Repairing not just Structure, but Psyche
October 3, 2001, ARLINGTON, Va. — Beyond the charred walls and shattered, smoke-hued windows of the wounded section of the Pentagon, life continues as normal.
Hallways stream with traffic; conference rooms host top brass; lunchrooms buzz with the chatter of uniformed men and women trained to handle conflict.
But the view looking into the wreckage is a sobering sight for a nation fortunate enough to have known mostly victory. America's symbol of military might looks as if something has taken a huge bite out of it, leaving a dark, gaping hole.
This week, I and seven others were among the first journalists given a firsthand view of the area where a American Airlines jet crashed into the world's largest office building on Sept. 11, killing 189 people.
The crash exposed a five-story cross-section of the building, providing an eerie dollhouse view of daily work life halted by tragedy: A sturdy office desk, a drab bookcase, rows of wall-hung photographs peering over dangling strands of cable, all seemingly untouched.
Publicly, military leaders praise the building's strength and resilience; privately, they confess sadness and anger over how a new enemy was able to pull off a stunningly orchestrated effort in which terrorists used household implements to hijack airliners and turn them into one-kiloton weapons of destruction.
The unspoken message seemed to be that rebuilding involves not just a structure but the sense of national security.
It's likely neither will ever be the same.
Wearing hard hats, our group heads into a dim, dust-caked corridor. Evidence of the explosion is all around us, extending four floors skyward — shattered walls and debris-covered floors, a faint smoky odor, overhead thickets of loose electrical wiring and insulation. A grungy elevator grins a boxer's broken smile, one door punched savagely awry.
With three times the space of the Empire State Building, the Pentagon houses nearly 24,000 military and civilian employees. It consists of five rings each circling the former and intersected by 10 main corridors, like the spokes of a wheel.
The hijacked plane bulleted in low enough that it clipped the antenna off a car on one side of the complex, crashing through three rings, leaving the higher floors relatively unscathed.
Workers on level four watching CNN's World Trade Center coverage were knocked to the floor by the force of the plane's impact, but were able to escape before the section's steel girders collapsed half an hour later.
"It held for 30 minutes before it collapsed," said Rear Admiral Craig Quigley of the U.S. Navy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. "And when it did — it collapsed gracefully. It didn't pancake down and crush people."
The 58-year-old Pentagon was several years into a $3 billion, multiyear renovation project. Fortuitously, the plane struck between an area where work had just been completed and an area where work was just set to begin — as a result, only 4,600 employees were in the area, thousands less than might have been otherwise.
The new design had included changes such as 2-inch-thick blast-resistant windows made to withstand a truck bomb, which until Sept. 11 was thought to be a more likely terrorism threat.
Inside, mold is rampant, the product of massive amounts of water poured on the inferno unleashed by nearly 20,000 gallons of jet fuel. A portion of the Army library, barely complete and awaiting move-in, was among the areas hardest hit by such damage. Pools of standing water still remain in the area.
But, as Quigley and others pointed out, the Pentagon is still standing. And life goes on.
Copyright © 2005 International Reporting Project. All Rights Reserved.