Michael A. Noeth

Draftsman Second Class, United States Navy - a painter.

He drew and painted before he could talk. His first formal training came as a schoolboy at the Art Students League in New York, and he took a fine arts degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology. He had always been drawn to ships and the sea, and enlisting meant all of it at once: to travel, to live at sea, and to paint what he saw.

He was in the commissioning crew of the Russell and was attached for a time to the production staff of All Hands, where his cover for the April 1998 Year of the Ocean issue and many of his paintings were published. He served with the crisis action team at European Command headquarters and was given the Joint Service Achievement Medal for it. He transferred to the assault ship Wasp in 1999, where his paintings of Navy life filled the ship's calendar, and qualified as a surface warfare specialist in his last month aboard.

He came to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations in September 2000, and was at his post.

He had been commissioned to paint the portraits of all twenty-seven admirals who have served as Chief of Naval Operations. Three were finished, a fourth nearly so, and a study made for the fifth; those are safe at the Naval Art Center and will hang in the Pentagon. The works he had lent to the Command Center were destroyed with it.

He said what he wanted was to paint sailors as they really are - aboard ship, at work and at ease - to show honestly the effort and training and expertise and the very serious sense of responsibility that a great many very young men give to the protection of this country. That it is not at all just seeing the world, or a great adventure.

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.