by Steve Vogel
The momentum built through the holidays. More than a thousand workers were now on the job. They worked straight through Thanksgiving, but at Evey’s insistence—and over the protests of the workers—they stopped for two days at Christmas.
As was the case sixty years earlier, workers came from near and far for the job. The morning after the attack, two hundred laborers had lined up outside the construction gates, and as the weeks passed, tradesmen arrived from around the country, many sharing hotel rooms or apartments. Phillip Sykora left his home in Cleveland over his wife’s protests to join the project and went to work each night with a small American flag clipped to his hard hat. Samuel Mauck, a twenty-eight-year-old carpenter from Front Royal, Virginia, was working twelve-hour days, six days a week, on top of a three-hour daily commute. For him, and many others, the Phoenix Project was “a smack in the face of bin Laden. He tried to take us out, and here we are just putting it right back up.”
About 40 percent of the workers were Hispanic, most of them immigrants. The largest contingent was Salvadoran, part of a large population that had come to the Washington area during the 1980s to escape the civil war in their country. Contractor Douglas Ortiz, a native Salvadoran, had waded across the Rio Grande as a seventeen-year-old in 1989 and eventually became a legal permanent resident. Others came from Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and virtually every other Latin American country. Spanish was heard all around the job site, and many signs were bilingual. A lunch truck sold hot tamales and Salvadoran pupusas.
Whatever the nationality or job, nobody was leaning on a shovel or taking cigarette breaks. Workers chipped in wherever they were needed, no matter their trade. Highly skilled tradesmen would pick up brooms and sweep. Sheet-metal workers helped electricians. Union workers helped non-union workers. If someone on a ladder needed a tool, he didn’t have to climb down—someone passing by would get it.
Workers were putting in days as long as twenty hours. Many dayshift workers would arrive at five or six in the morning, an hour or two ahead of schedule. Stephen Ludden, a construction foreman from Virginia, would tell them they did not have to start that early, but it did no good. “They didn’t want to let up,” he recalled. Sometimes the emotion of the job would get to Ludden and he would walk over to an impromptu memorial on a grassy hill overlooking the west wall, where thousands of people had left flowers, notes, ribbons, and teddy bears, and regain his composure.
Everyone worked with purpose, perhaps no one more than Michael Flocco, a fifty-three-year-old third-generation sheet-metal worker from Delaware. Two nights before September 11, he had dropped off his son, Matthew, at the train station in Wilmington. The twenty-one-year-old petty officer was reporting back to duty at the Pentagon, where he analyzed weather patterns for the Navy.
Navy Aerographer’s Mate 2nd Class Matthew Flocco died in the Navy Command Center. For months Michael Flocco was flooded with grief for his only child. Nothing helped until he asked his union to transfer him to Local 100 in Maryland, which was providing workers for the Pentagon job. He drove his Winnebago south in January and joined the Phoenix Project. The workers embraced him, joked with him, and shared his grief.
On his first day on the job, he was taken to the spot where his son had died. “How ya doin’, kid?” Flocco said. “I’m here. And I’m not leaving until this damn place is rebuilt.”
The odd couple
Evey and Kilsheimer had formed a close bond, though they made an odd couple. Evey was polite and perpetually chipper, a short man who strolled around the construction site in a tie, giving pep talks. Kilsheimer, with his full beard and long hair, looked like a disheveled bear and had a temperament to match. For months, safety officials complained that Kilsheimer was not wearing a construction helmet. He finally got a pink hard hat plastered with Mary Kay cosmetics stickers. “My way of saying, ‘Fuck you,’” he explained.
Kilsheimer would go to sleep about 10 P.M. and sometimes be awake by midnight. A half-hour later, he would be at his office and work until 4:20 A.M., when he would drive to the Pentagon for the day’s first meeting at 4:30 A.M. He would eat an apple on the way for breakfast. Working seven days a week, Kilsheimer had never taken time to see a doctor about the toe he had broken the night of September 11. It had abscessed and gangrene had set in. Over Thanksgiving, he had part of his big toe amputated. He relied on a John Deere electric cart to get around the sprawling Pentagon grounds. He kept veering onto Route 27—a busy road with cars whizzing by—because the sidewalk was blocked. Pentagon police threatened him with arrest, but Evey pled for mercy and arranged for the sidewalk to be cleared.
Kilsheimer’s work ethic came from his parents, Jews who left Nazi Germany after the outbreak of war in Europe. They escaped from their home near Baden-Baden in southwest Germany with the help of an American reporter who, according to family lore, intervened when his mother was about to be taken off a train by guards at the French border. The family settled in Washington, and his father went to work as a butcher. Kilsheimer worked construction jobs and earned an engineering degree from George Washington University. He had four decades in the field, but the Pentagon was the event of a lifetime. “It’s like I’ve been in training my whole life for this,” Kilsheimer told his wife. “I just didn’t know it.”
Evey told Kilsheimer he was the program’s hired gun. “That’s fine,” Kilsheimer said. “Just tell them my guns are loaded and to stay out of my way.” Evey did keep people away from Kilsheimer, especially reporters; the engineer figured it was so he could do his job, but later learned that Evey was afraid of what he might say.
Whenever questions were raised about Kilsheimer’s methods or decisions, Evey stood by him. Kilsheimer himself could not always understand the blind faith Evey showed in him. “How come you let me do all this?” he once asked Evey.
The answer was that Evey had confidence—not so much in Kilsheimer, although he had that, but in himself. After a lifetime of high-stress jobs—including making life-and-death decisions for his soldiers in Vietnam—Evey was not afraid that he had made the wrong call.
Evey considered himself different from the men who built the Pentagon. He was a modern manager using motivational and organizational skills, not a general issuing orders. “I wasn’t a Somervell,” he later said. Yet there were more similarities than he recognized. Both men demanded the impossible, each with a Southern charm that masked an iron will. Their force of personality drove people to accomplish more than they, or anyone else, thought possible. They shared the same willingness to delegate authority to those they believed could do the job. Evey, like Somervell, was an adept politician, skilled at keeping superiors happy. He was hardly a martinet in the style of Somervell, yet he could make hard decisions about people who failed him. At times, Evey seemed less like a mild-mannered program manager and more like the infantry platoon leader and company commander who led soldiers in combat with the 1st Infantry Division at Quan Loi in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969.
Steve Carter, serving as a liaison between the building management and the renovation program, considered the one-year goal a nice motivational tool but wholly unrealistic. At a meeting soon after the goal was announced, he was shocked at Evey’s reaction when someone raised the need to make contingency plans in case they missed the date. Evey’s face reddened and he slammed his hand on the table. “The question at the table is not whether it’s going to get done, it’s what we have to do to get it done,” he said. “Whether it will be, there’s no question. It will be.” Anyone who felt differently needed to find a new job.
Of course, it was easy for Evey to say. He could not even read the construction drawings. Even though he was the boss, Evey often felt like a kid brother to the engineers and construction managers, poking his head over their shoulders as they studied plans. He would ask questions, and they would patiently explain. “I couldn’t understand half what they were doing,” he later said.
But Evey understood enough. “He convinced everybody that it could be done,”
Carter said. “If you’d seen what I’d seen, it was an impossible dream.”
Out of the ground
In the new year, the building started emerging from the ground. The exterior wall was going up, the second-floor slab had been poured, and columns were rising for the third floor. It was high enough that it was visible above all the trailers and clutter on the ground. Lieutenant Colonel Ted Anderson watched it rising every morning in the dark as he zipped up Interstate 395 in his black Mazda Miata, aiming to get from his Alexandria apartment to the Army Operations Center by 5 A.M. Approaching the turnoff for the Pentagon, Anderson could see the crash site illuminated by construction floodlights, lit up as brightly as the monuments of Washington. For Anderson, the drive was therapeutic. The black scar was gone.
By mid-January, the reconstruction was three weeks ahead of schedule. Construction managers divided the project into three zones, running from north to south. The work progressed wedding-cake fashion, each zone several steps ahead of the next. The strategy allowed them to sequence the work like an assembly line. Though Kilsheimer and the construction team did not realize it, the strategy was strikingly similar to that devised by John McShain and his construction supervisor, Paul Hauck. And it had similar results—the work raced forward.
As had happened sixty years earlier, design and construction were moving concurrently; drawings were frequently updated several times a day. Fabrication drawings for the reinforcing steel would be turned around in one day, and the steel delivered the next. If that were not quick enough, stock steel and a hydraulic bender were kept at hand to meet immediate needs. Every day, confronted with potential snags, Kilsheimer would make decisions on the spot to keep the work moving. “He’d say, ‘Drill here. Move this over there,’” recalled Ludden, the construction foreman. “He would know exactly what to do.”
Nothing was allowed to slow the work. When concrete trucks were hung up at security checkpoints, Evey assigned badge-carrying renovation workers to ride shotgun on each truck, making sure they got through police lines. Tower cranes swung big hoppers of concrete for a deck pour through high winds, despite fears the stress might burn out the cranes’ motors. When snow was forecast for Saturday, January 19, the day a major deck pour was scheduled, the concrete subcontractor, Facchina Construction, brought in extra workers the day before, and they poured six hundred cubic yards, double the normal volume, to keep the project ahead. (Still, that was less than a quarter of the record 2,875-cubic-yard Pentagon pour overseen by McShain in the summer of 1942.)
The goal of having the E Ring ready by September 11, 2002, meant the building had to be constructed from the outside in. It was not the most efficient way to sequence the project—the E Ring would be a barrier blocking easy access to the interior—yet the work did not slow. Contractors brought a surplus twenty-eight-ton hydraulic crane into the interior, and it swung twenty-four hours a day; the crane would be scrapped once the walls were up because there was no way to get it out. To get concrete past the rising E-Ring walls and into the D and C rings, two concrete pumps were set up inside on the slab. Trucks dumped concrete into a hopper in front of the building, and a pipeline carried it to the pumps.
Modern construction techniques allowed shortcuts in building the concrete exterior walls. The old architectural concrete walls built at the insistence of architect Edwin Bergstrom had been painstakingly created with ridges left by gaps in the wooden forms. Ironically, reconstruction managers assumed the ridges were imperfections born of haste sixty years earlier, not a carefully nurtured look. Still, they needed to be replicated, now that the Pentagon was a National Historic Landmark. This time, crews fabricated custom-made plastic liners made from molds of the existing walls. The liners were attached inside formwork and concrete poured in. After the concrete cured, the plastic liners were stripped to reveal new walls that replicated the ridges and even the grain of the sixty-year-old wooden forms.
By late February, the exterior blast wall—this time made of reinforced concrete instead of brick—was ready for limestone panels to be hung. Bybee Stone, the Indiana limestone company, had recreated the original rough, shot-sawn finish of the Pentagon’s limestone. Studying the original walls, Patrick Riley, Bybee’s drafting supervisor, recognized that the rough finish had been created by an older, horizontal gang saw. Most limestone companies had tossed the old gang saws in favor of modern saws tipped with industrial-grade diamond that made a much finer cut, but Bybee had hung on to theirs.
A crew of a hundred Bybee workers toiled through the winter, milling, carving, and planing nearly eighteen thousand cubic feet of limestone. Bybee’s fifty-thousand-square-foot mill next to Jack’s Defeat Creek in Ellettsville, Indiana, was filled with clouds of limestone dust and the sounds of buzzing saws and hammering chisels. The gang saw’s twelve-foot blades cut through twelve-ton raw limestone blocks, while water and pebble-size bits of buckshot were sprayed across the stone’s surface, replicating the look of the original stone. The first truckload of limestone had left Ellettsville with an honorary state police escort in December, and more arrived every week.
On February 25, Evey presided as the first piece of limestone was placed on the exterior. It was a major milestone, and, as usual, Evey made a big production out of it, waving his fist triumphantly as he helped guide the stone into place. After the VIPs and cameras departed, masonry workers discreetly flipped the stone over. It had been installed upside down. “We had a fifty-fifty chance, and we guessed wrong,” Evey later said.
The countdown clock
Evey changed the schedule several times to reflect the faster pace, but workers kept gaining on it. A display clock had been set up in the foremen’s trailer counting down the days until the September 11, 2002, deadline. Construction workers demanded their own. A second clock, topped with a sign bearing the “Let’s Roll” battle cry, was installed atop posts in front of the construction site in early March. Construction workers and passing drivers alike could see the large red digital display clock counting the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until September 11.
At mid-morning on March 11, the six-month anniversary of the attack, the clock registered the time left: 183 days, 22 hours, 35 minutes, and 43 seconds. In the Pentagon’s center courtyard, 184 red roses were placed in memory of each of the victims. At the River entrance, Secretary Rumsfeld paid tribute to allies in the war on terrorism; fierce fighting was under way in Operation Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan, where the Army’s 10th Mountain Division was battling al Qaeda and Taliban fighters holed up in the Shah-i-Kot Valley. At the job site, the cranes kept swinging and the workers did not pause.
On April 5, the last of the concrete was poured for the roof. The Pentagon was now weathertight and all five floors complete; the concrete frame had been completed three months ahead of the original schedule. The occasion was marked by a traditional “topping off” ceremony. A Marine Corps country-and-western band played amid the concrete pillars and duct work on the second floor. Barbecue sandwiches were served for 1,800 workers, Pentagon employees, and fire and rescue crews that had responded on September 11. Rumsfeld toured the site and razzed construction workers attending the festivities. “I was told you never stopped working—what’s going on?” Rumsfeld joked. The workers gave no ground—above their heads, they told the secretary, the final concrete was being poured.
On June 11, the nine-month anniversary of the attack, the last of 3,996 limestone panels was to be placed into the wall. A piece of the original wall—still blackened by the fire but otherwise undamaged—had been chosen. A simple inscription was carved in the stone: “September 11, 2001.” Evey was shocked when he first saw the limestone. He had forgotten how dark and damaged the building had been that day.
Hundreds of workers in hard hats formed a semicircle around the building for the ceremony. Others stood atop heavy equipment and building supplies. Evey knelt and placed a steel time capsule into an opening in the wall near the ground, where the limestone would go. Inside were photos, lett
ers from schoolchildren, badges from police and firefighters, and a bronze box with the names of the 184 Pentagon victims. The intent was that the capsule never be opened. A crane lifted the limestone off the ground, and Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary, guided the stone to its place, a few dozen yards from where the plane hit. The charred stone stood in stark contrast to the surrounding new panels.
That evening, after 273 nights, spotlights that had been trained on the damaged wall were turned off. The outside work was essentially complete, and now the main effort would be inside. There, too, the work was ahead of schedule. Workers were already running wires, hanging drywall, and laying carpet. The countdown clock showed ninety-two days left and nobody doubted that they would finish on time.
People needed to remember
Peter Murphy’s knees felt weak as he walked into his office on August 15,2002. Murphy, counsel for the commandant of the Marine Corps, was moving back in that day with twenty-one colleagues, the first employees to return to the E Ring. Murphy was apprehensive and awestruck at the same time. “It’s kind of a twilight zone, almost,” he said. “It’s a strange sensation, coming back to an office you could have been killed in.”
His fourth-floor office had been demolished in the terrorist attack, and the building had collapsed directly beyond his desk. The whole area had been razed, but less than a year later, the office had been recreated. A scarlet-and-gold Marine Corps flag again stood in the corner, and the blue drapes and the blue-and-red carpet were immaculate. Movers wheeled in Murphy’s antique desk—a gift from a former commandant—which had somehow survived. The desk was placed in the same spot it had occupied before. It was as if the clock had been turned back to 9:37 A.M. September 11, just before the plane hit.
