The Tank

Yesterday was one of the biggest honors of my life.

I woke up, put on a suit and checked out of the Ritz Hotel at Crystal City, Washington DC, with my colleague, Nick Skytland. We had been invited to give our "Generation Y Perspectives" presentation to the wives of our nation's military top brass, as part of the military spouses' effort to understand this newest generation of service men and women to better provide family assistance programs mainly for soldiers serving overseas.

We had to print out the list of DoD senior leadership with their pictures next to their names so we knew who we were addressing if they happened to be there. My McDonald's coffee spilled going through the security checkpoint outside the Pentagon, prompting the guard to announce to the tiny room as if he were addressing an entire army on the battlefield and his megaphone had snapped in half: "Do not send coffee through the metal detector!"

Embarrassing.

Inside, we met up with Master Chief Belinger who would be our escort. He brought us inside where we met a young gentleman with an "honor guard" badge on his chest. I wish I could remember the man's name, but to be honest, I don't. He was about 5'10, brown hair, young face, and had just come back from tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

He told us about the history of the Pentagon and stopped at each exhibit lining the long white hallways to give us more information about the storied past of our nation's military and its headquarters fortress. He then took us to the 9/11 memorial, at the site where the plane hit the building, just over 7 years ago.

Has it really been THAT long?!?

I remember being in my dorm room freshman year, climbing down from my bunk and checking my computer, seeing an image of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. I hadn't even registered that it had been real- I think my first thought was that it was a movie special effects shot... then I read more and thought, "wow, how could that pilot be so stupid to run into a building?" I thought it was probably a tiny cessna at first.

Amazing how naive the world was at that instant. It wasn't until I went to the public bathroom down the hall for a shower and someone said, "Did you just SEE WHAT HAPPENED?!?! ANOTHER PLANE HIT THE SECOND TOWER!!!"

It was then that we all realized we were under attack. Several guys crowded around my tiny dorm room TV as the news stations tried to figure out what was happening. We were watching in horror as the first building collapsed right before our eyes.

I ended up going to class. I can't believe we had class that day, looking back, though I'm pretty sure they'd all been cancelled by the afternoon. I remember hugging my friend Brooke from Philly who had an uncle who worked in the towers. She was crying and I told her that I was sure he probably got out in time.

Turned out that he did.

Now I was giving a briefing in one of the main conference rooms of used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. They called the room "The Tank". The previous presenter before us was the man in charge of the nation's entire military presence in North Africa. Talk about an intimidating act to follow...

The walls were bare, adorned only in dark oak paneling save for a massive oil painting of Abraham Lincoln sitting on a stool in a small room surrounded by three of his generals seemingly looking down upon the conference table. (EDIT: I later found out this painting is called “The Peacemakers” by George P. A. Healy and depicts a historic meeting where Lincoln, Major General William Sherman, General Ulysses S. Grant, and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter discussed ending the Civil War on the Union steamer River Queen on March 27, 1865).

I stood behind a podium and watched the expressions of the wives change- in a good way, mostly- as we kicked off an engaging discussion about the factors that have shaped "Generation Y" and the ways we communicate. As I spoke, I couldn't help repeatedly glancing over at Honest Abe, maybe to see if he was still listening or if he'd checked out already, only to ponder more important issues. Like slavery. Or winning a war. Or re-connecting a divided nation.

I was awed and humbled to think of the weight of the decisions that had been made, and will be made, in "The Tank". Abe didn't get up to leave and nobody threw any rotten vegetables at Nick or me. It was one of the most memorable seventy-five minutes of my life.