Lincoln M. Starnes

Lincoln M. Starnes was born in Salisbury, Maryland in 1962. His stated interests as a boy were history, exploration, and motorcycles, and as a young man he taught himself banjo, guitar, and harmonica and developed a lasting attachment to jazz, rock and roll, and the blues.

He is the author of American Phoenix: Heroes of the Pentagon on 9/11, published in 2021 for the twentieth anniversary of the attacks. The book addresses the part of that day that receives the least attention, the strike by American Airlines Flight 77 on the Pentagon, in which one hundred and eighty-nine people died, one hundred and twenty-five in the building and sixty-four aboard the aircraft.

His brother Ben was one of the first responders at the Pentagon that morning, and that connection gave Starnes both access and, more importantly, the standing to persuade participants to talk to him. Many of the accounts in the book had not previously been recorded.

The book's structure is its most distinctive feature. It opens with the Pentagon's groundbreaking, which took place on 11 September 1941, exactly sixty years to the day before the attack, and closes with the dedication of the national Pentagon Memorial in 2008. That frame gives a single-day account an arc that most cannot manage, and it makes the building a subject with a history instead of a location where something happened.

The central material is the civilians and soldiers who escaped the building and went back into it, repeatedly, for people they did not know, in smoke and structural collapse and burning jet fuel. It carries endorsements from Michael Medved, Virginia Buckingham, and Major General James A. Cozine.

He continues to write and lives in the United States.