It was a big day yesterday. As a nation, we are approaching the 21st anniversary of the attack on America we now just call “9/11.” There are a lot of memories associated with that morning, spread out over the following months. I had been- briefly- at the Pentagon that morning. There was a bit of old business to take care of, old gym clothes hanging in a locker in the POAC- the famed “Pentagon Officer’s Athletic Club”- which was one of those links to the terminology used when the sprawling building was new. I was staying at Fort Leslie J. McNair that week on the DC side of the Potomac and just starting a new job at Langley.
That cool and dark morning thus found myself in the odd northerly transition off the 14th Street Bridge through North Parking around the five-sided Adult Care Facility, and with day-time enforcement not yet in effect, I decided to stop and clean out the gym locker, ending my eight years of service in the building. There was no drama to it. Simple act of parking the car right close to the building by the child care center, a fairly recent addition to the campus. A short walk under the pedestrian overpass to access the gym, and my last short walk back to the lockers. Everything fit in a plastic garbage bag, along with the ancient corroded combination lock, and then back out into the morning darkness under the stars that still glowed bright against the rising dawn.
Things did not get strange until the small morning meeting had begun on the 4th Floor of the Original Headquarters Building up the road in Virginia. We all remember the bits that followed with the news from New York, and then from just down the road. You can imagine the hub-bub that followed. We actually had emergency duties, not that anyone precisely recalled what they were, but I found myself with the Director of Central Intelligence as the first of the towers collapsed on the television, and our building was rumored to be a potential target.
There was more, of course, and the confusion and mobilization swirled around town for months as the Global War on Terror, what we knew as the
“GWAAAT” started in earnest. The Pentagon damage was replaced swiftly, and we followed the process with interest since the Navy ran a gas station, credit union and liquor store just west of the impact area. That little complex was declared “surplus” in the interest of expanding the useful burying ground at Arlington, and there were the funerals of those we lost that awful morning. That evening, back at Fort McNair, it was a little surreal to see the building still burning across the Potomac and troops rushing around in the darkness on the ground below the BOQ balcony. I stood there with a strong cocktail wondering at the strange and changing nature of the world.
With the Queen’s passing yesterday, that change that put the Cold War, over for a decade, into “history.” There was much more to it all, the materiel and vast arsenals pummeled into other things with implications not really understood until the serial conflicts in the Balkans. The death of Queen Elizabeth puts a dignified to the great conflict of World War Two. She was the last leader and direct connection to the age of political monsters and global heroes in whose number stood Winston Churchill, Harry Truman and Josef Stalin. That momentous tumult now has no connection to the last dignified participant who lived, and an Age, like an Empire, is done.
I only saw the Queen once, in person. It would have been in 2004- around the time of the dedication of our WWII Memorial on the Mall. I have a marvelous picture of Her Majesty chatting with Mac Showers in the middle of it. That day was not one of ceremony. It was one of the working days around the formal dedication and I was doing the usual three-mile jogging route from the Pentagon, up the Virginia side of the Potomac to Arlington Cemetery to cut across the Memorial Bridge over the River and then back south to the 14th St. Bridge and the short cut to the POAC.
Traffic was light, but I stopped for traffic headed eastbound to cross the service drive. As a single vehicle approached, I realized it was a Rolls sedan with a driver and a small figure seated in the rear. I suddenly realized who it was, but there was no security escort and no courtiers. No fuss and no show for the Queen of England and Defender of her Faith.
I don’t know what personal business the Queen might have had at the Cemetery, but as I realized her identity I stopped and went to the best attention I could manage in my jogging togs.
We did not exchange formal waves but she did look at me in passing, I knew she recognized respect.
Her ascent to the throne of the Empire occurred when I was eight months old. She is, therefore, the only Queen I will know. The King made his first speech this afternoon, and they say he did a nice respectful job of it. It is a changing of the Guard, certainly, and a farewell to something that went on so long that it seemed almost eternal. I guess we will see how he does. But in respect to his Mother and the changing of the guard, I will try these words out for the first time: “God Save the King.”
– Vic