Camouflage

At the end of the day, or at least in the part approaching twilight, I sometimes look back toward morning and wonder if I should have done something differently.

Yesterday was wild and blowing wet. I’m not sure I could have done it differently, even if I had thought about it. The first call at an anonymous building in Arlington went well, though I should have worn my trench-coat to get to the entrance from my car. There is almost always street parking there, since the building uses anonymity as camouflage.

The second call was more problematic. It is hard enough to get to the Pentagon, since there is no disguising what it is and what it does. To keep the car bombs away, the only civilian parking is far away. On a pleasant day, it is not a bad walk. But with the rain blowing sideways, it is easier to park at the shopping mall on the Blue Line and take the  train one stop to the building.

Eventually I wound up in front of the glass doors of the Army Operations Center , deep in the basement. I had only a single number to contact the government member within, and he had apparently decamped for a meeting. There was a list of phone numbers for people assigned to the Task Force, but I didn’t know them. The personnel turnover is something fierce, and it is hard to keep a current phone list.

The only thing still valid on the business card I had was the name. I had two crossed out addresses, and three old phone numbers written in ink.

I sighed and began to dial the numbers, one at a time, hoping that someone would take pity and let me in.

It was not like this in the old Pentagon. My badge worked in the card-readers, and I could go pretty much where I wanted. Not so now. I was anonymous in my civilian clothes, a cypher in the sea of uniforms.

The re-construction of the building has changed everything that I once knew. The grand corridors that connected the offices where I once worked are blocked by white-painted plywood; walkways are truncated, soldiers and sailors and anonymous government functionaries brush by one another, briefcases and back-packs brushing the artificially narrow walls.

It was always a strange building in which to do business, elegant in design, but fiendishly complex because of the endless tinkering with the design. Not all staircases go to the roof. Some end at blind leads in the basement. The newly renovated areas have a blank sameness to them, and the military departments and Office of the Secretary of Defense offices are all jumbled together in temporary assignments, not all together as they once were.

Someday the work will be complete, and things will make sense once again I am sure. It has been an impressive project. You cannot even tell where the airplane crashed into it, or where the fires burned so brightly and the massive concrete walls collapsed.

It really was a privilege to be there at all, unescorted. A friend had counter-signed a form granting me a basic entry badge, good for a year, and I have seventy more days of access. That is one of the things that tugged at the back of my mind, whether I could get the pass renewed. Soldiers swarmed in and out of the glass doors by the guard-post.

They called them “uniforms” because they were supposed to be the same. They are not anymore. There appear to be three or four patterns of camouflage in use now. The ones from Iraq and Afghanistan are a paler tan, the color of sand, and their boots are light brown. Some had ruddy faces, recently exposed to sun.

A pregnant soldier wearing battle dress in the old European forest pattern was performing security duty inside the glass door by a civilian contract guard. She looked to be in her early twenties. She looked at me, not without pity, as I dialed, glancing between the list on the wall and the little white phone. She looked tired, and was seated. Her boots were black. I hoped she was not headed to the desert any time soon, at least not until her baby was born.

I continued to dial numbers down the list, and finally got lucky. I was provided another number, one not on the list, and made contact with a minor official who had something I needed.

He said he would be out, presently, and I stood near the wall to stay out of the way of the soldiers. The pregnant soldier looked at me impassively through the glass. At length, the official emerged, clad in a dark trench-coat. He handed me what I had come to collect, a response to a proposal on a method to defeat the improvised explosive devices the Bad Guys are using to kill the soldiers.

He was on his way to another meeting and in a hurry. I walked along with him, swimming in the current of soldiers and camouflage. I asked him about the reports in the paper that morning that there was a new kind of explosive in use, one that erupted from a camouflage of debris on the ground and detonated at an altitude of a few dozen feet.

The new weapon was adapted from old anti-aircraft ammunition that belonged to Saddam, or at least that is what the paper claimed. The blasts were intended to hit helicopters as they whizzed low above the roadways, where the bombs had made travel by car so dangerous.

“Is it true?” I asked. “If so, we might have a means to combat the fuzing devices.”

“Don’t know,” he said. “It came up in the morning meeting and the Colonel asked the intel guys to come up with G-2 on it.”

“Will you have anything by the conference next week?” He said he didn’t think so, since they were moving offices again, expanding into a few floors in an office tower on the other side of the highway. That was going to be confusing, plus there were a thousand contractors coming to the big meeting.

I nodded, thanking him for his time. We parted near an elevator bank that promised escape from the deep basement. I got off on the first floor, a place where I knew I could find an exit from the building.

Anti-helicopter land-mines, I mused. Interesting development. The insurgents are trading old artillery shells for brand new aircraft. Doesn’t seem like a fair bargain. As I left the great sandstone flank of the building, I thought I should pursue some ideas on my own and not wait for the Army people.

If I come up with anything, I hope I can get their attention. They are awfully busy.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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