November 2001: The Pentagon, cleared of debris, stands ready for a lightning-fast renovation that would have the damaged offices open for business weeks before the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack. Officials had estimated that it would take eight months just to clear away the wreckage. Defense Department photo

FORTRESS REBORN
125 Pentagon workers were killed in the Sept. 11 attack,
but thousands more survived. It was a testament to both
the people who work there and the people who built it.

By Vince Crawley
Times staff

Sgt. Roxane Cruz-Cortes' heart races as she walks down Corridor 4, toward E Ring on the Pentagon's first floor.

"I can still smell the smoke," she says, her voice unsteady. She looks around uncomfortably, as though she sees something other than the corridor's clean, newly rebuilt, freshly painted walls.

Here, a year earlier, most of the first- and second-story offices were obliterated by a hijacked passenger jet, killing 125 in the Pentagon, 59 passengers and crew on the plane and five suicide terrorists.

Cruz-Cortes, a 21-year-old Army personnel specialist from Trenton, N.J., pushed and pulled wounded coworkers to safety and was awarded the Soldier's Medal for heroism. But the rebuilt area gives her something akin to combat flashbacks. She avoids going there if she doesn't have to.

Most people today will see nothing in Corridor 4 but new offices. Racing to meet a self-imposed deadline, a team of up to 3,000 construction workers labored, sometimes around the clock, to rebuild the destroyed section of the Pentagon in time for memorial ceremonies marking the Sept. 11 anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attacks in U.S. history. The cost: at least $500 million, possibly as much as $1 billion.

The damage is not visible now - except when Cruz-Cortes and the others who barely escaped the carnage close their eyes.


Roosevelt's choice

Franklin D. Roosevelt selected the Pentagon site.

For six decades, until 1941, the military was headquartered in the State, War and Navy Building next to the White House, today known as the Old Executive Office Building.

The War Department had 24,000 employees spread among 17 buildings in and around the city as the Army grew from 270,000 troops in 1940 to 1.4 million in the summer of 1941. Pondering his overcrowded facilities, Brig. Gen. Brehon Somervell, chief of construction for the War Department, hit upon the idea to create one huge building for the department's Washington staff.

Somervell was "dynamic, ruthless, impatient and above all, decisive," said Al Goldberg, the Defense Department's chief historian.

Somervell gave his top engineers a weekend to deliver basic plans for a three- to four-story, fireproof, air-conditioned building on the Virginia side of the Potomac that could house 40,000 workers.

The proposed site was deemed too swampy, so the engineers picked a tract known as Arlington Farms near the gate of Arlington National Cemetery. The plot of land had five sides, which gave the building its basic shape. The initial sketch of July 21, 1941, shows the Pentagon's distinctive exterior columns, which originally echoed the design of the Lincoln Memorial.

Gilmore Clarke, head of the District of Columbia Commission on Fine Arts, led a vocal group opposing the Arlington Cemetery site, fearing such a huge building would desecrate some of the nation's most hallowed ground.

Both Clarke and Somervell vied for Roosevelt's ear. On Aug. 29, 1941, Roosevelt took both men on a drive to view possible sites. According to Clarke's later recollection, Somervell argued so strongly for the Arlington Farms site that the president finally cut him off. "My dear general," he said, "I'm still commander in chief of the Army."

Next, they went a mile to the southeast, to the site Somervell had earlier rejected. It was a hillside leading down to a swampy plain and a recently abandoned airfield, Washington-Hoover Airport. A nearby down-and-out neighborhood was known as Hell's Bottom.

Roosevelt pointed to the location and turned to Clarke. "My dear Gilmore," he said, "we're going to put the building over there, aren't we?" Then Roosevelt turned to Somervell. "Did you hear that, general? We're going to locate the War Department building over there."

And they did. But Clarke didn't always get his way. As architects refined the five-sided shape into the one familiar today, Clarke insisted "the Pentagon presented the largest target in the world for enemy bombs." His argument "made no impression" on Roosevelt, who grew ever more fond of the distinctive design.

The official groundbreaking took place Sept. 11, 1941.


'I knew I was dead'

Exactly 60 years later, half the world was watching the World Trade Center burn on television on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Frank Probst was one of them. A Pentagon renovation worker and retired Army officer, he was inspecting newly installed telecommunications wiring inside the five-story, 6.5-million-square-foot building.

The tall, soft-spoken Probst had a 10 a.m. meeting. About 9:25 a.m., he stopped by the renovation workers' trailer just south of the Pentagon heliport. Someone had a television turned on in the trailer's break room that showed smoke pouring out of the twin towers in New York.

"The Pentagon would make a pretty good target," someone in the break room commented.

The thought stuck with Probst as he picked up his notebook and walked to the North Parking Lot to attend his meeting.

Probst took a sidewalk alongside Route 27, which runs near the Pentagon's western face. Traffic was at a standstill because of a road accident. Then, at about 9:35 a.m., he saw the airliner in the cloudless September sky.

American Airlines Flight 77 approached from the west, coming in low over the nearby five-story Navy Annex on a hill overlooking the Pentagon.

"He has lights off, wheels up, nose down," Probst recalled. The plane seemed to be accelerating directly toward him. He froze.

"I knew I was dead," he said later. "The only thing I thought was, 'Damn, my wife has to go to another funeral, and I'm not going to see my two boys again.'."

He dove to his right. He recalls the engine passing on one side of him, about six feet away.

The plane's right wing went through a generator trailer "like butter," Probst said. The starboard engine hit a low cement wall and blew apart.

He still can't remember the sound of the explosion. Sometimes the memory starts to come back when he hears a particularly low-flying airliner heading into nearby Reagan National Airport, or when military jets fly over a burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Most of the time, though, his memory is silent.

"It was pretty horrible," he said of the noiseless images he carries inside him, of the jet vanishing in a cloud of smoke and dust, and bits of metal and concrete drifting down like confetti.

On either side of him, three streetlights had been sheared in half by the airliner's wings at 12 to 15 feet above the ground. An engine had clipped the antenna off a Jeep Grand Cherokee stalled in traffic not far away.

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