National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

Activity Overview

The National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial is an outdoor memorial near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. It is dedicated to those who died during the September 11 attacks when American Airlines Flight 77 was hijacked and deliberately crashed into the Pentagon. The memorial, which first opened in 2008, features 184 Memorial Units, one for each person who was killed, organized as a timeline of their ages. It was the first national memorial dedicated to the horrific events.

Things to Do

• Visit the memorial - each Memorial Unit honors an individual victim from the Pentagon or Flight 77 with a steel and granite bench and a lighted pool of flowing water.
• View the landscape of the Pentagon Memorial, with its crape myrtle trees that provide shade over the Memorial Units and the Age Wall that represents the ages of the victims.
• Take the 24-minute audio tour of the Pentagon Memorial, which provides information on the history of the Pentagon, the design of the memorial, and a narrative of the events that occurred on September 11, 2001.

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial Insider Tips

• Learn more about what happened at the Pentagon on 9/11 before visiting the memorial in order to have a better understanding of its importance.
• If you're interested in visiting other important national memorials, you can visit sites such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall just a few miles away.
• The easiest way to get to the memorial using public transportation is by taking the Yellow or Blue Metro lines to the Pentagon station.