At the Pentagon, ‘Not Just an Assignment’

Martha Carden is the sort of no-nonsense, been-there-forever sort whom co-workers call the institutional memory of the office. But today, when she walks into her gleaming new digs down the hall from the Pentagon office she escaped Sept. 11, she will be the only memory.

Gone are 24 of her colleagues, mostly younger than she, who used to devour the cookies she baked, risk their cash in her football pool and earnestly pull den mother Martha aside for help navigating the bewildering Pentagon bureaucracy she understood so well.

Of all the people who came to work Sept. 11 at the office called DCSPER, the acronym for the Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, only Carden made it out.

“My emotion today is anger,” Carden said Friday as she began her move into the rebuilt offices. She’s a tiny woman of 53 whose silver hair and demure business suits belie the grit that has made her a survivor of 30 years in the Army bureaucracy and one hellish morning of smoke and flames.

“I am so angry that those cowards killed my co-workers for the simple reason that they were Americans. My friends had lives, and together we had a life in that office that we had made. At the time it seemed normal, everyday. We didn’t appreciate how special it was until it was gone.”

The obliteration of DCSPER by the terrorist-flown airliner that ripped directly into it did more than kill those two dozen people. It decimated in one instant a place where a small coterie of ordinary people, living ordinary lives, together added up to something extraordinary.

Carden, pulled to safety by an Army officer, was not seriously injured in the attack. She was back at work soon in temporary offices in Alexandria--a return to a job whose importance kept her going.

As Carden moves back in to an office just steps away from where her friends perished--when the plane hit, she was in a conference room about 20 yards away--she is deeply aware that what she had in her old office is gone forever. Even its name is gone, replaced by the even more anonymous-sounding G-1.

“We were like a family, a team,” said Cheryl Barron, a secretary in the office who was in Florida mourning her mother’s death when the plane hit. Two more co-workers from the office were out of the building on assignment that day.

“We were all concerned with each other. We talked about our families, our problems. It wasn’t just a job, a drudgery, not to us it wasn’t. It was a place where good people came together.”

Not an Ordinary Cog

In an organization as big as the Pentagon--24,000 people work in the massive edifice alone and many thousands more in Pentagon offices in nearby cities--it is easy to view a single office as just an anonymous cog in a vast bureaucracy.

But as cogs go, DCSPER, or “Desper” as it was pronounced, was a pretty big one.

The job of the office--whose boss, Lt. Gen. Timothy J. Maude, was the highest-ranking casualty of the attack--was to parcel out the work assigned to every unit of the Army by its military leader, the chief of staff.

It was a job that Carden, who had been at it for more than a decade, took exceedingly seriously.

“When new people would come into the office, I would sit them down and tell them, ‘You’ve got to realize where you are,’ ” Carden said. “You are not just pushing papers. You are almost at the top of the Army. You must ever, ever be mindful of where you are. What you are doing is helping the soldiers in the field get the work they need to do. This is not just an assignment.”

In the larger world of the military, where soldiers live arduous lives training and fighting in the field, the Pentagon has traditionally been derided as a world of pencil pushers. But in offices like DCSPER, there is another breed--of people, military and civilian alike, who view the Pentagon as a sailor does his ship, and who are fiercely loyal to its mission.

The office, by the account of Carden and others who had some connection to it, represented the epitome of Pentagon culture.

It was the kind of place where most people worked 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on their own initiative, even though they were paid for an eight-hour shift. It was a place where to be called a dedicated civil servant was to be paid the highest of compliments, and where women were called ma’am but were expected to be as blunt, matter-of-fact and respected as any of their male colleagues. It was, above all, a place where people were esteemed for their ability to adhere to the process, to collaborate, to get along.

“The first five rules in this building are coordinate, coordinate, coordinate, coordinate and coordinate,” Carden told young soldiers newly assigned to the office.

“When you’re trying to get a decision made, you can’t just think about your own little unit, like you could at Ft. Hood. Here you are making decisions that will affect the entire force. In this building, this is the big picture.”

In DCSPER, Carden and Maude would tease each other about their obsession with Christmas decorations: They both agreed that no month was the wrong month to buy a particularly special tree ornament.

It was an office where a colleague wouldn’t think twice of driving an ill colleague home. Once, Carden got such a ride from Sgt. Maj. Larry Strickland, who died Sept. 11. He was all concern and all gentleman, she said, until the moment she doubled over in his car, crying from pain. As they pulled up to a light, he looked over at her, she recalled wryly, and asked, “Could you maybe not do that, ma’am? I don’t want people to think I’m hitting you.”

When DCSPER moved into new offices in a renovated wing of the Pentagon--the same offices overlooking the Pentagon helipad that became the staff’s burial ground--workers took great pride in decorating. Carden brought in a prized piece of needlepoint she had made to hang on the wall. Strickland hung up a gag piece he was particularly tickled by: a plastic bass on a wooden plaque that, at the touch of a button, would wiggle to a recording of “Take Me to the River.”

Two other victims, Spc. Sunny Pak and Pat Statz, a civilian worker in the office, would disappear on their breaks and come back lugging castaway furniture from another office. Co-workers would hear the noise of another haul coming down the corridor and announce the arrival of “Sunny’s Salvage!”

Last Call to a Friend

Pak was on the phone talking to a friend when the plane hit. Her desk faced a window that lay directly in the path the plane took when it came skidding into the building, missile-like with one wing sheared off. According to the friend she was talking with, Pak cried out once, then let out a long, terrifying scream. Then the phone went dead.

Staff Sgt. Steven Goosey, 29, had been in the office for two years, working as a computer systems analyst, when he left for a training course at Ft. Gordon, Ga., about two months before the attack.

Goosey said that when he heard about the attack he felt sure almost immediately that the people he called “my life, my work family” were gone. When he was able to reach Carden on the phone the night of Sept. 11, he said he broke down at the sound of her voice, coughing, hoarse, but alive.

Telling his commander he needed to help, Goosey left his training to return to the Pentagon.

On Friday, as Carden returned to the Pentagon, Goosey was at her side.

“He was the only living person who could help me set up the office and redo everything that had been destroyed,” Carden said. “He knew all those people who had been killed. He felt the only place for him was helping me get the office going.”

Sitting at a table in the corner of a cafeteria in the rebuilt Pentagon wing--the same cafeteria Carden crawled through on all fours, her hand tight around the belt of Lt. Col. Robert Grunewald, the man she credits with saving her life--Carden said the people of DCSPER live in her thoughts every day. And she could not go on without them but for the job she believes in now more fervently than ever.

Like half a dozen others who worked in DCSPER, Carden, the unit’s assistant executive officer, is a civilian with close connections to the military. A native of rural Tennessee who is married to a retired Army colonel and has used her job to travel the world, she says she has found a home in the pace, purpose and honesty of the military life. She said that, like many other civilians at the Pentagon, she is inspired by the example and dedication she sees around her. That’s what pushes her to work 12-hour days, eat at her desk, do without breaks.

On Friday, Carden was in fine form, hugging new co-workers one moment, complaining about her desk setup and computer software the next. Her toughness emerged when she realized the reconstructed conference room from which she and eight others had fled the inferno was now lacking an escape route.

“There are nine people who owe their lives to a second door, and [the builders] will not put in a second door,” she said, literally jumping in her frustration.

“I said to those guys, ‘Why the heck didn’t you build a second door?’ They said to me, ‘Well, it meets the fire code, it meets the fire code.’ Well, it doesn’t meet my own personal code. I tell you, I’ve threatened to bring in an ax and position it at this wall so I’m ready.”