Vic Socotra

13 August 2008

First Shovel

Lt General Mike Maples Describes the New Building
Daily Progress Photo/Megan Lovett

The Hubrismobile roared out of the Bat Cave under Big Pink just after seven, en route the 29th Division Highway via I-66 and points south. I glanced at the azure waters of the pool, still cloaked in morning shadow as the high-performance tires chirped over the speed bumps in the parking lot. t was a marvelous day with deep blue skies and low humidity, perfect for the job at hand.

There was dirt to be turned, and witness to be made of the inexorable progress of the human spirit against the unyielding red clay of central Virginia.

We formed a mini-official delegation in the sleek German machine. We were not the point of the ceremony, mere witnesses to the turning of the earth, but it was significant in its way, and part of a legacy that will never be acknowledged and never remembered.

That is OK with me. I remember where this building came from.
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We were in a vault in Crystal City, owned by a major Aerospace Firm. It was oppressively hot in the room, and we were captives of the Base Reallocation And Relocation Process chartered by the now-departed Secretary Rumsfeld.

The scheme to the BRAC Round, as we called it, was a sort of three-card Monte game with the Congress. Defense is not an Executive Branch Department, as you might have heard. Rather it is a hodge-podge of sedimentary layers composed of the detritus of all America’s wars and conflicts, loosely piled atop o ne another and generally outlined by the now-fuzzy images of World War II and long struggle with the Soviets.

All the weapons systems and installations gain discrete constituencies in the Congress, and thus it is impossible to rationally discuss the merits of anything, since ships and bombers and tanks have parts that are miraculously constructed of parts made in all fifty states, and every base has a congressman and two Senators who will die before seeing a single job moved off post.

It was the particular conceit of20Mr. Rumsfeld that the Department could be run a little more efficiently if he took a hard look the daunting mass of things in his property book and eliminated duplication. He used the BRAC to create a list that the President would validate as a single block, and present it as an up-or-down ultimatum to the Congress.

There would be big winners and big losers contained in the BRAC list, and Congress would not have the chance to nit-pick it by seniority or Committee. There was a lot at stake, and for the first time, the Intelligence Community was directed to play.

That is how Patrick came to be assigned to the group in the stuffy conference room, and how he came to hire me to be his seeing-eye contractor in the process.

The group that gathered under the watchful eyes of yet another contractor would ultimately bond thoroughly. It was hard not to, sealed up together for endless days of analysis and debate. At the front end, the agendas were larger than the people, and that is how the building came to be.

A gover nment bureaucrat from a sister agency was on a mission. His master had dispatched him to trade the decrepit assortment of disintegrating facilities his Agency occupied for a glittering new campus that would fuse the organization together, enhance mission effectiveness, improve security and bring a better world.

Patrick looked across the table at me and I saw it in his eyes. I nodded back able to see a Big Chance when one came along. When his time came to speak, he cleared his throat and uttered the momentous words: “Yeah, us too. If they get one, we should, too.”

Buildings have many parents, or at least the ones that actually get constructed. It was not Patrick or me that got the building, but I can say that if we did not scamper back to the Pentagon and lobby persuasively to gain the support of the chain of command, it would not have happened.

I don’t know how the parents of the big sprawling mall at the junction of Route 29 and the big slab of I-66 are feeling. We stopped there for coffee at a sleek bakery that was operating at ten percent of capacity, an endless sea of empty black parking lot around it.

The intersection has been under construction since the Confederates put down their muskets, and great houses stand atop the fields where they stacked their arms. I have no idea who would live so far out there, way past the battlefields of the War Between the states, except loons and masochists, but perhaps they will sell all of them someday when personal anti-gravity or teleportation devices are available at the big box stores at the mall.

With coffee in hand, we eventually passed out of the new construction headed south, and the fields and pastures of the old Virginia emerged around us. This drive used to be the greatest place to shop for old pick-up trucks. The owners just park them down at the end of their endless driveways with cardboard signs on the windshields that lead to the magnificent divided four lane highway.

It was a marvelous day for a road trip, and the vise-like grip of the city fell away.

Charlottesville was Mr. Jefferson’s town, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, and a world away from swampy Washington, which actually is less than a hundred miles as the crow flies.

We used to visit the Court House where the Army had its foreign technology exploitation center, located in the university town for reasons known only to previous generations of bureaucrats. It was utterly inadequate to the task, which grew through another generation of conflicts, but everyone agreed that the town was a marvelous place to live, and bureaucrats weary of the endless struggle and longer commutes in DC had found their peace in a slower-paced life in the lovely countryside.

That is how the Hubrismoible came to be in the parking lot of the new building that is now known as the National Ground Intelligence Center, located in what had been a pasture near the rail line at the whistle stop of Rivanna Station.

Patrick is still in the government, and he had an invitation to the event, which was going to feature the turning of the first shovels of dirt for the new building. Lieutenant General Mike Maples and 5th District Congressman Virgil Goode were the key-noters, along with the Colonel Commanding the building next door. We built that one, too, though the heavy programmatic lifting had been done by others.

I once got in trouble over an unannounced inspection of the foundations conducted in my Navy whites.

The hand-out produced for the occasion announced that more than 800 jobs will move from the Washington, D.C. area to the Albemarle County. The new facility is scheduled to be ready for occupancy in 2011.
It was a little hard to believe, since the only evidence was a long mound of red dirt that closely resembled a newly dug grave. Since many of the people in the audience had participated in the Balkans adventure, it was hard to escape the image of Serbian atrocities and shallow pits filled with the unspeakable.

That is one of the things the new building is supposed to prevent, and I hope it does.

The General is a great impromptu speaker, and in view of the world situation, he was attired in desert camouflage, as were the other soldiers in the crowd.

He said that the $61 million project will bring hundreds of intelligence-related jobs to the area, and will enhance the nation’s security. The Congressman is a slim and elegant man who speaks with an accent that once was common to the region. He said that all overall, some 1,500 direct and indirect jobs are expected to be added locally as a result of the project.

Officials from the County and the State all nodded, as did the Army Corps of Engineers and the dignitaries from the Agency and the Archer Western Contractors from Chicago, who will design and construct the facility.

We were under a big tent to protect us from20the elements, though it was not needed. America’s Army is always prepared for any contingency.

After the remarks, The General and the Congressman and the Colonel Commanding and the Architect and the Corps of Engineers posed with golden shovels to turn the symbolic dirt.

It was pretty cool. After they were done, another rank of Agency dignitaries got a chance at the second shovelful, the Deputy Director and the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Director for Facilities. They are all good people, and all former comra des in the struggle to create new buidings.

I’m just a contractor, so I didn’t expect to get a chance to touch one of the digging tools, but I am sorry Patrick didn’t get to have his picture taken with a spade.

Buildings have many parents, as you know, but I knew where this one was conceived.

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