Robert E. Dolan, Jr.

Captain, United States Navy. He began at the Naval Academy and at forty was in command of the John Hancock, whose motto was First for Freedom.

Over twenty years he served in Bahrain, the Arabian Gulf, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, at various naval stations and on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the middle nineties, and took a master's at the National War College.

He kept up with the friends he had made in kindergarten at Holy Family School in Florham Park. He coached his son's Little League every week and chaperoned his daughter's school dances. A friend of forty years said that living for duty, honour and country did not make him a one-dimensional man - he could quote Shakespeare and Monty Python in the same sentence.

In 2000 he moved his family to Alexandria and went to the Pentagon as head of the strategy and concepts branch under the Chief of Naval Operations, into a newly refurbished office on the first floor of the D ring. That is where the aircraft struck.

His wife wrote afterwards that he was the best and the brightest this country had to offer to the altar of freedom.

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.

His wife Lisa, his son Beau and his daughter Rebecca.