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Reflect & remember

The Pentagon memorial to its victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is designed to encourage personal reflection.

And Kathy Dillaber, whose sister Patty Mickley was killed Sept. 11, 2001, when a terrorist-commandeered airliner slammed into the building’s west side, has mixed feelings about the soon-to-be-dedicated project.

“I hate this memorial — that it is here,” says Dillaber. “I don’t want it to be here. But it has to be. September 11 happened.”

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See video of the memorial

On the other hand, Dillaber says, she appreciates the detail, the love and caring that designers, builders and family members put into the memorial, “to do justice to all of our family members.”

The memorial is “beautiful. It is stunning,” she says. “Stop and listen.”

The water rippling underneath Patty Mickley’s cantilevered bench creates a soothing serenade, just as it does at all 184 memorial benches, each oriented along the direction American Airlines Flight 77 took on its final deadly approach and each dedicated to a victim who died that day. The sound inside the memorial site softens, almost drowns out, the constant noise of traffic on Route 27, a mere 50 feet away, and around the Pentagon.

“You lose yourself in your own thoughts,” said Jim Laychak, president of the Pentagon Memorial Fund, who lost his brother Dave on 9/11. “You don’t hear the traffic, the planes. You don’t hear the talking. A lot of families have said the same thing — that you tend to lose yourself in this place.”

The effect was intentional.

“It’s an invitation to think,” said Keith Kaseman, who along with his wife, Julie Beckman, created the design selected for the memorial. “It’s meant to convey directionality, and the magnitude of the tragedy. The benches, the layout, have no relation to anything real — they are purely design elements.

“This has to literally invite your interpretation,” Kaseman said. “Some people have really quick associations. Others won’t.”

Under construction since June 2006, the now-complete Pentagon Memorial is an understated yet graceful gravel field of cantilevers, memorial pools and paperbark maple trees that collectively honor the children, flight crew members, administrative assistants and service personnel killed at the Pentagon on 9/11 — the same morning 2,791 others died in similar attacks at the World Trade Center in New York City and in a rural Pennsylvania field.

Following its dedication on the morning of Sept. 11, the memorial will be open to the public, around the clock, beginning that evening.

The dedication ceremony will bring together about 16,000 people, many of whom have a personal connection with the tragedy. One of them is Jim Schwartz, the fire chief of the Arlington County Fire Department, which handles all fires and other emergency calls at the Pentagon.

For years, he and Pentagon officials had planned for and rehearsed responses to terrorist incidents — planning that had its roots in the 1995 sarin nerve gas attack in Tokyo’s subway system, he said. Earlier in 2001, Schwartz and others ran a tabletop exercise at the Pentagon that involved a small commercial aircraft crashing into the building.

His first unit arrived less than two minutes after the 9:37 a.m. impact. Schwartz, the incident commander for all emergency response, was on the scene eight minutes later. He saw a west lawn “littered with patients” and a flaming building façade with “some of the hottest conditions a firefighter can face, total lack of visibility in most areas.” The heat was so intense that protective equipment was largely ineffective; the firefighters couldn’t carry enough air to get to the seat of the fire and fight the flames.

That didn’t stop Pentagon personnel from skirting the worst of it and entering the building, a portion of which had collapsed, to rescue those unable to get out, Schwartz said.

“The story is often told about the job that the firefighters and the police officers did on the morning of 9/11,” Schwartz said. “The real heroes of 9/11 are the people that work in this building who did more to save lives, did more to escort their disoriented comrades out of the building — some of them coming out of the building with injured people, and going back in multiple times to effect rescues. They really did a tremendous job without the benefit of the training or the protective clothing that we have available to us.”

That morning, Dillaber, who works for the Army’s personnel division, had met her sister, a Pentagon budget analyst, at center court at 9:15. They chatted, then went their separate ways back to their offices.

“She went to the fifth corridor and I went to the fourth,” she said. “Shortly after I got back to my office, I was in the hallway walking toward another office, and heard a loud sound. I went down to the ground, then got up, and thought, ‘I have to get my purse and find Patty.’ Something didn’t feel right.”

Dillaber immediately started looking for her sister, but never made it back to her office to get her purse. Her office in the C ring was closer to the center of the Pentagon, but was engulfed in flames — her desk, she later found, had been reduced to a “nub.”

The family waited a week before Patty’s remains were identified.

“She was loving, caring and put herself last,” Dillaber said. “She adored her family. She was a terrific mommy. ... She was always trying to do things to make everybody happy. She loved Disney and balloons and pink.”

Laychak said he hopes people will come away from the memorial remembering the people who died, and remembering that they had families who loved them. “Everybody’s life interconnects with other people’s and that’s suddenly ripped apart,” he said.

After Sept. 11, Laychak said, communities pulled together to help the families of those who died. “I hope this place brings about that feeling again,” he said.

Laychak, who headed the effort that has raised more than $22 million in donations to cover the construction cost and a portion of its $10 million maintenance endowment, said he looked at this as his mission, his individual contribution. “It seems like everything I’ve ever done in my life has helped prepare me to take on this role. I looked at it as, how could I not do this for my brother?” But, he added, “Once I got into it, it was less about my brother than about all the 184 people who died.”

Despite his intimate involvement with the memorial, Laychak has so far resisted visiting his brother’s bench. “I’ve been so close to this project,” he said. “I’ve seen it evolve every step of the way. I wanted to save visiting his bench, going to see it, as something special to me that day when the park opens.”

The perspective of the memorial’s designers initially was much removed from the Pentagon, but not 9/11 itself. Kaseman and Beckman, architects and business partners, were working in Manhattan when the World Trade Center was attacked.

Keith was in midtown. Julia came off the subway at Union Square, less than three miles northeast of the massive skyscrapers, and saw the first building burning. “She turned around and asked somebody what happened,” Kaseman said. “And as she’s asking, everybody’s eyes lit up, and she turned around and saw the explosion coming out of the other one.” They learned about the attack on the Pentagon through the sidewalk grapevine.

The days and months that followed were tough. “Emotionally, there was just so much sorrow in the air,” Kaseman said. “Tears on the subways, all the time. It was a real negative atmosphere. ... So when we learned about this design competition, it was the first chance that we saw that we could ... contribute something positive to this atmosphere of negativity.

“We felt really compelled to do this.”

Keith and Julie’s design was selected in 2003 from more than 1,000 entries. The victims’ families also provided input. Final design details, planning and construction were managed by Balfour Beatty Construction, which began site work in June 2006.

Specialists created the unique, marine-grade stainless steel benches, each of which took an additional 100 man-hours of hand-grinding, straightening and polishing, according to Balfour Beatty’s Chris Hartzler, the senior project manager.

“No one’s ever built anything like this before,” he said. “It took a lot of effort by a lot of industry experts — a lot of metallurgists — to get the right detail.”

The tops of the cantilevers are inlaid with five fitted pieces of smoothed granite that provide the seat bases and a seamless segue to the gravel field. Underneath each is a 7,000-pound precast concrete basin, mostly sunken, that provides a base for the bench and makes up the glowing light pool under the memorial unit. The memorial units or benches are laid out according to the ages of the victims, progressively grouped along their birth years on stainless steel “age lines” — there’s a significant gap between the markers for the five children and the older victims.

The crunch of one’s feet on the stabilized gravel surface gives each step a crisp finality.

In addition to their parallel orientation, the benches are also positioned to show whether the victim was in the Pentagon or aboard the jet. The victims’ names are inscribed on the leading edge of each bench; if a visitor can read the name while facing the Pentagon, that person was inside the building when the plane struck, and vice versa.

At night, the individual pool lights will reflect off the bottom of each bench, providing the park’s only lighting and making the engraved names seem to float above the water.

Those involved with the project uniformly praise the teamwork that went into the effort — a process that has included poignant moments for workers as well. As the memorial neared completion, the stonemasons were emplacing the “zero limestone” — a line of stone from the original building façade, laid at the entrance to the park, and engraved with “September 11, 2001, 9:37 a.m.”

“They were setting the first piece that says ‘September,’” said Hartzler. “And they had just set it and pulled their hands off of it, and somebody looked down at their watch and said, ‘Look what time it is.’ It was exactly 9:37 a.m. And that was not planned, it was not staged. I still get goose bumps ... there wasn’t a dry eye there.”

When a visitor steps across that line, Kaseman said, “you’ll be on the gravel and know you’re in a different place.”

And just as those orange-bronze maple trees will continue to grow and shift visitors’ perspectives at the memorial, Kaseman said, “thoughts themselves will change. But the invitation will persist, well into the distant future, hopefully, if all goes well.” h

Read more on the memorial, including how to make a donation.