"That Was My Girl"

 

Lieutenant Colonel Karen J. Wagner,

United States Army | Killed at the Pentagon

September 11, 2001

Karen J. Wagner proudly served the people of these United States for seventeen years as a member of the United States Army.  At the age of just forty, Lieutenant Colonel Wagner secured what proved to be her final promotion on August 1, 2001, working at the Pentagon as medical personnel officer in the Office of the Army Surgeon General and Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel.   

Lieutenant Colonel Wagner was at work at the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001 when the murderous cowards who had hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, deliberately crashed it into the Pentagon, killing all sixty-four passengers and crew members on board the flight and one hundred and twenty-five people on the ground.   Lieutenant Colonel Wagner was one of those killed.  

Karen Wagner graduated from UNLV with a degree in Business Administration.  In 1984, she was commissioned as a second lieutenant...one week after she had gotten married.  Three years later, on her twenty-sixth birthday, she gave birth to the couple's daughter, Sandra.  Her little girl was every bit as tough and as strong as the mother with whom she shared her birthday.  She had to be as she was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus.  She was blind and needed to be fed through a tube.  Doctors did not expect little Sandra to survive more than a month or two.  She survived fourteen. 

On what proved to be the final morning of her life, Lieutenant Colonel Wagner died doing what she excelled at doing, which was saving and protecting others, getting people out of the Pentagon after Flight 77 struck it.  She was killed in the collapse of the building.  

While the death of her daughter broke her mother Mattie's heart, the fact that Karen Wagner died while keeping others around her from being killed did not surprise Mattie Wagner even a little bit.  "That was my girl", said Mattie, in this beautiful piece that Jeff B. Flinn wrote back in 2005, which I cannot recommend enough.   

We the people of these United States should be thankful that Mattie Wagner shared her daughter with us.  She made those around her better.  She made the world around her better.  

-AK