Sandra White
Attack Location: Pentagon
Age: 44
Home: Dumfries, Virginia
It was at a Miss Black America contest in Williamsburg nearly two decades ago that Oscar White met his soon-to-be wife, Sandra. Even with all those beauties around, he couldn’t take his eyes, or mind, off her.
“That night I knew,” Oscar White said yesterday of the wife he lost in last week’s attack on the Pentagon. He said he was drawn to “her sincerity, kindness, honesty. I had the feeling that I met someone as committed to family and values as I was, and I made up my mind that night I was going to marry her.”
Six months later, he did.
Their lives together were marked by their devotion to Christianity, to each other and to their sons — Oscar III, 17, and Jonathan, 15. On weekends, the family would bowl or fish.
“She even ventured into a one-night stay in the woods,” White recalled in an interview from his home in Dumfries. “That was the first and last time she was not in air conditioning, but she did it because it was with family.”
Sandra White, 44, was a civilian in the Army budget office, but her husband, a retired Army colonel, said she displayed the fortitude of a soldier. She supported him not only in his daily deeds, he said, but also in much larger ways, such as when she stayed home with their young sons in Virginia while he trained at Fort Hood, Texas, for two years.
“I could not have had a better partner in my wife,” he said. “God truly blessed us with 18 years.”
— Steven Ginsberg
WHITE, SANDRA L
- DATE OF BIRTH: 09/18/1956
- DATE OF DEATH: 09/11/2001
- BURIED AT: SECTION 4 SITE 3331-C
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY - WIFE OF WHITE, OSCAR N, COL US ARMY
Michael Robert Patterson was born in Arlington and is the son of a former officer of the US Army. So it was no wonder that sooner or later his interests drew him to American history and especially to American military history. Many of his articles can be found on renowned portals like the New York Times, Washingtonpost or Wikipedia.
Reviewed by: Michael Howard