Small Things
Several months ago a book on the September 11, 2001 Terrorists Attacks on the Pentagon came through my unit at the library (a copy cataloging unit). I didn't remember the book exactly but it came through the Government documents work flow so it was likely that it was this book from the historian of the Secretary of Defense
Pentagon 9/11 [WorldCat.org]. The glyph form, 9/11, either spoken or written has no reverberation for me, overused as it has been. A mere percussion beat by grasping fools. A signifier that meaning is lent to. The day we are told the world changed. Not the world perhaps, which absorbs human tragedy on scales uncounted with great and continuing regularity. But our world, our partial world certainly, became colder in the moments of those incomprehensible tragedies, and moved closer to the edge of an indeterminate abyss that day. I was glad to see this book. Being a federal book depository we get books like this which are unlikely to make it to the corner mall bookstore. Most government documents we get in advance to the fourth floor where they lie peacefully undisturbed on their shelves for centuries. Except for the County Soil Surveys which are enormously popular.
I looked through the table of contents with interested, but also conflicted feeling. This book might answer one question I've had since that day. I knew from the papers the next day and later that week that my old office, the office where I had once worked 20 years before, a watch section in the CNO's office, had been hit and that many of the personnel had died. I wanted to know what happened to the Petty Officer of the Watch. The person who held my job.
What I remember most from those days was being in the grip of an ornery twenty-four hour watch cycle which was always changing from twelve to eight hour watches, with occasional special weekend sub-schedules thrown in. The Pentagon was a strange place filled with very strange people, And I arrived there after spending most of the previous year at sea on an aircraft carrier. Frankly it amount to two fairly disorienting years. Which I made the best of. Overnight shifts in a empty Pentagon with the better part of a mile to walk to pick up various documents from various message centers. I and the operations e-5 who had a job similar to mine would race the Widgets up and down the long hall ways of the D-corridor. Widgets were these little yellow electric mail carts which as I recall them looked like three wheeled Segways with big wire baskets on them. These were left in the hallway plugged into wall sockets. They generally belonged to offices manned by self-important civilians. I'm sure I've told this story before. I tell it again so these people know why their carts were never charged in the morning. And never will be. One of the other things I remember was one of our Lieutenants. He had come (with the intervention of officer candidate school) from a librarian job at the Boston Public Library. There, he would occasionally explain, he had been plagued by vague feelings of stifflement. He would illustrate this point by hopping up on the phone bank console and delivering a speech about standing on the leading edge of the ramparts of freedom.This is what the Navy gave him, the chance to stand there. Then he would quietly and with dignity get back down because this was the Pentagon and that sort of behavior was not to be tolerated. It was somewhere right about then I decided I wanted to get a college education. His path took him from a large library to the Navy. Mine took me from the Navy to a near meaningless clerical job at a large library. There was no notable intent to this. One thing about the past when it becomes long past is that even the future from the past is often simply more indifferent past.
The book, after I had scanned chapters and flipped through enough pages gave up an answer. The Petty Officer of the Watch; he lived through the day and with only minor injuries. Despite being in a hall section that was otherwise utterly destroyed. A small thing, but one that left me with a strangely odd sense of relief.
11:57:08 PM  ;;
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