Pentagon9/11

Brick by Brick
by Malcolm McConnell

(reprinted from Reader's Digest, Sept. 2002)

MICHAEL FLOCCO veered into his driveway in Newark, Del., and dashed from the pickup truck. It was almost 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. The stocky sheet-metal worker had rushed back from a construction site in nearby Wilmington to join his wife, Sheila, after learning of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon. Their son, Matthew, a Navy meteorologist, was assigned there. Michael found Sheila sitting on the couch sobbing. Replays of the flaming World Trade Towers and live coverage of the Pentagon flashed across the television screen.

"The office doesn't answer," Sheila said. "And all I get is his voice mail on the cell phone."

Michael sat in his dusty work clothes, his arm around his wife, and struggled to make sense of the chaos on the screen. The Pentagon's gray limestone facade looked like a cardboard box someone had kicked a hole through. Dark smoke billowed, and flames licked up from a collapsed roof slab. The worst of the devastation appeared confined to the "Army" side of the Pentagon. There would be no reason for Matthew to be there. Would there? So they continued to call. Each time their own phone rang, Michael grabbed it, certain he'd hear his son's voice.

By 9 p.m. the tone of the news reports had changed. "Navy personnel appear to head the list of dead and missing." Pictures on the TV now showed that the exploding jet could easily have penetrated the D-ring, the band of corridors where Matthew's office was located. Matthew, their only son, the boy they adored. Pictures of him -- brown eyes, big grin -- stared back from around the room.

Throughout the TV replays of the collapsing Trade Towers, Michael's glance shifted from one photo to the next. Matthew with the striped kitten -- had he been five? At ten, smiling in his yellow soccer jersey. Lanky at his high school prom.

Another shot: During his first visit to the ocean, the little boy's face wrinkled at the taste of the salt water. Michael could still feel the heat of the sand as he knelt beside him, patiently explaining the difference between the water in a wading pool and the vast Atlantic. The first real word the boy had spoken was mathematics. So Michael, the construction worker, had taught his son the geometry of the natural world. The boy had been delighted to recognize a perfect spiral in a flower held between his father's fingers.

By fourth grade, Matthew was bored with cartoons on TV, and his dad often returned to find him lying on the floor, absorbed in the blue and red curves of the low-pressure systems swirling across the Weather Channel maps. Matthew was always the kid with his head in the clouds, the stars, the sky.

He hoped to got to college, even thought the family's savings would not stretch far. With strong SAT scores, and great moves on the sports field, his dream had been an athletic scholarship, but an injured elbow got in the way.

So Matthew enlisted in the Navy. His plans were to complete his enlistment, earn a bachelor's degree, and then re-enter service as an officer. After training as a meteorologist, he was selected for a coveted assignment at the Pentagon. His boyhood fascination with weather would now become his profession.

That Tuesday night, Michael tried repeatedly to contact Navy headquarters. But the circuits were busy, the steady methodical beep maddening. The next day, Sheila called every hospital in Washington and Northern Virginia. All the while, Michael was gripped by a growing fear dial Matthew was dead.

The grim news did not reach them until early Sunday afternoon—five full days after die attack. Naval Reserve Lt. Cmdr. Douglas Hanson arrived with a chaplain. He confirmed that Matthew's body had been identified. The four floors above Matthew's office had collapsed into a heap of fire-seared rubble, crushing everything below.

Sheila and Michael now faced unremitting grief. On Sheila's part, there was some comfort in faith. Matthew was in a better place, she believed. But for Michael, prayers brought no peace. At night he roamed the house, unable to sleep. Nothing helped: not the alcohol he drank, not friends who gathered near. Even in their presence, he felt nothing but despair.

Work, he thought. The only possible thing to do now was work. His son's office had been blasted apart. He was going to find a way to fix it. He contacted Bob Woods, business agent of his Sheet Metal Workers International Association Local 19, requesting temporary placement with Local 100, the union responsible for Pentagon reconstruction. It would be a tough job, but Woods knew it offered the rare chance for a grieving parent to find a way to build things back.

"My wife and I lost our only child, our only son," Michael wrote Bill Phares, the Local 100 business agent in November, adding that he wanted to help rebuild "that part of the Pentagon where our son died." Phares assured Michael there'd be a job once the rubble was cleared and the reconstruction—officially called Phoenix Project—began. The effort would be huge, with a near impossible deadline: restoring the destroyed offices for occupancy by the first anniversary of the attack.

WITH SHEILA'S BLESSING, Michael used some of Matthew's insurance money and bought a 24-foot Winnebago Minnie to be his home while he worked.

He parked the RV at a campground just off the Capital Beltway, and 25 miles north of his new job. On January 15, 2002, his first full day on the work site, he was stunned when he saw that the pavement near the helipad still bore black, sooty gouges made by the exploding airliner. It was as if a derailed freight train had seared a path through the solid concrete.

Michael had tried to prepare himself for what it would be like to be on-site, but he realized he hadn't come close.

He approached the crew foreperson, Charlotte Hart-man. "Charlotte," he said, "I need to see the spot where my son died." When he told her Matthew's office number, Hartman flopped down dusty blueprints of the D-ring ground floor before the attack, and then slid a transparent plastic overlay on top and matched the positions of the destroyed offices with the lines of new columns.

Charlotte guided him through the maze of new concrete columns and yellow steel scaffolding supporting the freshly poured second-floor deck overhead. Glancing back and forth at her clipboard, she pointed to an area of the concrete floor. "Stand right here. This is where he was." Then she left him alone.

It was chilly, the air heavy with the particular dankness of slowly curing concrete. Michael fought a wave of dizziness, and the impulse to get out. The familiar din of a construction site—whining power tools, hammers and the clang of forklifts depositing loads—grounded him.

"Here I am, kid," Michael told his son. "I know your spirit still has to be here, too, because of the way you were taken from this earth." He paused. "Matt, we're going to rebuild this place together, one piece and then another, right back to the way it was before you died." For the first time in months, he felt the aching grief begin to loosen.

Gathering his tools, Michael noted the grid numbers marking the site of Matthew's office. He would return there every day. Back at the RV, he hung a Navy flag above his bed. An iron anchor; a frigate coursing through waves of white and blue. For the boy who'd loved the ocean, the man who through his service to the Navy, was now forever linked to the sea.

MICHAEL INITIAL SHIFTS were 10 or 12 hours, 7 days a week. Climbing scaffolding to hoist and wedge long, awkward sections of ductwork into place was exhausting. But he didn't complain. He just set the alarm for 4:10 a.m. and made the one-and-a-half-hour drive through the early traffic to begin his shift at six o'clock.

Some mornings, Michael stood in the glare of the construction lights and took pictures to build a record of the building's transformation. By late spring, corridors took shape and the floors were tiled. Michael could sense the building coming alive around him.

In April, Michael met with Lt. (j.g.) Nancy McKeown, Matthew's supervisor, one of the last to see him alive. From her, Michael learned that Matthew and his friend, Petty Officer First Class Edward T. Earhart, had watched the TV coverage of the first Trade Tower collapsing. McKeown had ordered them to program weather updates for military aircraft converging on New York. Matthew was working at his desk, back to the outer wall, when the hijacked airliner struck. Lieutenant McKeown was thrown under her desk, but clawed her way to safety. "Neither one of them suffered," she told Michael. "The plane smashed through their office in an instant. One moment they were alive, the next they were gone."

He was killed doing his duty, Michael realized. Killed doing the thing he loved. For the first time in months, pride at Matthew's courage began to outweigh inexpressible pain.

MICHAEL FLOCCO decided to stay on the job at the Pentagon through the September 11, 2002, ceremony of remembrance for those killed and injured in the terrorist attack. He and Sheila would fold the Navy flag hanging over his bunk and bring it to the service in remembrance. Until then he would keep working. Piecing things together with his strong, skillful hands. The only way he knew how.