The Stories of Lives Devoted to Service

Tim Maude was the military equivalent of a corporate turnaround specialist, the three-star general credited with rescuing the Army from an ominous recruiting slump.

Danny Caballero was the kind of kid Maude wanted to attract, an eager Texan who was still in high school when he began telling his parents he wanted to sign up for military service.

From top brass to young recruits, this week’s terrorist attack on the Pentagon tore at the heart of America’s military.

The Defense Department lists 126 military and civilian personnel as missing and presumed dead.

Here are some of their stories.

Lt. Gen. Timothy J. Maude

Lt. Gen. Timothy J. Maude, 53, was the highest-ranking casualty of Tuesday’s attack.

As the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel, Maude orchestrated the “An Army of One” recruitment campaign that is helping the Army meet its recruitment targets after years of lagging enlistments.

The new recruiting pitch replaced the well-known but increasingly ineffective “Be All You Can Be” campaign.

Maude received his third star and his latest advancement in August 2000. Normally, the rank of three-star general is reserved for combat officers, but the Army made an exception for Maude.

“We were in the middle of our worst recruiting year,” said former Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera. “I felt very strongly when the job came open that Tim was the right guy . . . to manage the human resources of an organization that has to hire 80,000 new employees a year.”

Maude spent a year in Vietnam in the late 1960s and was awarded a bronze star. But most of his Army career involved personnel-related assignments at bases in the United States, Korea and Germany.

An avid golfer, Maude was described by associates as a quiet, unassuming man with a wry sense of humor.

“He was a wonderful guy,” said retired Gen. Ted Stroup, who mentored Maude. “This is a real loss to the Army.”

Lt. Cmdr. Otis Tolbert Jr.

Lt. Cmdr. Otis Tolbert Jr. spent his whole life honoring his father--on the football field, in the classroom and as a military man in the Navy.

His father had been a naval officer before him, one of the first black pilots to fly an A-7 jet. And it was that same kind of determination that put the 39-year-old Tolbert in the Pentagon.

He grew up in San Joaquin Valley, in the shadow of Lemoore Naval Air Station. His father, Lt. Otis Tolbert Sr., a flight instructor and company commander at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., moved the family to California in the mid 1970s.

Lemoore was a small cotton and dairy town that lived for its Friday night football. Tolbert, “Big O” to his high school coaches and teammates, was a star fullback and defensive end on a championship team. His talents took him to Cal State Fresno on a scholarship.

“He was a very good football player, but he was a lot more than that,” said Dr. Jesse Liscomb, a Navy flight surgeon who lived across the street from the Tolberts. “He was a scholar and a leader by example and one of finest young men I ever knew. This isn’t grief talking. He was one of this country’s gems.”

Tolbert wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps to become a Navy pilot. But his knees didn’t pass muster, so he had to take another route. He joined the Navy and helped escort battle carriers through the seas as an intelligence officer.

A promotion landed him inside the Pentagon, an 8-to-5 workday that gave him time with his wife, Sherrie, and their three children.

His father eventually retired from the Navy as a commander and became a pilot for United Airlines, working out of Chicago, Tokyo and most recently San Francisco.

He had trained scores of pilots to fly the Boeing 757 commercial jet, the same type of plane that crashed into the southwest side of the Pentagon on Tuesday morning.

Melissa Rose Barnes

Melissa Rose Barnes, 27, was preparing to leave the Pentagon soon to move back to California. She had worked at the Navy’s headquarters for two years after holding several assignments since 1992, when she enlisted from Redlands. Her mother, who is divorced from her father, still lives in California. She also has a brother.

Promoted to yeoman third class in June 2000, Barnes held an administrative job in telecommunications at the Pentagon and reported to the Chief of Naval Operations, according to a Navy spokesman. She stayed in touch with her former husband, Petty Officer 1st Class Chris Barnes of Chesapeake, Va. They separated in 1998 after four years of marriage. He kept one of their dogs, Sasha, and she kept the other, Honey.

Barnes began her naval service as a corpsman--a medical aide--at a naval hospital in Portsmouth, Va., and later received communications training in Mississippi. In 1997, she left the Navy but returned about nine months later.

“She missed the military,” Chris Barnes said. “She wanted to try something else, but she came back into it.”

Cmdr. Robert Allan Schlegel

Like the other men in his family, Cmdr. Robert Allan Schlegel, 38, was a career Navy officer.

Schlegel, who lived in Alexandria, Va., worked at the Pentagon as a scheduler, assigning the cruise routes and dates for Navy ships, according to family members. His wife, Dawn, is a government psychologist.

One of Schlegel’s brothers is also a Navy officer, and another brother and his father are retired from the service. “They’re all Navy,” said his sister-in-law, Debbie Schlegel.

A 15-year veteran of the Navy, Schlegel grew up in the Philadelphia area before moving with his family to Maine about the time he started high school. He and his brother, both sports fans, would call each other during televised games to boast about their team’s success.

“That’s how we all are with one another,” said Debbie Schlegel, who was gathered with other family members Thursday in the family home in the tiny town of Gray, Maine.

Cecilia Richard

Cecilia Richard, 41, had no children of her own, but she doted on the children of her five sisters and one brother, family members said.

A civilian accounting technician for the Army, Richard lived in Fort Washington, Md., with her husband, Michael, and her retriever, Coby.

On Tuesday morning, older sister Renee Baldwin watched the initial television reports of the attack on the Pentagon and immediately called their mother. “I said, ‘Mom, they just hit the Pentagon.’ I said, ‘Mom, Cee works out there,’ ” Baldwin said, using the family nickname for Cecilia.

As of Thursday, the Army was still listing Richard as missing. Family members said they had not given up hope, but they realize the prospects are not good.

“Right now, I just feel a lot of grief,” Baldwin said. “I’m angry at the people that did this. But what can we do now? It’s done. It’s done.”

Michael Noeth

Michael Noeth, 30, was an artist who was working on portraits of all the chiefs of naval operations throughout U.S. history, a Navy spokesman said. The paintings were to hang in the Pentagon, where Noeth was stationed.

Noeth, who took art classes at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, joined the Navy in 1994 as a deck seaman to earn money.

At the time, Noeth was assigned to the USS Wasp and had just had his first art exhibition--at the Montserrat Art Gallery in New York City.

“I was so nervous about attending the show in New York,” Noeth told a Navy public affairs officer.

He ended up selling five paintings.

Lawrence Daniel Getzfred

Lawrence Getzfred, 57, grew up in Elgin, Neb., a town of about 800. Soon after he received his high school diploma in 1962, he enlisted in the Navy. Four of his six brothers did the same.

Getzfred was 19 years old and looking for a career that could pay for his schooling and take him around the country, said Betty Getzfred, his sister-in-law.

“It’s a family thing,” she said. “It was a way to get their education.”

Over 38 years, Getzfred served in Hawaii, England, California and Washington, and was on active duty during the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars.

Betty Getzfred said he had been stationed at the Pentagon for three years and had just started his second tour there. He worked as a captain in security, she said.

Getzfred and his wife, Pat, a Montessori school teacher, have two daughters. Just two months ago, they spent a week in Elgin visiting family.

For the last few days, Getzfred’s family has been waiting for word.

“There is always that hope there, but it looks pretty grim,” Betty Getzfred said. “We’re holding on to that little light of hope.”

Daniel Martin Caballero

Two flags fly outside the Caballero home in Houston: the Stars and Stripes, and the dark-blue, yellow-fringed banner bearing the seal of the United States Navy.

Daniel Martin Caballero, 21, enlisted in the Navy shortly after graduating from Houston’s Stephen F. Austin High School in 1998.

“When the recruiters came to the high school, he was awed by the idea of joining,” said his mother, Carmen Caballero.

After basic training and a year of school in Chicago, Caballero was assigned to the Pentagon as an electronics technician third class. He lived in the barracks at Bolling Air Force Base.

His Pentagon office was located directly in the path of the plane that plowed into the building Tuesday morning.

Three years ago, when Caballero told his parents he wanted to join the Navy, they asked him over and over, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“We thought he was safe,” said Carmen Caballero of her only son. “We were wrong.”