Letters

The Five Rings of the Pentagon

How It's Used

“It took only 16 months to advance from the first spade turning to completion of construction. The Potomac itself supplied much of the building material, with 680,000 tons of sand and gravel being dredged from the river bottom to make concrete. Construction proceeded in a clockwise manner, with the last section being reserved for elements requiring the most time to design and build. Even so, the first tenants—employees of Army Ordnance—were moving in as early as April of 1942. It was not possible just then to install permanent directional markers, and people soon were getting lost. That led to such legends as the man who entered the building on a Tuesday, wandered through the labyrinth until Saturday, and finally emerged—in Philadelphia. [NOTE: A similar legend tells of a Western Union messenger in a green uniform getting lost in the building and finally emerging three days later as a lieutenant colonel.] Another tale told of a woman who rushed up to a guard and exclaimed, ‘Quick! You have got to get me out of here. I'm about to have a baby.’ The guard remonstrated, ‘You never should have come in here in that condition.’ ‘I wasn't when I came in,’ she snapped back.

“Yet the basic layout was simple: five concentric rings linked by ten major numbered corridors resembling the spokes of a wheel. Each office number carried its own directions for getting there. Room 3C273, for instance, lay on the third floor, C Ring (the third one from the center), off Corridor 2.”

“The Pentagon is getting a facelift. The building famous for its fives—five sides, five floors, five concentric rings—now has five wedges. As staff vacate their offices in the 60-year-old structure, construction crews strip the monster down to its skeleton and rebuild it, one giant pie-slice at a time.”

“The plane's impact crushed newly renovated offices deep into the Pentagon's five concentric rings, but only a portion of the outermost corridor, known as the E Ring, collapsed completely. The damage appeared even more extensive than first thought, with fire churning through the Pentagon's roof, fueled by wooden frames and horse-hair insulation from its World War II-era construction.”

“It took only eight-tenths of a second for American Airlines Flight 77 to strike the outer wall of the Pentagon, penetrate the concentric E, D and C Rings, collapse upon itself like an accordion and ignite chaos. The jet spewed thousands of gallons of fuel through hallways, offices and meeting rooms inside the nation's premier defense installation—into every place that airborne mist could go on the wings of an enormous shock wave. A series of explosions sent an ominous mushroom-shaped cloud into the air.”

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