MY VISIT TO THE PENTAGON
SEPTEMBER 15, 2001 (around 6pm)
NOVEMBER 3, 2001 (around 2pm)
On a beautiful crisp Saturday evening, we climbed up on top of a hill overlooking Washington, DC and the Pentagon. This is the view of the city from the hill:
You can vaguely make out Arlington Cemetery (with the gleaming white tombstones under the autumn sun). You can also see the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial in the distance. On this very same hill, if you looked a little bit to your right, the scene of devastation is shocking. Almost 100 hours later, the billowing smoke is gone and the smoldering fires are extinguished. Massive cranes chip away very gently at the rubble of the Pentagon facade as if carving a delicate stone sculpture. An entire side of the 5-sided building looked charred and blackened by the intense fires fueled by the horrible crash only 4 days ago.
As you walk down the hill along Columbia Pike past the Navy Annex, the wounded Pentagon building unfolds. Needless to say there were cops everywhere. I was also a little somber when I had my picture taken. The media had a huge presence across the parking lot from the massive gaping hole in the Pentagon building. Seeing the damage up close and personal very quickly puts a new face of horror to the whole tragedy. Everything suddenly came to life and became terribly real - the careening plane, the impact, the explosion, the screams, the trapped, the terrified, the searing heat, the explosive force, the thundering bang - we weren't there to see and hear it happen but I was quickly horrified and overwhelmed by my imagination. Until you really see it for yourself, you don't get the whole magnitude of it. Standing there, perched on that safe high spot that provided me an expansive view of the graves at Arlington Cemetery and the massive fortress of the Pentagon, just looking at the gaping hole hit me really hard. It really, REALLY hits you hard. And you pause, in solemn silence, and wonder and gasp in horror - what about the people on the plane?
But by far the most wrenching thing about my visit to the site of this tragedy were the mini-memorials spread across the lawn and attached to the iron fence separating the Pentagon and Arlington Cemetery. It was a touching and moving makeshift memorial. There was a crowd but they were mostly silent. Between being touched by the stories of tragic lives lost and staring in awe of the gaping hole in the Pentagon, it all seemed like a tragedy that is slowly and very painfully unraveling day by day. There was a certain sadness in the air as everybody present, and certainly everybody in the country, mourns the lives lost and a shattered country. There were the occasional tourists who were there solely to pose in front of a "hole in the Pentagon". And then there were children who, fortunately for them, have yet to grasp the magnitude of this tragedy, playing in the fields and pouncing on every opportunity to use a camera or a camcorder. The rest of us stared in an eerie silence, occasionally punctuated by blaring sirens and children laughing. Is this the new America?
I returned to the Pentagon on November 3rd; almost 8 weeks later. Route 27 had been reopened for a few weeks now and we could get much closer to the destruction than ever before. Huge cranes continue to chip away at the three outer rings of the mammoth military complex. With reconstruction comes rebirth. But we will never forget.
With so many lives lost, there were so many stories to tell. Each tragic life lost had a story to it. And each story affected so many people's lives. And the flowers, the American flags, the poems, the cards, the banners, the tributes and many more made these pictures worth a thousand words... God Bless America.
NOVEMBER 3, 2001
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