Lieutenant Colonel Karen Wagner (1961-2001), military officer. Karen Wagner was born at Fort Riley in Kansas but spent most of her childhood at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Her grandfather had served in World War I, and her father was an Army medic who served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam and met her mother at a military funeral. One of her earliest childhood memories was the death of a close family friend in the Vietnam War. She grew up listening to military stories told by her father and his friends (one of whom was killed in Vietnam), including racial segregation, the way that medics were targeted by the enemy, and the Viet Cong efforts to get black soldiers to defect. In high school she was named to the National Honors Society, earned honors on the basketball and track teams, and joined the junior ROTC program. She graduated from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in 1984, then followed her father into the medical branch of the Army, focusing on administration. While serving as trainer for medical specialists at the 187th Medical Battalion at Fort Sam Houston in 1987, her daughter Saundra was born with hydrocephalus and spina bifida. Wagner declared “This is my baby, and she needs me to care for her…I’m going to lean into this and trust the grace of God,” and cared for Saundra until she died just after her first birthday. Wagner moved on to the 67th Evacuation Hospital in Würzburg, Germany to serve as chief of personnel. At that post and everywhere she was stationed, she earned praise from peers, superiors, and those who served under her for her attention to detail and uplifting personality. Her sister said that “She never met a stranger. She was the kind of person who, when you met her, she would never forget you. She would talk to you like she’d known you forever.” This was echoed by a biographical essay, which stated “If [her] duties were low in drama, their effect was not. Her focus was personnel, and the matters she dealt with – promotions, commendations, station assignments for families with two Army parents – were at the heart of a soldier’s Army experience…One person’s bad day will become a bad day for everyone who depends on him. But nobody ever saw Karen have a bad day.” When superior officers complained about minor details, for instance, she was able to defuse the situation with laughter by saying, with tongue firmly in cheek, “It’s a black thing, sir. You wouldn’t understand.” Wagner was also a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and in 1992 she earned a master’s degree in health administration at Webster University.
In 1997 Wagner was transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C., which was the Army’s flagship medical center, to serve as brigade executive officer and deputy brigade commander. This placed her in charge of thousands of military personnel. While training one, she told him “You’ve got to demonstrate good leadership. And you’ll do that by showing the same level of respect to everyone, from the lowest civilian staffer to the highest-ranking surgeon.” She dealt with issues such as high-ranking officers misusing government credit cards, doctors who did not meet physical fitness requirements, and disciplinary cases. One such case involved a young private who was in danger of being dishonorably discharged for drug use, but Wagner called for him to get a second chance, saying “You have to trust the people under you. The Army trains them to do the right thing. So put your faith in the Army.” In 2000 she was made secretary to the general in charge of the North Atlantic Regional Medical Command, which included Walter Reed and nearly every other Army hospital in the eastern U.S. This was quickly followed by a 2001 promotion to lieutenant colonel and a transfer to the Pentagon, the headquarters for the U.S. Department of Defense in the D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia. There she served as medical branch representative to a deputy chief of staff. In this job she oversaw promotions and commendations for all Army medical officers, working with all levels of power from the chief of staff to the Senate and president. She did her usual excellent work but also spoke of retiring from the military when she reached her twenty years of service in 2004, then moving to an overseas base to teach military children. She also began looking into adopting a baby.
These plans were thwarted by the worst terrorist attack in American history. On the morning of 11 September 2001, Wagner was scheduled to meet with her superior officer and then attend a retirement party at Walter Reed for her former supervisor. Unbeknownst to any of them, terrorists had hijacked four planes that same morning. They were members of an Islamic terrorist group called al-Qaeda, led by a Saudi Arabian named Osama bin Laden. He believed that the U.S. had too much power over the government of his native Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East, he rejected what he perceived as decadent American culture, and he wanted Muslims who followed his interpretation of the Qu’ran to become a global power. He had coordinated suicide bombings on American targets in Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen in the three previous years, but now he wanted to make an even bigger statement and cause greater damage and loss of life by carrying out an attack in the U.S. Two of the planes were deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. When the second plane hit, Wagner and other officers in the Pentagon realized that the crashes were not accidents and that the U.S. was under attack. She calmly said to the group that had gathered around the T.V. “Okay, let’s get back to work” and returned to her office. Several minutes later, the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, moving at 530 miles an hour and weighing more than 63 tons. One witness near the building later recalled “I looked out my window and I saw this plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming. And I thought, 'This doesn't add up, it's really low.' And I saw it. I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon.” The impact penetrated 310 feet into the building and created a 200-foot-tall fireball. Wagner survived the initial impact, but her office became pitch-black, filled with toxic air, and rose to temperatures above 1,700 degrees. She and one other survivor began crawling to safety, but she fell unconscious and could not continue. Karen Wagner became one of the 125 people killed inside the Pentagon, along with 59 victims on board the plane and a total of 2,976 victims killed in all four plane crashes. She was buried in Texas next to her daughter.
Tributes and memorials to Wagner came in from throughout the country, especially the places to which she had a personal connection. She posthumously received the Purple Heart and the Legion of Merit, the latter awarded to members of the armed forces who show “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services and achievements.” The gym at Walter Reed was renamed the Karen J. Wagner Sports Center, and after the hospital closed in 2011, an outdoor memorial in her honor was relocated to the National Museum of Health and Medicine. In 2004 the Army established the Karen Wagner Leadership Award, which is annually given to an officer who shows excellence in medical human resources. In Las Vegas, the LTC Karen J. Wagner VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) Post 12119 was instituted in 2012, and a memorial plaque stands in UNLV’s office of veteran services. A medical building at Fort Sam Houston was renamed in her honor, and in 2005 Karen Wagner High School near San Antonio was built. Her name is listed on the Victims of Terrorist Attack on the Pentagon Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, the Pentagon Memorial outside the building, and the National September 11 Memorial in New York. Memorial services are still held every year to honor the third-generation veteran who, along with passengers, people in the Twin Towers, one pilot, and numerous others before and since, became African American casualties in acts of terrorism.
©David Brodnax, Sr.
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