Marsha Stallworth Ratchford was not supposed to be in that part of the Pentagon.
The Navy information technician from Prichard, a mother of three, had been temporarily relocated with her staff to the building’s D wing because her own office was being painted.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, killing 184 people inside the building. Ratchford was among them. She was 34.
Twenty-five years later, her family is still telling people who she was.
The Last Phone Call
As news of the attacks in New York spread through the Pentagon, Ratchford called her husband.
“He said ‘She called me, saying something happened. I just want to tell you I love you.’ And that’s how they hung up,” said Angelia Stallworth Blunt, Ratchford’s sister.
Minutes later the plane hit.
The call is the kind of detail that recurs throughout 9/11 family histories — the brief conversation, the absence of any way to know it was the last one. Ratchford was calling to reassure someone about an attack happening 200 miles away.
Thirteen Hours to Washington
In Mobile, the family got in a car and drove nearly 13 hours to Washington, D.C.
“I just burst into tears and just started crying,” Blunt said. “I was like, oh my God, I thought that our country was being attacked, is what I thought. I thought our country was being attacked and I was just afraid for everybody.”
What they found when they arrived did not look like the nation’s capital. Blunt said the scene at the Pentagon resembled a war zone.
Weeks Without Confirmation
The family believed Ratchford was gone. Official confirmation of her death took weeks.
By the time it came, they had already returned home to Mobile and begun planning her funeral.
That gap — knowing without being told — is one of the least-discussed features of the attacks. Identification at the Pentagon, as in New York, depended on forensic work that took time, and families lived in a suspended state that no ordinary grief process accounts for.
Who She Was
Blunt is clear that the anniversary, for her family, is not primarily about how her sister died.
“She took care of us like she was our mother. And she never let anybody harm us, bother us. I mean, she was like this leader,” Blunt said.
Ratchford carried that role into her own household, raising three children. Her youngest was one year old.
“Kids really miss their mom so much,” Blunt said. “It was like she was taken away in the dark.”
A one-year-old in 2001 is now 25 — old enough to have lived an entire adult life with no memory of the person being commemorated. That is the specific arithmetic of the 25th anniversary for the youngest children of the people killed.
The Note
There was one more thing.
The last time Ratchford stopped by her mother’s house, her mother was not home. She left a note behind.
“She kissed a piece of paper and put ‘Until we meet again,'” Blunt said.
No one knew, when she wrote it, what it would come to mean.
Marsha’s Guardian Angels
Blunt has spent the years since building something in her sister’s name.
She founded Marsha’s Guardian Angels, a nonprofit that provides food, clothing and other supplies to people who need them.
The choice of mission tracks directly to the woman it memorializes — an older sister who, by her family’s account, took care of everyone around her as a matter of course. Rather than commemorating her only on an anniversary, the organization does the thing she did, year-round, in her name.
“I thank God that you let us borrow her for 34 years,” Blunt said.
A Prichard Name on a National Loss
The Pentagon attack is often the least-covered of the day’s three sites, overshadowed by the towers and by Flight 93. One hundred and eighty-four people died inside the building, and among them was a Navy technician from Prichard who had been moved to a different wing that week because of a paint job.
Twenty-five years on, her sister keeps saying her name — and hands out groceries under it.