Dennis M Johnson

Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army, Adjutant General Corps - twenty-five years, and on his second tour at the Pentagon as chief of personnel services to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel.

He was born at Port Edwards, finished at John Edwards High School in 1971, went through ROTC at Wisconsin-Stevens Point and took a degree in business administration in 1975. He was commissioned that December, detailed to armour, and reported to Fort Knox as a platoon leader in April 1976.

He served as a club manager at Mainz in Germany, took a master's with honours in hotel and restaurant management at Florida International, and went to Alaska - Fort Wainwright as installation club manager and then chief of personnel, and Fort Richardson to command the 203rd Personnel Service Company. He went through Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth and came to the Pentagon in 1991 as a programme budget officer.

His parents had asked him to try for Hawaii, and in 1994 he got it: Wheeler as chief resource management officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency, Pacific, where the staff called him Gramps. He came back to the mainland in 1998 and to the Pentagon in May 2000.

Colleagues said he treated everyone in his department like family - that he made a point of talking to each person he passed, and made sure they knew they could come to him about anything.

He met his wife at college in 1973; she was eighteen and he was nineteen. They married in April 1979. She says: quiet, gentle, honest, fun-loving and extremely dedicated to his job. After twenty-two years she could never stay angry with him for long, because he would always find a way to make her laugh.

On the morning of the eleventh they kissed goodbye and she waved to him from the door and then from the kitchen window, as they did every morning. When no word came she thought he must be helping somebody, because that was his job - to take care of people. At eleven that night she was given two telephone numbers: one if he came home, and another if he did not.

He used to tell his children, when things did not go their way: life isn't fair.

He was buried at Arlington with full military honours on the twenty-ninth of September.

His wife Joyce, his daughters Dawn and Cassandra, his parents Bob and Elva, and his siblings Diane, Richard and Gail.