25 July 2007
Wedge Four
Pentagon Wedge, Down to Bare Bones
I am done with the Cassandra thing this morning, so you won't have to put up with it.
It is clear enough, and there is no reason to continue to flog the horse. Something is going to happen, and we all seem to know at least in general what it is going to be. The Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman addressed some of the pieces of the puzzle this morning, saying that some of the major airports have reporting finding little assorted bits of electronic components in odd places, lumps of clay and other inert materials.
Put together, these things could represent the real components to be used to create an improvised device of some horrific kind. The Spokeswoman said that we should not be alarmed, since there is no clear, credible and unambiguous threat.
Nor will there ever be, until the ambiguity is removed by action. What it means is that the adversary continues to probe, looking for chinks in the armor. It may be more than that, actual mission rehearsals. They have the freedom of action, after all, and the authorities are doomed to eternal vigilance on all fronts all the time.
An attack on airliners would seem to be the hardest thing to do, and the timing is all wrong, since it would validate and galvanize the American electorate at a time when interest in the struggle is waning. The Bad Guys have their fixations, though, and I suppose we have to accommodate them.
It does not seem fair, but that is the way it is at the Zenith of the empire, though erosion in the sands of time seems to run with new tides. All you can do is shrug and get on with life. Maybe the housing market will fall apart. Maybe the Baby Boom retirements will tank the health care system. The world may turn its back on the dollar, seeking something more stable and secure.
Perhaps the next few decades will not be as pleasant as those to which we are accustomed.
Sad, in a way, since some relatively small adjustments could have put off the looming financial and energy crises. A little leadership would have been welcome along the way, but this is the hand we have dealt ourselves. We still have to get up and work, and handle what comes our way.
That is how I came to be walking up to the massive sandstone fortress by the Potomac yesterday.
I have written of the Pentagon before, since in its way it has something of the aura of the great other great buildings of history; not as timeless as the Pyramids, of course, but sharing some of their geometric majesty. Within its concrete is the story of the American century, and we are not done with it quite yet.
Walking up from the Metro entrance was a bit disconcerting. In the days before the attack, the escalator ran from the platform level right up through the bus staging area to the great Concourse.
That is long gone, the buses moved away from the great buttress of the building, and the escalators now terminating well away from the entrance, with waiting guards in blue jumpsuits behind their bullet-proof glass shields.
Visiting only periodically as I do now, I see the building in a series of snapshots. The reconstruction of Wedge Four is in progress, so it is pretty weird entering the Concourse and seeing it abruptly truncated. There is a white plywood wall that cuts it in half, sealing off the area where where Pentagon Federal Credit Union was, and the Hallmark store and the Barbershop were.
The slab-to-slab reconstruction of the space in Wedge 4 is in progress. All the electrical, mechanical, and plumbing services are being replaced, and fancy new retail space will be installed. In the office areas, non-masonry partitions will be ripped out, returning the space to the “open bay” concept with which it began in 1941.
Then the process of walling it all up again will commence, bureacrats being what they are, but that will take years. There will be security improvements, of course, and public access will be re-oriented to the second floor. The steep ramps that lead to the upper floors will be closed, and redistributed to form expanded multi-purpose facilities and additional office space.
I had several calls to make, and in the course of bouncing from one side of the building to the other, ran up against the white plywood barrier in the passage near the old Executive Dining Room. Once reserved for Generals and Senior Civilians, the place is a little sad now. Anyone can gain access to the facility, and the expensive concert-model player piano is still in the foyer, but lunch service was halted on Monday. They will continue to cater out of the kitchen until Feb of 2008, when it will close for the final Wedge Five construction. That is the one that will force the movement of the Secretary and the Chairman's staff.
The mounts for the picture frames for the Presidents outside the dining room are vacant now, but helpfully labeled for their ultimate return.
There is a new contractor running the place and you can sense that things have really changed. They claim they will re-open, but who knows?
There were some challenges as they continue the decade-long reconstruction. The new windows on the outer walls of the E-Ring are resistant to splinters and other projectiles, but heavier than their predecessors. They have a tendency to pull the sandstone facade away from the original concrete. Wedge Two had to be completely rebuilt after the airliner went into it, and the patriotic workforce, largely undocumented laborers, completed the replacement well ahead of schedule and the project marched on around the perimeter.
The new building within the old will be ADA compliant, which is only slightly ironic. The original intent of the building was to serve first as the HQ for the coming European war, then as a hospital for the casualties of it. I think it was intended to be something along the lines of Napoleon's Invalides, the great hospital in Paris for the veterans of the Grand Armee.
The new escalators and passenger elevators that are being installed will make things easier to get around, but it was the wide sweeping ramps that were intended to move the hospital beds around with ease.
Of course, no one ever moved out to make room for the wounded. The two buildings which the Pentagon was intended to replace- the long Munitions and Main Navy Buildings- were located adjacent to the Reflecting Pool on the Mall. They were temporary structures constructed for WWI; at the peak of their usage some 18,000 people worked there, and footbridges actually crossed the pool to wooden buildings built where the Park Police Stables are now. The two long structures were not finally ripped down until 1970 on the orders of President Nixon.
I tend toward the preservationist view in my private life, but would never advocate people continuing to work in a disintegrating facility. We used to have routine sewage leaks and other horrors in the old building, and the electrical infrastructure was an unreliable hodgepodge of accumulated mistakes. I once was sitting in a glass-walled control booth, immediately behind General Powell and Secretary Cheney, when the power failed and the most powerful military leadership in the world was left completely in the dark.
I viewed it as a metaphor at the time, but that is precisely why people in overalls were always doing something in the corridors. They once found an electrician- an Israeli, incidentally- conducting private and unauthorized upgrades near the Joint Staff spaces for purposes unknown.
The drinking water was unsafe, and asbestos insulation hung low from broken wall panels that had been rammed by the electric carts that buzzed the workers around. I always wanted one of those jobs, envious of their ability to whiz at high speed down the wide internal boulevards.
The old building was crammed with odd architectural mistakes, since the whole thing was thrown up in less than 18 months (they worked around the clock in those days, hurry up, there is a war on!). But what they have done in the reconstruction has changed the sense of majesty of the design.
You can still see it in places; the NATO corridor still is wide enough for two cars to pass in the corridor. Many of the wide corridors have had office rows constructed on the window side, which serves to make them narrow and constricted, but accommodated people dislodged in the construction.
I looked out the window from the fifth floor, which had been added as an afterthought back in the day. I knew the little wooden snack-shack at Ground Zero was gone, and was curious as to what was going to replace it. Rising in the middle of the courtyard is the steel skeleton of something massive and multi-storied.
The old snack bar with the dummy owl on top of the cupola was low enough that seated on one of the Adirondack chairs around the edge of the center slab, the enormity of the poured-concrete of the building embracing you was quite imposing. The new building will be more efficient, I am confident, but it will break the sight lines.
When complete, there will be a climate-controlled environment, and the workers in the vaults within will be more comfortable. In the end, the place will look a lot like it used to, though it will be completely transformed. According to Pentagon insiders, "all historical external features," will be retained, including the ducks who inhabit the courtyard.
I did not see any of them yesterday, but maybe they will come back when the construction is finally done and the dead presidents and secretaries are back where they belong.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com