William R. Ruth

Chief Warrant Officer 4, United States Army Reserve - a veteran of two wars, an aviator for thirty-six years, and a social studies teacher for nearly thirty.

He was born in 1943 and grew up with family ties to Alliance, Ohio, where his brother and sister lived and where he now lies. He took a bachelor's degree at Bowling Green State University in 1971 and a master's there in 1973, and studied further at Ohio State.

He flew helicopters with the Marines in Vietnam, with Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 363 in 1966 and 1967, under the call sign MURRAY, and would tell friends about the missions: evacuating the wounded and the dead. The other pilots called him Baby Ruth.

Afterwards he taught, for nearly thirty years in the Montgomery County schools in Maryland - Thomas W. Pyle Middle School in Bethesda, and last John T. Baker Middle School in Damascus, where he ran the air gun club. A colleague called him an absolute intellect, a voracious reader who taught history deeply, and a caring mentor who took children on field trips and looked after the younger teachers. He was a licensed amateur radio operator, W3HRD, and one of his students went into electrical engineering because of it.

He never left the service. He flew for the Maryland Army National Guard for more than twenty-five years out of the aviation facility in the Edgewood Area at Aberdeen Proving Ground, and when the Gulf War came he was pulled out of the classroom and sent to the Middle East as an air traffic control warrant officer with the 29th Air Traffic Control Group. Between Vietnam and Desert Storm he flew more than eight hundred combat missions.

In 1997 he retired from teaching and took an Army post at the Pentagon, in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel. On the evening of 10 September 2001 he cut a holiday short to preside over his first meeting as commander of his VFW post in Mount Airy. The next morning he was at his desk when American Airlines flight 77 struck the western face of the building, into the offices of the very staff he served. He was fifty-seven.

His post is now the CW4 Bill Ruth VFW Post 10076, renamed for him, and on 13 December 2012 the Maryland Army National Guard dedicated the aviation maintenance facility at Edgewood in his name. "He made a career of sacrificing for others," the general said that day, "until the day he made the ultimate sacrifice."

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 son Sean. His mother Jane, his brother David and his sister Martha, of Alliance, Ohio. His elder son Chad died in a car accident about a year before him; Chad's organs were donated, and Bill met the man who was given his son's heart.