March 11, 2002

11:28 AM

Survivors Healed, but Not Whole"But hearing the story of how Patty crawled out of that room, dutifully dragging her behemoth purse (it weighed a ton, it seemed, with enough odds and ends to supply an army), and this as her colleagues were stripping off their clothes and lapping up water off the floor in a desperate struggle to escape the terrible heat and stay alive -- that was funny. A half-year after the attack, the reconstruction of the Pentagon is racing along, with crews repairing the broken facade and ready to start roof work today, the six-month anniversary. Harder to mend are the souls of those who were there Sept. 11."
posted by owillis (2 comments total)

It's probably a combination of the secretiveness of the military and the smaller numbers involved and the remoteness from the media capital of New York, but the Pentagon doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves in all this. There are some photos of the damage on places like defenselink and FEMA (overseers of Arlington SAR). The irony is that the people in WTC who were this close to the blast ... mostly didn't get out. The fire was hundreds of feet in the air, remote and unreachable. Unknowable. The people in the Pentagon lived through it up close.
posted by dhartung at 11:41 AM on March 11, 2002

I live on the hill overlooking that side of the Pentagon. If I walk one block to the end of my street I can watch the construction going on. I'm just really glad I wasn't at home when that plane hit. It's cowardly of me, but I don't think I could have handled being so close to so much death. (The cats were sort of skittish and haunted looking for s few days afterwards.)
posted by Fenriss at 11:46 AM on March 11, 2002