Matthew M. Flocco

Aerographer's Mate Second Class, United States Navy - a weather man, which he had wanted to be since he was a boy watching the Weather Channel.

He and some friends walked into a recruiting office on a lark in his last year of school, and his mother said the more he listened to the recruiter the more he wanted to go. He enlisted straight after graduating.

He ran every other day and went home to Delaware at weekends to play softball in a community league. He had been moved off the night shift only days before; otherwise he would not have been in the building at that hour.

The weekend before, he was home from Fort Myer. He hung about with his friends and played horseshoes, and on the Sunday there were sweet pepper omelettes and then the drive to the station. The train was late, so his mother had a few extra minutes with him on the platform. When it came in she gave him one last hug.

His parents have hung his dress blues and his pea coat in the front window at home. His father said: we are just so proud of him, and we are going to miss the hell out of him. I learned more from him in the past three years than he ever learned from me.

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.