Friday, May 29th was a
pretty relaxed day, in the most wonderful way. Our morning didn’t start until
11:15, which meant that we could sleep in, take our time getting ready, and
even send a few emails before we left to meet the group at the Archives metro
station. I love riding the metro. Absolutely love it. I’m from a small Ohio town
of 600 people. We don’t even have a stoplight in our town, let alone any big
cities nearby with subways or metros, so I enjoy riding the metro every chance I get (not lying, y'all). Today’s
destination: the Pentagon! Even riding the escalator up from underground, you
know you’re in the right place. Decorated military men and women are walking
everywhere, and security guards holding very, very large guns were standing at every corner. We went through security, and even the visitor waiting room was a
cool experience. We took photos at a podium and waited about an hour for our tour to start.
I couldn’t help but wonder who was in that waiting room with us. Could a 4 star
general be waiting for a meeting with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
Or perhaps a Congressman was sitting in the corner? Or maybe it was simply 8th graders
from around the country and our Ohio State group. Even so, I was excited to even be sitting inside the headquarters of the Department of Defense.
We saw some pretty cool things throughout
the tour – the central courtyard, the 9/11 memorial, the lobby area that closely resembled a mall, with banks,
credit unions, clothes stores, shoe stores, barber shops, jewelry stores, etc..
Kind of amazing the think that the 23,000 Pentagon employees would be able
to survive inside the building for six straight months if for any reason they
were unable to leave. Only about 7,000 of those employees are civilians, though
– everyone else is a member of the military. Our tour guide, an active
member of the Army, said that the central courtyard in the middle of the
Pentagon is an area where lower-ranking military members don’t have to salute
their ranking officers, and can instead enjoy a peaceful, relaxing lunch regardless of
who they run into. This 5-acre no salute zone is the largest in the world.
Another favorite story from the tour: the café
in the middle of the courtyard has always been a simple cafeteria for a lunchtime
break. During the Cold War, however, the Russians had other thoughts. They saw
the large volume of people going in and out all day and predicted that it was a
bunker, reportedly aiming their nuclear weapons at the building in the middle
of the courtyard. Years later, it was finally conveyed that this “bunker,” as
it was thought during the Cold War, was really just a lunchtime hot dog stand, now
renamed Ground Zero Hot Dogs in honor of that hilarious mistake.
At the end of the day, perhaps it would have been cool if
the tour had taken us to more than just the memorial, the escalators, the
windows, the hallways. We saw a very small portion of the Pentagon, only about 1 mile of it, compared to the whopping 17 miles of corridors. But I still can’t believe that earlier today I walked around in a
building that houses the Navy, the Army, the Marines, the Air Force, (not the
Coast Guard, they’re part of the Department of Homeland Security), the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of
Defense, and countless other important officials…I’m blown away. In that
building, decisions were made that sacrificed thousands of American lives, and perhaps
saved just as many. Today I was able to witness just a small piece of that
history. Not bad for a late morning’s start.
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