The Pentagon: A History (69 page)

It would be a peaceful, tree-shaded memorial with 184 illuminated benches, each representing a victim. The benches—cantilevered, stainless-steel structures—would be set above individual reflecting pools of water and lit from beneath. They would be oriented along a timeline set to the age of each victim, from the youngest, three-year-old Dana Falkenberg, to the oldest, seventy-one-year-old Joseph Yamnicky. Some eighty paperbark maples—their bark cinnamon-brown and their leaves brilliant red in the fall—would shade the site. “The memorial had to be like no other memorial, because September 11 was like no other day,” Beckman said.

When the design was revealed on March 3, 2003, renovation officials said they expected to break ground that June and finish the memorial by September 11, 2004. This prediction soon proved wildly over-optimistic, and the initial cost estimate of between $4.9 million and $7.4 million far under the mark. Groundbreaking was pushed back. By 2005, the cost was estimated at $22 million, with another $10 million for an endowment to maintain the memorial. The federal government contributed $1 million, but most of the money would have to come from private contributions. Family members led the fund drive, but raising that much money proved challenging. Donations came from many sources—Pentagon employees, defense corporations, newspapers, churches, and construction companies, among others. Rumsfeld and his wife gave $100,000. Sixth-grader Kelsey Donovan—whose father, Commander Bill Donovan, was among those killed in the Navy Command Center—held a bake sale and set up a drink stand along a bike trail in Northern Virginia. Slowly but surely, the money was raised.

On June 15, 2006—another brilliant, sunny day at the Pentagon—some 300 families members, joined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cabinet members, and other dignitaries, gathered at the memorial site. Ground was being broken at long last. Crews were already removing utilities from the site, and the new goal was to dedicate the monument in the fall of 2008.

It had been a long haul to get to this day—longer than expected, nearly five years since the attack. Yet Lisa Dolan, whose husband, Navy Captain Bob Dolan, died in the attack, was at peace with the time it had taken, as were other family members at the ceremony. “The families have always felt it didn’t matter how long it took, as long as it was done right,” she said.

Rumsfeld came striding from the building, accompanied by the official party. The secretary had been determined to see this day before he left office. The days of September 11—when Rumsfeld had captured the nation’s imagination with his heroic rush to the crash site and his bravura performances in the Pentagon press briefing room as American forces overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan—seemed a distant memory. The Iraq war had been a long and difficult slog. Many failures had been laid at Rumsfeld’s door. The secretary and his top aides were accused of ignoring warnings and not preparing for the long Iraqi insurgency that followed the invasion. More than 2,400 American soldiers had died in Iraq, and no exit seemed apparent. Rumsfeld’s tenure had seen the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and similar incidents that marked the erosion of long-held standards of American conduct in war. The secretary of defense with whom he was most often compared was the only one who, as of that date, had had more time in office than Rumsfeld—Robert McNamara. Calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation were routine, and he would be ousted before the year was over amid deteriorating public support for the war. Rumsfeld had dismissed the criticism, an attitude that further infuriated his critics and fostered regular accusations that he was coldly insensitive to the costs of the war.

Yet when Rumsfeld spoke on this day about those lost on September 11 and all that had followed, his voice seemed to catch, and he spoke with real emotion. “He still feels it in his heart,” thought Kris Fisher, whose husband, Gerald, an Army employee, died in the attack.

Rumsfeld and a family member pulled off a black cloth unveiling a piece of limestone—one of the original pieces of the Pentagon, salvaged after September 11—that would serve as a memorial marker. The secretary read aloud the words carved on it: “We claim this ground in remembrance of the events of September 11, 2001.” Afterward, Rumsfeld stayed for over an hour at the dusty site, talking to dozens of family members, anyone who wanted a word with him.

Nearby, Abraham Scott lingered too, standing not far from the spot where a bench would one day bear the name of his wife, Janice, an Army budget analyst. He was proud of the families for driving the memorial forward, and he felt sure his wife would have been too. It was hard to be back on this ground. They had worked together at the Pentagon for many happy years, and though he could no longer bring himself to walk into the building where Janice had died, he knew this spot was the right place for the memorial. It was little more than windswept ground with gravel and withered grass. But he could see it, a place where they would be at peace.

For the ages

On January 23, 2003, Army Corps of Engineers blast expert Paul Mlakar appeared at the Pentagon to release the American Society of Civil Engineers’ study on how the building had performed on September 11, 2001. The six-man investigation team, including specialists in structural, fire, and forensic engineering, had finished their work in April 2002, but the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, responsible for the building’s security, balked at releasing the report out of fear that it might provide a blueprint to terrorists seeking to strike again. Engineers argued that the report held important lessons on how to construct safer buildings. After months of debate, the security agency finally agreed to release it.

The report affirmed that the blast-resistant windows added by the Pentagon renovation had saved lives on September 11, and that the new steel framework had strengthened the exterior walls. But the real credit for why the Pentagon performed as well as it did—and why so many escaped—belonged to its builders. “There was a lot about the way the building was originally constructed that contributed to its resilience,” Mlakar later said.

The building had held up so strongly in the face of extreme forces that the engineering team recommended that “the features of the Pentagon’s design that contributed to its resiliency in the crash—that is, continuity, redundancy, and energy-absorbing capacity—be incorporated in the future into the designs of buildings and other structures in which resistance to progressive collapse is deemed important.” These features were fairly typical of reinforced-concrete construction in the 1940s but are not as common today, having been jettisoned in favor of streamlined construction methods that meet safety codes but do not provide the extra protection given the Pentagon.

The building’s structural redundancy came from the robust beam-and-girder system that held up its floors. Floor slabs were supported by beams that in turn were supported by girders, in a crisscross pattern interlocking with the columns. “That two-dimensional network was very forgiving, in that if you removed a column, the load could go in two different directions without collapsing,” Mlakar later said.

Reinforcement bars in the beams and girders extended into adjoining sections, providing continuity that further strengthened the floor. The structure acted as a whole, rather than as individual pieces. Thus—even though about thirty columns were destroyed by the plane’s impact, another twenty were significantly damaged, and dozens more were weakened by the fire—the building bridged the gaps. The built-in redundancy and continuity enabled the structure to transfer the load to stronger columns and remain standing.

Moreover, the Pentagon had an unusual measure of strength thanks to a curious, almost forgotten oddity: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s quixotic hope to turn it into an archive after the war. FDR had insisted that Somervell build the floors strong enough to hold heavy file cabinets; the general ordered them designed to support 150 pounds per square foot, twice the norm. Sixty years later, Roosevelt’s tinkering paid off. The extra steel and concrete and the close spacing of the columns—generally ten, fifteen, or twenty feet apart—gave the building reserve strength that helped it withstand the blow. The plane disintegrated against the “forest of columns” on the first floor, the report noted.

The Pentagon’s columns were particularly strong because the builders used spiral rebar—circular coils of reinforcement steel that wound through the columns like a rib cage. Spiral rebar tends to be used more often in seismic zones, because of the added strength it provides when an earthquake shakes a building. Most modern buildings are constructed with straight reinforcement rods, which require less labor. Spiral rebar was more common in the 1940s, and it is not surprising that architect Edwin Bergstrom and his design team, coming from earthquake-prone California, would favor it.

“It makes a strong column—strong as the dickens,” recalled Donald Walker, the steel rodman who put rebar into the Pentagon’s beams and columns. On September 11, the spiral-reinforced columns acted like shock absorbers against the tremendous lateral forces created when the aircraft slammed into the Pentagon. The plane’s impact and subsequent explosion scoured the cover off about thirty columns, but the core of concrete within the spirals stayed whole. Columns were twisted with dramatic curves—some bent like a bow shooting an arrow—but they remained standing, still bearing their loads.

Two columns in particular made a difference. They stood next to each other along the D Ring, labeled 9 and 11 F, and were directly in the path taken by the plane. They had been hit by the avalanche of aircraft and building debris and were subjected to terrific heat. The two columns were bowed and burned yet continued to support the building at its most critical point, bordering the expansion joint where the collapse broke off. “The spiral reinforcement in those two columns must have been a key factor in preventing a widespread collapse,” the report concluded.

Six decades earlier, Ides van der Gracht might have paced the aisle beside the sweating draftsmen who drew the plans for those columns. Joe Allan and his fellow carpenters could have put the wood forms for the columns together, hammering to the rhythm of the pile drivers. Perhaps Donald Walker’s steel crew rushed to put up the spiral rebar. The concrete for the columns may have been poured under the watchful gaze of the ever-present job supervisor, Paul Hauck, or perhaps the indomitable John McShain himself. Captain Clarence Renshaw and Lieutenant Bob Furman might have roamed the dusty site as the columns went up, looking for any problem before their great taskmaster, Colonel Dick Groves, discovered it. The two columns were built right, and they held, and they made a difference.

The Pentagon had been conceived over a long weekend. Its design had been one step ahead—and sometimes one behind—its construction. The pentagonal shape, like so many aspects of the building, was essentially an accident, born of the speed in which the project was pursued. The construction had been slapdash; columns were missing, concrete pours uneven, drawings wrong or missing altogether. Yet somehow the Pentagon was designed wisely and constructed well. Somervell’s building had proven itself one for the ages.