Even Soldiers Hurt

By Andrew Goldstein/Washington

Deep inside the Pentagon, past hallways that still reek of burned metal, a windowless first-floor conference room has been transformed into a fully operational command center. Color-coded floor plans and organizational charts of key personnel adorn the walls, and teams of sturdy men and women wearing fatigues swing in and out, ready to be deployed. Air Force Lieut. Colonel Steven Vieira oversees the operation, dispatching troops swiftly but carefully. His goal is "100% contact and saturation." The enemy is not human but ghostly, flickering here and there on the faces of the nearly 20,000 Pentagon employees who once thought their building was untouchable and now walk by the west wall's football-field-size hole and its 189 people dead or missing.

Before Sept. 11, the Pentagon did not have a single full-time working psychologist. Today there are almost 100, working around the clock to make sure anyone who suffers stress, anxiety and depression knows at the very least where to find help. The military has little practice at being touchy-feely; many soldiers love the uniform because it acts as a shield against vulnerability, as a constant reminder of a mission far greater than individual sorrows or insecurities. Since the end of the cold war, old-line soldiers have grumbled that the military's warrior ethos has been lost. In the 1990s the Navy was ridiculed for giving "blue cards" to basic-training recruits to help them deal with stress. (When a recruit was beginning to feel a bit blue, he would hand the card to a trainer.)

So Vieira's teams do their best to look and talk like normal soldiers, not shrinks. They introduce themselves not as therapists but as part of the "critical-incident stress-debriefing team." Even the Pentagon's new mental-health wing, located inside the main health clinic, has a generic name: the Life Skills Center. Vieira's handouts emphasize that getting emotional "is not weakness." Says Army Major Rick Keller, a psychiatric nurse-practitioner from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington: "We know we can't get them with a big Kum ba Yah."

They get them by going door to door, to every room in the building, and by sending out e-mails and posting flyers listing the mental-health resources available. On one day last week, Vieira's teams met with nearly 500 people--some one on one, some in groups. During these meetings, the psychologists hear the same message again and again: "For the first time in our lives, we feel vulnerable. It's as if our house had been robbed."

But despite the 100% saturation, many at the Pentagon have no desire to undress their feelings. "The line community--the trigger pullers--these guys handle it differently," Keller says. "They have a unique ability to compartmentalize. When we approach them, they'll say, 'Give me your handout. I'll read it, and I'll call you if I want to.'"

The stress is most acute for some of the youngest. "A lot of these guys are just 18 years old," says Vieira. "They have never been exposed to death at this level. Some never expected to be." But even officers like William Durm, the Pentagon's chief dentist, who headed the first triage units at the scene of the attack and who has been in the Navy for 25 years, admit the emotion can be difficult to bear. "During the rescue," says Durm, "there was no time to process what was happening. It was later, when I had to pull dental records for identification and some of the victims were people I knew--I had performed root canals on a few of them--that the trauma really hit."

The coming weeks may be the toughest yet. Until now many units have been able to focus on pulling their offices together and getting people back to work. But as their tasks return to normal--last week workers stopped searching for human remains and prepared for the reconstruction--there are more opportunities to reflect. Says Lieut. Colonel Hank Cashen, a social worker normally stationed at Andrews Air Force Base: "More and more reactions and feelings are beginning to come to the surface." And with the search for remains now over, the procession of funerals will accelerate. This week, on the one-month anniversary of the attack, there will be a memorial service. To prepare, Vieira has plans to blanket the area with mental-health counselors, stationing teams in tents near the service and also at the nearby Sheraton hotel to provide support for families. Therapy tents near the Pentagon? It's the dawn of a new era. "We're more sensitive now," says Vieira. "America is more sensitive."