05 March 2010
Metro Entrance
(Entrance to the Pentagon Metro, just behind the bus platform)
I have intense feelings about the old building, and they came back hard this past week, since I had to do some business there. That was before the shooting, and I could not bring myself to dig into it yesterday.
There was too much unresolved, and the first stories are always wrong anyway. The one thing that is most surprising is that there was only one corpse. There could have been dozens. It could have been as bad as the rampage at Fort Hood.
It would have been heavy on the symbolism, if it had not resulted only in the death of the gunman.
God knows the building is impressive. I first saw the great gray-brown limestone ramparts from the parking lot in 1970, when the building was only three decades old. The portals in the façade designed to allow buses to pass right through the imposing walls to the courtyard were still functional, and the place was the largest building in the world.
The Johnson Space Center passed it soon enough, and then others, though the crisply uniformed kids who guide the tours still qualify it as “The largest Federal building” in existence.
I don’t think I actually went in the place until 1981, visiting a friend who worked in the Intelligence Plot up on the 4th deck in the Navy corridor. The guards then guarded the entrance to the ramps that gave access to the offices from the Concourse.
I spent most of the decade of the 1990s working there in a variety of offices, and it was still possible to get lost there, since over the years. The place was disintegrating, and you could understand why.
The whole vast edifice had been thrown up in 18 frantic months of activity, and had been sinking into the muck ever since. It had a feeling of the vast aircraft plant at Willow Run about it, a place out of time.
They began the reconstruction then, basement first and then wedge by wedge. It was about third done when I left it in 2001, just a couple months before murderers flew an airplane into it and everything changed.
The Metro platform used to feature a towering escalator that ran all the way up into the building, right to the entrance to the Concourse. It was impressive at the time, and they have bricked it up now.
A friend and I snuck up to the refurbished offices adjacent to the great gaping hole through the outer three rings once the rebuilding had commenced. The corridors led only to plywood and open air.
Strange things happen at the building, always have. In 1991 I was working in a space next to the Director’s office of the Agency. It was on the third floor looking out over South Parking and the shuttle-bus stops.
A gunman walked up to three people waiting for one of the passenger vans and opened fire. A Navy Commander was mortally wounded. Accounts at the time read “The seconds-long shooting shattered the morning routine as government and Department of Defense workers waited for buses to carry them to government offices around the region. The shuttle bus stop is about half a block away from the busy Pentagon Metro station.”
The shooting was apparently random, though I can no longer tell the difference between terror inspired by target or chance. Edward Higgins died on the spot, and of course the broadcast news failed to identify him, and the families of every Navy 0-4 and 0-5 in town had to panic.
John Patrick Bedell may have walked precisely this way. He parked his car in the structure adjacent to the Pentagon City Mall. It was the evening rush hour. He was neatly dressed, and although bearded, there are plenty of men in sport-coats and white shirts walking around.
I wasn’t able to find his precise route to become a footnote to history, though I am sure there is a camera that has his image on the way. His motivation appears to be advanced paranoia, which may be the motive for terror from the right.
It is possible that he strolled through in past the shops and taken the escalator down to the Metro station and taken the one stop to the Pentagon itself.
It is much shorter to cut through the tunnel under the Shirley Highway and walk across the parking lot. If that is what he did, he would have passed the shuttle bus stops, and the chain link fence in front of where the temporary blue metal office structure used to stand. That was where the great construction campaign had been managed, and I was surprised to see it has been torn down, now that the reconstruction is almost done.
He would have walked the same path I did on Tuesday, since I had to visit the Badge Office, located just to the right inside the towering oak doors. Of course, he would have been bucking the flow of human traffic, which would just be thinning at just past 6:30 in the evening.
The demeanor of the guards is much different than it used to be. They are thoroughly tactical, in fact. Not at all like the old overweight Navy—blue clad Pentagon Protective Service guys who used to doze at the desks. A trim black-and-gray clad uniformed officer stands at the top of the escalator to the Concourse level with a machine gun; there are several officers on the floor, watching the entrance doors and the electronic turnstiles.
Mr. Bedell did not get far enough to see what is in back of the doors.
The check-point for uncredentialled visitors is just to the left of two guards who sit on stools in ballistic vests and check our white and pink badges. White is for Real People and bright Pink for the hoard of Contractors. People would have been waiting in the chill in long queues for the buses out to the distant suburbs, since the Pentagon is the major transit hub on the Virginia side of the river, not just a place where DoD people congregate.
It is amazing. It could have been so much more awful.
Bedell was a physics major, and proficient in navigating the internet, so it would not have been hard to make a facsimile badge and get inside. Two clicks on Google just revealed for me a perfect image of a valid one, and he could have dummied something up to get past a visual inspection and to the doors. Or he could have just started blasting on the platform.
But maybe that wasn’t the point. He could have started shooting at the other people on the bus platform.
He talked to someone in the crowd before he approached the officers and produced two 9mm handguns. Officers Carraway and Amos were alert and did their jobs efficiently. While both of them suffered flesh-wounds, Bedell took a headshot and expired without comment.
The Building is a lightning rod, I know that, and this is the second attack on a Federal building in just two weeks. Whatever the motivation, I won’t be able to go past those guards again without a flash of unease.
Of course, that has also been the case about the shuttle bus-stops and the whole north face of the E-ring for that matter.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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