Amelia V. Fields

Amelia Fields turned 46 that morning. Her husband, who had been her high school sweetheart, slipped out of their Dumfries home during breakfast to place a surprise birthday card in her car. While she headed to work at the Pentagon, where she was a civilian secretary for the Army, he baked a chocolate cake for when she would have arrived home that night. 

It “would have been the first thing she saw when she walked in,” said William Fields, a retired Marine Corps master sergeant. 

Amelia Fields has not been heard from since American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon on September 11th, leaving her husband uncertain how to register certain aspects of her fate. She had worked there for only two days, having been assigned previously to Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County. 

Amelia Virginia Dennis was born in Princess Anne, Maryland on the Eastern Shore. She and her future husband met in study hall during their junior year at Washington High School. He was shy, she wasn’t. That sparked the initial attraction. 

They graduated in 1973. After they married two years later, she accompanied him on his military assignments and volunteered at Navy hospitals while raising the couple’s two children, William, Jr., 23, and Shantell Fields, 18. 

Since moving to this area in 1997, Amelia had been active at the First Mount Zion Baptist Church in Dumfries.