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Pentagon memorial opens to honor 184 dead

The nation’s first memorial to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was dedicated Thursday during a ceremony at the Pentagon, where American Airlines Flight 77 crashed seven years earlier, killing 184 people.

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“We gather to dedicate this ground where a great building became a battlefield, where stone became dust, steel became shrapnel, where flames, smoke and destruction stole the lives of 184 men, women and children,” said former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of hundreds of dignitaries in a huge throng of onlookers who gathered on a cool, cloudy morning on the Pentagon’s south side for the official unveiling of the memorial.

“From this time forward, the Pentagon will be more than a symbol of government, more than a seat of military power, said Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates. “It will also be a place of remembrance.”

The memorial, a two-acre field on the Pentagon’s west side, is a place for reflection: a series of 184 steel-and-granite benches, each with its own glowing light pool, set in a gravel field interspersed with paperbark maple trees, all aligned in the direction Flight 77 took on its final fateful path.

Keith Kaseman, who along with his wife, Julie Beckman, designed the memorial, has called it an “invitation to think.”

In addition to a procession of speakers, including President Bush, Gates and Pentagon Memorial Fund board chairman Jim Laychak, the program was marked by solemn moments, such as a lone bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace” while walking between the memorial benches, and the reading of the names of all 184 victims, each marked by the ringing of a ship’s bell.

The reading was gently interrupted at 8:46 a.m. for a moment of silence to mark the instant when another terrorist-piloted airliner crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City, and to remember those who also died both in New York and in a grassy field in Pennsylvania.

When the speeches were done, Bush walked onto the site and officially dedicated the memorial, stopping first at the bench of 3-year-old Dana Falkenberg, the youngest victim.

The benches, covered in blue sheeting, were unveiled by troops wearing crisp dress uniforms — first Dana’s, then the rest in a rapid-fire sequence that had the effect of a large sheet being pulled back over the entire field. The thousands in attendance stood to applaud, and the air was filled with the fanfare of the U.S. Air Force Band and a full-throated chorus provided by the U.S. Army Chorus and the U.S. Naval Academy Chorus.

“The ceremony absolutely took my breath away,” said Meg Falk, who, at the time of the attack, was the director of the Pentagon’s office of family policy. After the attack, she set up the Pentagon’s assistance center to help victims’ families, and spent countless hours with them.

Falk, who has since retired, called the memorial “such a wonderful tribute to those whose lives were lost.”

One of those lives lost was retired Army Staff Sgt. Jimmie Holley, a Pentagon accountant who was in the building when it was struck. His stepson, Daniel Jackson, said the dedication was a “long time coming” but added that he was thankful for the effort made to put it together.

“I’ll never get over it,” he said of Holley’s death.

Later, after visiting Holley’s memorial bench, Jackson’s mood was serene. “It was beautiful,” he said. “It’ll be open 24 hours, so I’ll go to the bench and just sit and think about him. It’s so quiet and nice.”

Holley is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, and his grave overlooks the Pentagon wall that was struck by Flight 77.

Rumsfeld said the proximity of Arlington makes the memorial’s location particularly fitting.

“Here beneath these sloping fields of Arlington National Cemetery, fields that hold our nation’s fallen, this building stands as a silent monument to the resolve of a free people,” said Rumsfeld, who was in the building during the attack and helped assist victims.

“And so, too, this memorial in its shadow will stand not only as a symbol of a nation’s grief, but as an eternal reminder of men and women of valor who saw flame and smoke, stepped forward to save and protect the lives of their fellow Americans on September 11.

“Let it also remind each of us of those who have volunteered to serve in our nation’s armed forces before and every day since,” Rumsfeld said. “Our nation’s military has stood strong in this new age of peril, determined that what happened here seven years ago must not happen again.”