ONE OF THE QUIET WONDERS of the last year has been the swift reconstruction of the Pentagon. While New York City has gone through a long, public grieving process for the World Trade Center, Washingtonians seem almost oblivious to the impressive work of the Phoenix Project. But no longer. On July 4 the National Geographic Channel will air a documentary, Inside the Pentagon, that goes a long way to showing the valor and everyday heroism of the military men and women who work in the capital.
To understand the Pentagon, you have to first grasp its size: 6 million square feet of space connected by 17.5 miles of corridors. It is home to 23,000 workers who, being largely military folk, start getting to the office around 6:00 a.m. every morning.
At 9:38 a.m. on September 11, a Boeing 757 traveling 350 mph crashed into the Pentagon, killing 184 people and damaging 400,000 square feet of the building. And one member of the Phoenix Project says that the damage could have been much worse. Before September 11, the Pentagon had been undergoing what was to be a 20-year renovation project, and the plane actually struck the least vulnerable point: New blast windows shielded people inside–and didn’t even crack; a geotechnical mesh which had been layered into the walls acted like a spider web and kept the structure from collapsing for nearly 30 minutes, giving rescuers time to pull many people out; a new sprinkler system prevented the fires from spreading; and many workers had yet to move back into their old offices. If the terrorists had struck any other part of the Pentagon, the tragedy would have been much worse.
The damage didn’t look all that bad from the outside (click here to see a photo from September 14); the plane acted like an armor-piercing round, and burrowed deep into the building, destroying almost the entire wedge. Click here for an eerie view of what the wedge looked like after demolition was complete. By this picture from mid-April the exterior was nearly complete, and on June 11 the final piece of limestone was placed on the new facade.
“Inside the Pentagon” shows a remarkable picture of this restoration effort, and an equally remarkable look at the men and women in uniform who work there every day. Ted Anderson, a former soldier who now serves as a congressional liaison for the Defense Department, tells how he and his colleagues spent the morning of September 11 pulling people out of the burning section of the building. “We have an unwritten code in the military that states you will never leave anybody behind,” he says calmly. “Whether you’re injured or whether dead, you will never be left, you will always be brought out.”
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.
