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Arlington funeral honors unidentified victims

Military pallbearers carry the casket of the unknowns at a service at Arlington National Cemetery.

ARLINGTON, Virginia (CNN) -- A flag-draped coffin held unidentified remains of victims of the September 11 attack on the Pentagon as friends and family members gathered for a final farewell Thursday at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington.

The funeral and burial honored the five victims whose remains were never recovered after the attack, which killed 184 people inside the Defense Department's headquarters and aboard American Airlines Flight 77, the commercial airliner that hijackers flew into the military complex.

The Pentagon victims "died here at home, not on a faraway battlefield," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at the ceremony.

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"Soldier and civilian alike, they were dedicated to their cause of freedom," he said. "Young and old, their lives and their deaths gave birth to a new pride and patriotism that has rekindled the flame of freedom across this land. They will be remembered. We will not forget."

Thousands of friends, family and co-workers filled Arlington's Memorial Amphitheater, a structure built in the early 20th century as a gathering place to honor those who died defending the United States. Its best known services are on Easter, Memorial Day and Veterans Day.

"While there's nothing one of us can do to bring back those loved ones, we can celebrate who they were, how they lived their lives, and remember how their lives were lost, in a struggle dedicated to the eternal truth of freedom and the human spirit," Rumsfeld said.

After the funeral service, a horse-drawn caisson carried the coffin to the burial site, a five-sided granite memorial bearing the names of all 184 victims and overlooking the Pentagon.

Organizers of the services said the remains, cremated together and placed in an urn inside the coffin, could include some remains of all victims.

Some of the remains in the urn were identified after the burial of other parts of that victim. The families of those victims agreed to allow the remains to stay with the unknowns.

Remains of 64 other victims of the attack -- civilian and military alike -- already have been interred at Arlington.

The five unidentified victims are Dana Falkenberg, 3; retired Army Col. Ronald Golinski, 60; Ronald Hemenway, 37, a Navy electronics technician first class; James T. Lynch, 55, a civilian video technician who worked for the Navy; and Rhonda Rasmussen, 44, a civilian who worked for the Army.

The 3-year-old died alongside her parents, Leslie Whittington and Charles Falkenberg, and 8-year-old sister, Zoe, aboard Flight 77. The others were at work at the Pentagon.

The remains of the five hijackers were identified because they did not match DNA samples given by the victims' family members.