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When the First Mate and I went to the Pentagon this past Fourth of July, we got a wonderful guided tour from a CQ reader who gave up half of his holiday to take us through the entire building. The Pentagon has so much history and so many fascinating stories, but by far the most moving portion came at the beginning of the tour. The Pentagon has a memorial to the lives that ended on 9/11/01, as the third attack plane plowed into the very place where we now stood.

I wrote about this during our vacation, but I want to share with you all of the pictures I took of the memorial.

This image actually comes from another memorial inside the Pentagon, one that lists the name of the dead from the US Navy. My apologies for the flash.

The centerpiece of the memorial.

An explanation of the Defense of Freedom medal, given to civilian DoD workers as an equivalent of the Purple Heart. Donald Rumsfeld created this award on September 27, 2001, as a result of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon.

A list of the missing and the dead at the Pentagon from the attack.

The altar in the chapel of the memorial. I thought the back-lit seal was especially beautiful, and I kept the flash off so that I could pick it up better. That's why the rest of the picture is so dark; the chapel normally is not.

The true memorial of the Pentagon attack, however, cannot be found at the Pentagon itself but at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. This flag hangs just off the lobby, a two-story tall flag that earned its fame as the flag that Pentagon workers draped over the gaping hole at the crash site in the days following the attack. They wanted the world to know that we may have suffered a tremendous attack -- but that we would not run, we would not hide, we would not be intimidated into retreat. The Pentagon would rebuild, and we would fight the war that the terrorists provoked, and that we would prevail.

UPDATE: Here's a picture of the event, from 9/12.

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