9/11 attack at the Pentagon: the Pentagon Memorial
9/11 attack at the Pentagon
By Thomas Brading, Army News Service
It’s been 19 years since Sept. 11, 2001, when four hijacked passenger jets were turned into makeshift missiles above American soil. But the tragic day is still fresh in the minds of some of the Army’s top leaders who survived the attack at the Pentagon.
Positioned across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital, the Pentagon is the nerve center for all things national defense. It’s also one of the world’s largest office buildings, made up of roughly 23,000 military and civilian employees, including the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The five-sided structure is often seen as a universal symbol of America’s strength and security, which made it a target that September morning.
As the sun rose over the nation’s capital that day, the gridlocked morning traffic crept along the Beltway. Underground, train riders like Brig. Gen. Mark S. Bennett and Maj. Gen. Paul A. Chamberlain, who were younger officers at the time, crowded into railcars to beat the slow-moving jam.
All and all “it was just a morning like any other,” Bennett recalled.
They were young officers navigating the city in 2001, but today Bennett is at the helm of the U.S. Army Financial Command, and Chamberlain is the director of the Army budget.
By the time the Metro train dropped them off, the Soldiers weren’t the first to arrive at the Pentagon. Employees were already buzzing through each ring and corridor of the building.
Pentagon staffers were already immersed in numerous morning routines; briefings were planned, PowerPoints were being finalized, coffee was brewing, and some, like Chamberlain, found time to squeeze in a morning run.
“The sky was crystal clear blue that early fall morning,” Chamberlain said, looking back. “I went for a run, came back, and took a shower.” That’s when he first heard the news at the Pentagon Athletic Center. “Over the radio speakers in the shower, I heard a plane [may have] hit the World Trade Center in New York — which was very odd.”
The news quickly spread around the building. Lt. Gen. Thomas Horlander, deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army, Financial Management and Comptroller, was then a 41-year-old lieutenant colonel on a mission from Fort Rucker, Alabama that morning.
The Pentagon has three times the floor space of the Empire State Building, and can be daunting to navigate for newcomers, like Horlander. The Colorado native felt like a fish out of water during his work trip to the Defense Department epicenter.
When Horlander and his coworkers walked into the building, the security guards knew they were out-of-towners, he said, during a recent interview. “I said [to the guard] we’re trying to locate a conference room. He gave us assistance and said when you get there to turn on the television — an airplane just hit one of the Twin Towers.”
After that, everything changed. Newscasts started reporting the incident at the World Trade Center in New York City. The news anchor on the confirmed “smoke was billowing out of one of the towers,” Chamberlain said. “I thought, wow, it must have been a significant plane that hit it.”
The Pentagon Memorial design was developed by Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman. Their vision for the memorial was selected from more than 1,100 submissions by a panel of architects, family members and public figures in the Washington, D.C. area, including two former secretaries of defense.
The Pentagon Memorial captures a specific moment in time – 9:37 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, when 184 souls were lost. The $22 million memorial sits on two acres of land right outside where the jetliner struck the building.
There are 184 memorial benches dedicated to each of the victims, and they’re organized in a timeline of their ages, from the youngest victim, 3-year-old Dana Falkenberg, to the oldest, 71-year-old John Yamnicky.
Each memorial unit includes a cantilevered bench engraved with a victim’s name and a lighted pool of flowing water. The benches are made of stainless steel and inlaid with smooth granite, and each bench is inscribed with a victim’s name on the end and arches over a shallow reflecting pool of water, lit from below.
The benches for the 59 jetliner passengers are positioned so a visitor will face the sky when reading the victim’s name. Those dedicated to the victims inside the building have the victim’s name and the Pentagon in the same view.
The site also has a curved wall, aptly dubbed the Age Wall, which increases in height to represent the ages of the victims, starting at 3 inches to represent the youngest victim and growing to 71 inches to represent the oldest victim.
There are 85 paperbark maple trees clustered throughout the memorial, with foliage that changes to brilliant oranges and reds in the fall. The paperbark maples will eventually grow to 30 feet to provide a canopy of shade over the area. Ornamental grasses mark the memorial’s boundaries.