September 12th and the Crew from Kalamazoo

Grey smoke was still wafting lazily upward from the Pentagon into the early morning sky as I made my way south, across the 14^th Street Bridge, on my way to work in Arlington.  Still reeling, numb from the previous day, I was anxious to do something concrete in response to the attacks.  I’m sure most Americans felt similarly that morning.  As a military officer, I know my brothers and sisters in arms felt particularly restless and called to action.

As it turned out, the thing I could do most immediately was to lend a hand in helping the Pentagon recover quickly.  While I wasn’t assigned to the Pentagon proper, I worked for a headquarters agency and was in “The Building” almost every day, attending to the business of preparing for, and fighting, our nation’s wars.  I was relieved that I did not know anyone personally who lost his or her life in the Pentagon.  I was glad the terrorists flew into the side of the building that was least occupied, having just undergone a major renovation and still largely vacant.  While obviously in mourning and turmoil, it was important for all of us to show the world the attack did not bring us to our knees. 

The Pentagon was right back at work that Wednesday morning, already humming with the typical frenetic activity by 6 AM, although certainly with more purpose than on most days.  Everyone reported for duty.  Recovery was already underway.

I quickly learned of, and volunteered for, escort officer duty—accompanying the outside crews who came to get the Pentagon back into the fight.  I signed up for the night shift and went home to get some sleep.

That night, as I drove across the Potomac on my way to the Pentagon, I saw the parking lots ablaze with bright lights, and filled with all manner of trucks and equipment and tents.  As I entered the halls of the wounded building, I immediately noticed the overpowering smell of wet soot.  The entire building smelled like a camp fire after you douse it with water. 

I was teamed with a commercial cleaning crew from Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Within a day of the attack, the Department of Defense had mobilized and brought in hundreds of professional cleaning services from every state east of the Mississippi.  They came in cars, vans, trucks and buses.  They jammed the local budget motels.  They set up camp and operations based in the parking lots surrounding the famous five-sided edifice.  They organized quickly, dividing themselves up into two shifts.  They cooperated.  They came to work hard.  They felt the sense of urgency and call to duty that compelled us all.

The team I was partnered with was a family operation comprised of maybe a dozen folks, blue collar, salt of the earth, patriotic types—at least half of them related to each other in some way or another, and the rest friends of the clan.

The general plan was to do a relatively fast first pass through the common areas and traffic corridors of the entire Pentagon, wiping down every surface in the main corridors to remove most of the fine film of ash and soot that had permeated every nook and cranny of the huge building.  Individual offices would later be cleaned by the workers themselves.

We set to work in a hallway in one of the rings on a lower level, in one of the five “wedges” of the building adjacent to the one that was struck by the airliner.  The Pentagon has miles and miles of hallways, all arranged as “spokes” that radiate out from the center courtyard, and concentric “rings” that connect the spokes.  Our mission that first night was to complete one ring hallway between two spoke corridors, maybe between one and two hundred feet.  I believe another crew was working from the opposite end.

To be clear, my job, officially, was just to be with these fine but uncleared (from a security access perspective) people, not to assist them.  I did however, grab some tools of the trade and apply some elbow grease right alongside them.  Armed with rags, and toothbrushes, and cotton swabs, we inched our way down the hallway, into the wee hours of the morning, wiping down walls, floors, ceiling tiles, light fixtures, office doors, windows, ventilation grates, and floor moldings.  Discussion was muted, respectful, mostly focused on the task at hand.  No one forgot the soot we were removing contained the ashes of over a hundred Americans who had been killed the day before.  Breaks were few and far between. 

At daybreak on September 13^th, this fine group of Americans wrapped up their work in the hallway, collected their tools, and headed for the canteen tent set up in the parking lot before making their way to their cheap motel rooms for some much-needed and well-earned sleep.  At the Pentagon exit nearest the temporary tent city, I said my goodbyes.  I then drove the hour home, running against the influx of commuters, to find my own bed.

I spent two more nights with the crew from Kalamazoo, working just as hard, with just as much dedication and focus.  By week’s end, the task was nearly complete.  “The Building” no longer smelled of soot.  The aggrieved Eagle was sharpening its talons.  The tent city began to fold.  My crew returned to Michigan.  I returned to my normal duty.

Every September 11^th since that horrible event in 2001, I think about my time with those folks from Michigan.  How they dropped everything and got to Arlington as fast as they could.  They served our country that week by helping to clean up.  Without fanfare, they just went to work, and showed the world what America is made of.  I was proud to serve with them.                          

Time for Change: Investigating and Prosecuting Sexual Assault in the Miltary (an open letter to my US senators and representative)

I am a retired Air Force officer and former squadron commander with a lot of practical experience in applying the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  I strongly encourage you to draft and champion legislation that will transfer responsibility for investigating and prosecuting major crimes from the services to the Justice Department.  

We absolutely need to relieve the military chain of command from this responsibility.  For one thing, they are not properly trained or equipped to deal with major criminal infractions.  Secondly, doing so is a time-consuming distraction from the other important responsibilities of preparing for and winning our nation’s armed conflicts.  Finally, America has lost confidence in the ability of the military to effectively and justly police and protect its own members from criminal activity. 

I believe the FBI and the Justice Department are best positioned to take on this responsibility (as opposed to letting local jurisdictions handle such cases); treating these as federal crimes (perpetrated by and/or against service members) will lend consistency and eliminate problems associated with local jurisdiction, especially when incidents occur beyond our borders.   

Such a move—setting up a special military crimes unit within DoJ—could be paid for by reducing the size of the individual military agencies now charged with handling these crimes (their resource requirement diminishes with the reduction in tasking).  As an interim measure, perhaps current military resources could be detailed to DoJ.   

Fight on State

Raise your hand if you’re proud to be an American. I am. I love this nation and I feel so blessed that, by the grace of God, I was born here. I feel tremendous pride when I see Old Glory waiving in the breeze. I still get a little choked up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” This is a great nation. We’ve done—and do—great things. We delivered Europe, twice, from invasion. We put a human on the moon. We rescued Iranian fisherman from their foundering craft in rough seas.

And we’ve done some very wrong things. We embraced slavery for the first century of our existence. We tolerated abject racism long after slavery was abolished. We all but wiped out the indigenous peoples of our land, and largely marginalized those who were left. We rounded up and interned our entire population of Japanese-Americans during World War II. We kept women from voting. We’ve spied on our own people. We’ve trampled our Constitution on several occasions. We still do wrong things today. We will, undoubtedly, do wrong things in the future.

Yet, I am still proud to be an American. Partly because we Americans take responsibility for our mistakes. We have stepped up and owned these shameful eras and ugly episodes. We don’t pretend they didn’t happen. We don’t sugar coat them. We look them in the face, work to rise above them, and endeavor to be an even better nation.

In much the same way, I am proud to be a Nittany Lion. I am thinking fondly of my alma mater on this first day of September, as a new freshman class is just settling in, “shapeless in the hands of fate,” as a new era of Penn State football is about to begin, as a great university looks it failures square in the eye and struggles to right unrightable wrongs as best it can. My heart, broken as it is, is in Happy Valley today.

Fight on State.