Legion commander: Never forget what happened on 9/11

Twenty-two years ago Monday, on Sept. 11, 2001, a total of 2,977 Americans lost their lives in the terrorist attacks in which Al Qaeda operatives hijacked four planes and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a field in western Pennsylvania.

One of those deaths was a close friend of Holton resident Pat Fontaine, who remembered the life of that friend, Gerald DeConto, a captain in the U.S. Navy who was assigned as director of current operations and plans at the Navy Command Center at the Pentagon and who was killed when American Airlines Flight 77 flew into the Pentagon.

“He was trying to make sense of what was going on, trying to get the word out, trying to get the Navy into the best possible position to respond and defend the country,” said Fontaine, commanding officer of Holton’s Mary L. Bair American Legion Post 44, of DeConto during a short 9/11 remembrance on Monday morning at Holton’s Linscott Park.

Fontaine and DeConto were classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy graduating in 1979. Fontaine later went into the U.S. Marine Corps while DeConto stayed with the Navy — a career choice that, as Fontaine put it, had DeConto “going places.”

Unbeknownst to DeConto, he had been screened for Major Command on Sept. 1, 2001, a position that includes oversight of the Navy’s major ships. But at 9:37 a.m. Eastern time, Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, killing DeConto and many others.

“I swear to God, he did not suffer,” Fontaine said of his friend, who is buried in Arlington National Cemetery and “sleeps in the shadows of the Pentagon.”

Fontaine reminded the more than 35 area residents present at Linscott Park that Americans must pause to remember the nearly 3,000 Americans — “almost 550 more than we lost at Pearl Harbor,” he said — who died that day in 2001.

Not many are left who personally remember what happened at Pearl Harbor, Fontaine said in reference to the Japanese air attack on Dec. 7, 1941 at a U.S. naval base in Hawaii. The idea that someday, Americans will not fully recognize the significance of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks is a frightening prospect, he added.

“It may be just a sentence in a school book, or a few seconds of TV news sandwiched in between the latest sports scores and what the Kardashians are up to,” he said. “But not today. Not today.”

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