flight officer in July 1973.

He flew with VP-6, instructed at the training squadron at Moffett Field, and spent three years on exchange with the Royal Air Force at Kinloss in Scotland flying Nimrods. He was executive officer and then commanding officer of VP-40, took a master's at the Naval War College, and served three years on the Joint Staff - where he was the principal military adviser to the American ambassador in Vienna during the Open Skies Treaty negotiations, and prepared the testimony for its ratification hearings.

He made captain in October 1993 and went to Patrol Wings Pacific in Hawaii as force training officer for ten squadrons. At the Pentagon he was duty watch captain and then branch head, and made himself the sea daddy of every reservist serving a period in the Navy Command Center. He was at his duty station when the aircraft struck.

He married Patricia Grooss at St Mawgan in Cornwall in October 1980. He had once thought of teaching as a career, and those who served with him say he was a teacher all the same.