On the Job Amid the Surreal
Pentagon Workers
Prepare for War as Lights Glare Over Crash Site
By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday,
September 30, 2001; Page C01
It was a strange sight that greeted the stream of early-morning arrivals in the Pentagon's north parking lot.
At the far end of the lot, behind a fence patrolled by military police and marked with signs warning against photography, bright lights were trained on big piles of debris. A front-end loader droned as it moved material collected from the crash site.
FBI agents, covered head to toe in white protective suits, looked like astronauts on an unworldly terrain as they walked around the piles. Some worked with dogs that sniffed the debris. They were looking for evidence. They were looking for human remains.
Few of the military officers and defense employees arriving for work gave the scene a second glance. At the Pentagon, such grim and surreal sights have become routine.
Instead, workers walked hurriedly toward their offices. Even at this hour, at a quarter to 6 in the morning, windows all over the building were lighted up, and the Pentagon gave off a greenish hue.
Many workers had left their homes early to capture scarce parking spaces -- the normally orderly lot was strewed with vehicles, parked on median strips, atop sidewalks and on the grass. Now the arrivals needed to fend their way through heavy security.
These are not ordinary days at the Pentagon. In one part of the building, the struggle continues to recover from the Sept. 11 terrorist attack that is feared to have claimed the lives of 189 people. Along other corridors, military planners are preparing for a war that the president has warned will not be quick and will not be easy.
All across the building, in the course of one day, a visitor finds a Pentagon and a 20,000-person workforce that has been scarred and transformed, likely forever.
Two hundred Army soldiers in formation, joined by almost as many law enforcement officers, stood in a semicircle in front of the gaping black gash in the Pentagon left by the jet plane.
A milestone was being observed, as the FBI formally turned the scene over to military authorities. The agency would continue working from its staging area in the north parking lot.
Soldiers from the Army's Old Guard folded an American flag and presented it to Arthur Eberhart, the FBI's on-scene commander. A sound system played Lee Greenwood's "Proud to Be an American." An FBI chaplain read from Ecclesiastes and gave the benediction.
"Let's get back to work and solve this case," Eberhart told the assemblage.
They were somber, yet proud. In two weeks of dangerous and terrible work, they had managed to recover 118 sets of remains, as well as body parts of other victims. Now, the focus would be on the criminal case and restoring the Pentagon.
The soldiers were leaving today, too, needed for funeral detail at Arlington National Cemetery. The same soldiers who had been pulling out remains would now bury many of them.
At a Red Cross truck parked nearby, Jeff Cawley and Sarah Pardoe were finishing up the midnight shift. Through the cold night, they had handed out supplies -- coffee, hot chocolate, sweat shirts, snacks, cough drops, batteries, just about anything -- to the soldiers, FBI agents and other workers.
"They come out looking drained," Cawley said. "I've seen some of the most tired people I've ever seen in my life -- and yet they unfailingly thank us."
"It's quite humbling, isn't it?" said Pardoe.
Congressional leaders were inside the Pentagon for a breakfast meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and a "media availability" had been promised when they left.
Nine television cameras were lined up outside, facing the steps of the entrance used by the military brass and VIPs. A cluster of reporters, most of them regular defense correspondents, stood waiting.
Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came down the steps and rode off in a black Cadillac limousine. Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) bolted without a word. A group of congressmen headed straight for a waiting shuttle bus.
"Don't leave without talking to us," a reporter commanded. But they did.
Then the white mane of Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) came into view atop the steps. The senator saw the cameras and strode over. "Here we go," a reporter exulted.
But Warner offered few specifics.
Press aides told the reporters not to despair -- the secretary of defense was on his way. A few minutes later, Rumsfeld emerged and paused at the door of his waiting Lincoln Navigator. "I'm off to a meeting," he called out.
Rumsfeld drove off to the White House.
Business was picking up quickly at Conklyn's Florist, the flower shop in the Pentagon's shopping concourse.
"We've got a lot of orders for funerals," said Lesley Beavers, the shop manager, arranging tulips in the back.
"Most everybody wants something patriotic -- red, white and blue," she said. "We just can't get the ribbon."
Rumsfeld himself had come in to buy flowers, though for a happier occasion: his wife's birthday. "He said he almost forgot," Beavers said. "I told him, 'As busy as you've been, that's all right.' "
Beavers has never seen the Pentagon this way. "I've been here over 25 years, and I'd never been afraid," she said. "I was here during the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and now the 'Plane in the Building War.' "
This war, she said, has affected Pentagon employees in a way the others never did."People are nervous -- not so much afraid that something will happen again," Beavers said. "They're just a little bit leery about coming to work. But that's what you've got to do."
In happier times, the courtyard in the middle of the Pentagon was a nice spot for workers to relax on sunny benches or beneath shady trees.
Now it looked like a refugee camp.
A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, guarded by MPs and Pentagon police, divided the courtyard and kept people away from damaged sections of the building.
Dozens of soldiers, sailors, Marines, civilian employees and contractors milled near the fence, carrying empty cardboard boxes. They were desperate for their turn to get in.
When the jet struck, many workers abandoned everything, and since then, those in many damaged sections have had to cope without important office papers or personal belongings.
Early on, a general who angrily tried to force his way in was detained by military police.
Pentagon officials have set up a schedule allowing people to don protective clothing, enter the smoke- and water-damaged corridors and retrieve their items, under escort.
"We've helped people get stuff, from diabetes medicine to dentures to classified [papers]," said the gatekeeper, Army Lt. Col. Joann Webber, her brown hair in a bun and a clipboard in her hands from which she periodically called out names.
Pentagon police officer Christian Hale called for the crowd to listen up. "If you're on Third Floor, C, D or E Ring" -- hopeful cries rose from some throats -- "your turn is tomorrow," he announced. The unlucky ones turned away dejectedly.
"The looks on their faces," Webber said. "Some are so grateful to have a chance to collect their belongings. Then there's the opposite extreme, the people who don't want to see what it looks like, the melted clocks and everything. They leave upset."
A half-dozen military medical officers gathered in a windowless conference room around a wooden oval table. On the wall were color-coded floor plans showing offices on each level of the Pentagon.
This was the command center for mental health, and those were the targets.
The Sept. 11 attack left no one at the Pentagon untouched, and doctors in the DiLorenzo TRICARE Health Clinic wanted to make sure everyone in the building was getting help.
"Everyone is having problems," said Air Force Lt. Col. Steven Vieira, who is overseeing the effort. "That doesn't mean we're crazy. It means we're suffering from grief and stress, and anger, for that matter, and we need to deal with it."
The doctors were attacking the problem with military precision, getting counselors to people too busy to seek help -- inside the Pentagon and out at the rescue site.
"There are people in offices which had heavy losses," Vieira said. "Their grief is a whole lot worse to bear, because they lost so many."
The clinic expanded its operations to 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
On the day of the attack, doctors and nurses were among the first to respond, treating horribly burned victims. In the days following, they treated respiratory problems from the smoke and abrasions and sprains from the difficult rescue work.
"Now, we're getting a lot of people with a little anxiety," said Robert Veiga, a clinic supervisor. "They're returning to work -- people they know were killed or wounded. They come in with panic symptoms: They can't eat, can't sleep, their hearts are beating fast."
It's not something the doctors expect to go away.
"To be frank, I don't think it willever be back to normal," Vieira said. "It's as bad as Pearl Harbor. We're in this for the long haul."
Two Air Force chaplains, crosses on their blue shirts, hovered near the door to the auditorium on the fifth floor.
Since the incident, the Pentagon chaplain's office has held a daily interfaith prayer service, open to everyone in the building.
"Spiritual triage is just as important as physical triage," said Lt. Col. Norman Desrosiers, a white-haired chaplain greeting arrivals with a warm smile.
Air Force Lt. Col. Donna Foretook a seat, managing a quick break from her job in an intelligence office.
Heads bowed as the other chaplain, Capt. Jason Peters, led the group in prayer.
They prayed for the president, and the secretary of defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They prayed for the victims, and they prayed for the nation. They sang a hymn.
Fore offered her own prayer. She told of a Pentagon worker, someone she would see almost every day riding the commuter bus she took from Fredericksburg to the Pentagon. The man's office was close to where the plane hit, and when she did not see him on the bus on subsequent days, she worried.
"Finally, today, he showed up on the bus," Fore told the other worshipers. "It was such an immense relief. It was just someone I rode the bus with, but I was so worried. Last night, I had been praying so hard."
The message was clear, she said: "We should not lose hope."
There's a hole in the heart of ACSIM.
Two longtime employees, Cheryle Sincock and Sandy Taylor used to fill it.
They had moved with the Army's Office of Assistant Chief of Staff for Installation Management into newly renovated space in the Pentagon. Their office was directly in the path of the jet that struck the building, and they are still listed as missing.
Clara Toland would have been there with her friends, but almost as an afterthought, she took leave that week.
Now, relocated to their old office space in another part of the Pentagon, Toland sat at her desk, with plants and flowers sent by colleagues, and remembrances of her friends.
She comes in early each day to help fill the void in the office. But returning to work has not been easy.
"My family didn't want me to set foot in the building," she said. "They said, 'Mom, retire.' Part of me wanted to return, part of me didn't. The part of me that did was loyalty to the office. I could not leave them alone."
This shop was closing down.
An Army specialist glided over the blue carpet, distributing copies of tomorrow's schedule in people's boxes. The Marine sergeant at the front desk closed up classified files on her desk and walked back to place them in a safe overnight.
Six grocery-size brown paper bags -- emblazoned with red and white stripes -- were lined against a wood-paneled wall. They were burn bags with classified papers, ready to be taken away and destroyed.
Rumsfeld had left the office a short time before, the earliest he had gone home since the terrorist strike, according to one of his military assistants, Army Col. Steven Bucci.
Now, Bucci wanted his people to do the same. "Everybody's been putting in the hours, but [Rumsfeld is] working harder than anybody else," he said. "It inspires loyalty. Everybody understands what's at stake."
There would be plenty of long nights ahead. "We understand the president's intent," Bucci said, walking to his car with his wife, also a Pentagon employee. "It's not a short, quick fix. We're in for the long haul."
The corridors of the Pentagon were largely empty, now the domain of cleaning crews buffing the floors.
But behind closed doors, much was happening.
Officers in battle dress uniform burst in and out of the Army Operations Center. The 24-hour command-and-control center was in full crisis mode, with representatives of every office in the Army staff keeping track of developments worldwide. If and when a military response to the terrorist attacks comes, the Army's portion will be directed from here.
"None of us are getting much sleep right now," said a senior operations officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
"There's no problem with motivation on this one. This is a national crisis of unbelievable proportions, but it's something we've trained for."
A colonel bustled through a secured door and out into the hallway.
"Java!" he called to another officer. He was not bellowing the name of a target or an operation code name, rather heading outside for some Red Cross coffee.
With all Pentagon cafeterias closed at night, the staff working the night shift has relied on the relief operations to feed them. But those operations would shut down by the weekend.
"I don't know what we're going to do," said the senior operations officer. "I don't think you can get a pizza delivered to the building right now."
McDonald's had pulled out earlier in the day, and Burger King before that.
Camp Unity, a compound set up in the parking lot to feed and support workers at the crash site, was breaking down, as search and recovery operations gave way to reconstruction.
But tonight there were still plenty of workers at the site, and the North Carolina Baptist Men's relief operation was ready to feed them.
"People are coming 24 hours a day, and we've got food 24 hours a day," said Dave Wilson, a pastor wearing a red, white and blue bandanna around his head as he tended to huge pots in the mobile kitchen.
He was readying for the midnight rush, when the cleanup and recovery crews would end their shifts and come in hungry and thirsty.
In the background, the black gash was illuminated, and a waxing moon was rising over the Pentagon.
A few figures trudged wearily through the cool night to their cars, heading home for a few hours of sleep.
At the far end of the lot, behind the fence, the drone of the construction equipment continued, and underneath the light, the agents in the white suits moved through the debris, still searching.