Father Neil McNicholas: A guided tour to terror as the US began to build again

TEN months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States,

I happened to be visiting a friend in Washington DC who owns a construction company.

Through contacts within the business, he was offered the opportunity to see the reconstruction work being carried out on the Pentagon to repair the damage caused on 9/11 and he asked if I would like to go with him on the visit.

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It was an opportunity not to be missed, though I wondered if I would even get in, not being American. Non-US visitors may well be able to join official tours of the Pentagon, but it might be a different matter being admitted to an area that was not usually open to tourists albeit empty and under construction.

We had to be there very early in the morning – work was going on round-the-clock but early morning, before the day shift arrived, was a more convenient time to be shown around.

For security reasons, we had been asked to bring some form of ID and I did the same as everyone else and handed in my US driver’s licence (I still held a valid Florida licence having been at university there). I basically then said very little so no one would question my accent.

My friend’s business contact was in charge of the reconstruction project and it was he who was going to show us around. He began by explaining the full extent of the damage caused to the north-west segment of the building when the plane flew into it on the morning of 9/11, and the horrific situations that he had had to deal with when he was called in immediately afterwards.

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We were gathered in what had been the control tower for the Pentagon’s heliport – a small building very close to where the aircraft had struck. It was now being used as the project construction office but it still bore the scars of the damage caused by the explosion and fire.

The Pentagon building itself was by now almost completely repaired – or at least on the outside. The initial estimate for the work had been three years but there had been a determination from the outset that the reconstruction would be complete, and the north-west segment reopened, in time for the first anniversary – an amazing goal that in the event was proudly achieved.

And so, looking at the building from the outside, it was hard to believe the devastation that had been caused.

Things were a little different on the inside. Some of the office space that had sustained less damage had already been repaired and was ready to be occupied once again. The section of the building where the plane had struck, and which had been totally destroyed, had obviously taken longer to rebuild and repair.

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We walked through large open areas – more like a parking garage than office space – between all the new supporting pillars where walls remained to be built. Here and there, there were still signs of damage – scorch marks and the holes made by flying debris – yet to be repaired.

It was an eerie and sobering experience to stand in a space where an aircraft had flown in and where 184 innocent people had perished. It was also a unique privilege, as a priest, to be able to stand right there and quietly pray for those who had lost their lives.

We also visited one of the interior roadways that separate the five “rings” of the Pentagon, looking at a huge hole that had been punched in the wall by, we were told, one of the plane’s engines, and to stand where it came to rest – hard to imagine. Indeed, everything that had happened there on 9/11 was hard to imagine.

Our visit concluded with a brief tour of adjacent areas of the Pentagon where the day-to-day business of the building was going on as normal despite the nightmare of what had happened there just a matter of months before.

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By 9:30am, our visit was over. It had been a unique experience, a unique privilege, and one not easily forgotten.

In a very small way, it certainly personalised things when I later watched documentaries about the events of 9/11, but it is a universe away from the actual experience of those caught up in the unspeakable horrors and tragedies of that day.

Father Neil McNicholas is a priest for St Hilda’s Parish, Whitby

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