14 April 2007
Owls
Friday the Thirteenth passed uneventfully, at least for me. I think, on the whole, that the day is actually really unlucky if you are a Knight of the Temple, or the King of France or the Pope, all of whom came out badly from their encounter that Friday, what with all the torture, curses and burnings-alive.
It was not so uneventful elsewhere. There was a big car bomb attack in the Shia's holy city of Karbala on Saturday morning. The murderer detonated the explosives at a crowded bus station at around 0915 local time, which is 0515 Greenwich Mean, and just before midnight here in Washington, or still Friday the Thirteenth.
The day is not over, I guess, until it is over. I had been on the lookout for mischance, but got through my part of it without incident. I had agreed to a mentoring session with a guy about my age who is on the brink of retiring from Federal Service. He wanted to meet at the Hooters in Fairfax, which is close to his house, and I would have mentioned that was unsuitable for business, but I haven't ogled the business model for that chain in a while, and went anyway.
Imagine! Combining young women in skimpy costumes with food sales! The company logo is sort of cute, too, with the image of a Great Horned Owl with gigantic wide eyes emulating the strategic vista of a woman's bosom. “Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined,” says the corporate motto. I had to agree, thinking of the old days, driving back into the city. There was a time when there would have been at least one pitcher of beer on the table at lunch, along with the fiery chicken wings and the cleavage, but that belongs to a society that seems to have died.
Maybe a good thing, but I enjoyed living in it.
I was thankful that people don't drink as much during the day as they used to. It would have made the rest of the schedule impossible to execute. The trick was managing participation in a conference call with some eager-beaver from a division whose function was unknown to me and a previously scheduled appointment with a Senior Government Official.
Both seemed important, and I had worked for a month to get on the schedule at the Pentagon. The phone conference began a half hour before, and was scheduled to end precisely at the moment I was expected in the Senior Official's office.
I don't like scheduling things that tight, but I accepted the invitation to the phone meeting because I am new, and don't know what I can blow off with impunity. The title of the meeting sounded important: "AE&E." That could mean anything, I thought. Maybe it was “Analysis, Engagement and Engineering,” Or something more sinister related to compensation.
I successfully navigated down the freeways from Fairfax, which is the nice thing about not being tied to the same schedule as the other Government lemmings. It took about thirty minutes to be pulling into the big parking structure at Pentagon City, which is as close as you can get to the Building anymore. You can hoof it, or take the Metro, and it amounts to about the same thing unless it is raining. It takes about twenty minutes to get the car parked and walk or ride to the access control points at the Pentagon.
Once there, of course, anything can happen and you need to go with the flow. The key is to leave plenty of time, and if you get the inkling why everything there takes longer or is more expensive than it needs to be, you might be on to something.
The guards have a lot of machine guns and thick glass shields to hide behind in case there is a small unit attack. I guess it is better than when you had to wake them up, after hours, but it is still inconvenient.
I arrived early enough to do a reconnaissance-in-force, which is critical, since nothing is where it is supposed to be anymore. So is the crumbling charm of the old concrete barn. You had to see it back in the day. The public used to be able to just walk into the building, and the concourse on the E Ring on the southeast corner. It was a vibrant cacophony of hustle-bustle, with the guards manning posts on the ramps that lead up to the offices inside.
The ramps and the vast corridors were the key to the feeling of massive power in the building. It was vast. The point was that the Department of War would not need the space once the conflict everyone knew was coming was done. Then this colossal space would be used as a hospital to care for all the wounded.
They built the place in less than a year, and actually won the war, which is sort of surprising when you think about it. The Department never went away. It just kept chugging along, a self-perpetuating machine that is the closest thing you can imagine to perpetual, if ponderous, motion.
They tinkered with the vast spaces over the decades and conflicts that followed, offices moved and changed function, but the place had a sort of eternal feel to it. The civilians go older, like the building, but the military stayed young and earnest, charging along the wide corridors with manila folders and sealed pouches filled with secrets.
Eventually gravity wins in everything, even against the Department of Defense. The place was falling apart and people were stacked on top of one another. Before the competing concrete of the Berlin Wall crumbled, there was a scheme to double the size of the place, digging down and spreading out.
That was way too expensive, and once the Soviets quit, and nothing was done for a few years, and things disintegrated to the point that something had to be done, since there was asbestos falling out of the ceilings and failing pipes, and ominously big Norwegian rats that played in the night and in the three levels below the ground, where the land had been filled and the river pushed aside.
The reconstruction was done in about eight phases, though the press releases describe the work as proceeding in five neat wedges. The first thing that happened was in the bowels, and those of us that worked there recall the vibrations from the muffled explosions down below.
Then there was the Remote Delivery Facility, intended to get potential truck-bombs away from the fetid loading dock under the office windows of the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. They named it after Donald “Doc” Cooke, the only surviving employee from Day One.
They started the first of the wedges then, and had just finished the second one when the Assholes flew the jet into it, and it had to be redone. Then the vast river of money flowed into reconstruction after some of America went to war.
The endless re-construction of the building is continuing, I am always ready for something crazy when I walk in. Yesterday was no exception. The great Concourse now ends in a blank white plywood wall just at the end of the CVS Drugstore.
The constant change is why I determined to arrive early and take the phone meeting in the courtyard, out by Ground Zero. The Department has been nice enough, down through the years, to put out hundreds of wooden Adirondack chairs on the concrete diagonal walkways there. It can be a very nice way to spend an idle hour when the elements are favorable. Besides, cell reception is notoriously awful in the Building; there is no signal most places, since the last thing the Department needs are more open phones.
Consequently, there are always dozens of people out in the courtyard trying to talk, mixed in with the smokers, waving their phones around trying to get a good aspect to the nearest cell towers a couple miles away.
The phone meeting by Ground Zero on the phone was sort of strange. Right after the attack, there was a complete prohibition of flights near the Pentagon, as you know, but that gradually has been relaxed and the jets roar right over the courtyard. Not a big deal, although the sound echoes in the little green space, and makes it hard to talk. Once I understood that the discussion involved the Department of Energy, I was tempted to ask whether that account had any nucelar weapons business, where they might be synergy. This seemed surreal, even to me, and I kept my mouth shut after that.
Anyhow, the point is that Ground Zero is gone. The name long predated the real attack six years ago, and went back to the chilliest days of the Cold War. The great geometric shape of the courtyard had a miniature pentagon in the middle of it, a little architectural quotation.
It was green, one story in height, with an asphalt roof. It was topped by a faux-colonial cupola with tarnished copper, and at the summit was one of those remarkably life-like fake owls on the top. It made me think of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, when I thought to look up, and simultaneously be alert for pigeons. The structure held a snack bar, open in the temperate months, and stocked with appallingly bad fast-food burned on the premises.
The name "Ground Zero" long predated the actual attack, and went back to the chilliest days of the Cold War. Workers at the building assumed that the middle of the courtyard would be the aiming point for the first big Soviet weapon coming in, aimed right at the fake owl on top of the snack bar.
It is gone now. I assume they will replace it, but they are outsourcing all the food services in the Building, and I can only imagine that Hooters might be eager to replace the old Owl with a new one, and sell their award-winning chicken wings.
But I don't think that would fly, given the times.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsoctra.com