My career in the Navy probably included more time at the Pentagon than at sea. The Pentagon, legendary nerve center of the world’s largest military establishment, is known by such nicknames as the “puzzle palace.”
As a reserve public affairs officer in the 1970s and 80s, I went to the Pentagon for my annual active duty every third or fourth year because that’s where public affairs officers are needed – and where they go if they wish to advance.
The Pentagon is the world’s largest office building with more than 6 million square feet and 30,000 people. It’s practically a self-contained city with a shopping mall, bus terminal and subway station. The building dominates the landscape, though I once encountered a Washington cab driver who was unable to find it.
The Pentagon is a typically functional, no-frills government office building. Its unique architecture is confusing at first but there’s a system to it: Five sides, five floors, five concentric “rings” separated by air shafts. It’s easy to figure out that Room 2B315 is on the second floor of the B ring, and the best way to get there is to take Corridor 3 across the radius of the building instead of walking around the B ring.
The first time I worked in the Pentagon I came across an exterior wall at one end of the building, and looked out the window to see a pipe discharging viscous matter into a dumpster. This was where classified documents were shredded and converted to pulp, I was told. Aha, the output of the building! I figured there was a loading dock at the other end where paper was delivered.
Even though it’s a military headquarters, the Pentagon is not particularly warlike. Many of the people there are civilian employees. If you see people engaged in intense conversation in the cafeteria they probably are talking about their pensions and not about nuking the bad guys.
It’s more egalitarian than a military base, perhaps because there are so many high-ranking officers that the customary perks of rank are impractical. Nobody salutes inside the building and everybody works in a spartan office or cubicle. Generals and admirals probably have a private lunchroom somewhere, but everybody else stands in line at the cafeteria. The relatively modest trappings must be disappointing for senior officers who are treated as deities on the average military base.
I wound up parking in a Pentagon lot so distant it may have been in another state. As I trudged across the acres of North Parking I could feel my white summer uniform wilting in the Washington humidity. By the time I reached the building, I looked like a Good Humor Man who’d been mugged. I was particularly demoralized one morning when I encountered a group of Marines in exercise gear who were running around the building. Only three more laps, guys!
Even though the Pentagon is considered a temple of bureaucracy, the organizations where I worked were very efficient, sometimes more so than my corporation in Chicago. As a staff organization, the Navy Office of Information had relatively few layers of management with ready access to our admiral.
Getting the approval of other organizations entailed a process known as “chopping” (a slang term that may have had its origins in ancient China). We would attach a cover sheet to the document listing the organizations whose approval we needed. Then I’d walk the document to each office to get their “chop,” usually from an officer on duty who was authorized to sign off for his group. This required some shoe leather, but I once got approval on a letter for the Secretary of the Navy in a day. Today they probably do this even faster by email.
An open-air courtyard at the center of the building is an inviting park with trees, grass, food stands and occasional band concerts. At lunchtime my colleagues and I would eat hot dogs and make idle wagers about the number of Soviet missiles targeted on our particular park bench.
In one tour of reserve duty I worked on a special project in a makeshift task force office on the lower level of the building. The windowless office was crowded and I sat next to a commander who recently had been the skipper of a nuclear missile submarine. At lunch one day, I asked him how it felt to go from the prestige of commanding a capital ship to being an ordinary working stiff in the Pentagon. “It’s certainly a drop in status,” he said. “But I get to go home at night.”