Remembering 9/11

Some 125 Pentagon workers lost their lives when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the western side of the building. Twenty-eight of those killed worked with Beaver on the second floor in the ‘E’ ring. In the weeks following the attack, Beaver and his co-workers attended more than 30 funerals. “We all wanted to honor the people who had been killed and that was our way to do it,” he says.

Beaver says one thing that likely saved lives that day was the fact the plane hit a renovated wing of the Pentagon. Steel was added to the building during the renovation, and a mylar coating was added on every window at a cost of $1,100 each. “The window that blew in at me just sat there flapping like a sheet. It didn’t break; I didn’t get a scratch on me. I was about five feet from it. I just remember thinking, you don’t see that every day.”

The attack happened on a Tuesday morning. By Thursday, Pentagon staffers were moving to new offices. By Monday morning, they were back to work. “People were devastated. People had lost lots of friends, but we knew we needed to get back to work, and that’s exactly what we did with a new sense of purpose.”

Beaver continued working at the Pentagon as a senior analyst — forecasting personnel strengths — until 2008, when he retired and moved to Colorado. He was retired for two years before he was approached about teaching a statistics class at Daniels. Over the next five years, Beaver helped modernize the MSBA program, which he is now in charge of. “It’s a hobby. I’m retired still. It’s two nights a week, but it really has become my passion. It’s a phenomenal program.”

Although 9/11 was one of his worst days on the job, Beaver does not mind talking about it. He looks at it as an opportunity to educate and remind others of what happened.

“The people out there who wanted to kill us on 9/11 still want to kill us today. Our enemies like the Taliban, like al Qaida, like ISIS, we are an affront to them. They still want us eliminated, and that’s something that we can’t forget. It’s something we need to be reminded of, and it’s something that bothers me and should bother most Americans, and I’m very happy to have the opportunity to remind people, yes this did happen, it happened very recently. And it’s still going on.”