Tear - stained spreadsheets

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:( Washington Post

October 10, 2001

Pg. B1

Tear-Stained Spreadsheets

Army Office That Lost Half Its Staff Reconstructs A Year's Work

By Steve Vogel, Washington Post Staff Writer

Robert Jaworski huddled with assistants in his Pentagon office, anguishing over a schedule of funerals for 34 of his employees. The big white calendar on the wall was filling fast, and Friday was a particular concern.

"There's one at Fort Belvoir at 10, another one at a different chapel at Belvoir at 11, there's an 11:30 in Dumfries, there's an 11 in Manassas," he said. In the afternoon, there were two more, one of them in Georgia. Most had been Jaworski's colleagues for years.

"What funeral do you go to? How do you have that choice not weigh on you?" he asked. "It's a dilemma you never visualize getting put into."

Resource Services Washington, the close-knit Army office that Jaworski runs, lost more people than any other Pentagon office when a hijacked plane struck the building on Sept. 11. More than half of his approximately 65 employees were killed. In one division, the only workers who survived were out of the office when the plane hit.

It is a casualty rate rarely seen by American combat forces, akin to what a few companies suffered landing in the first wave at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

Those who died in Jaworski's office were not warriors. They were budget analysts and accountants -- most of them civilians -- who had been busy closing out the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. "These were ordinary people, at their desks, doing their jobs," Jaworski said.

In the days and weeks that have followed the attack, traumatized survivors have banded with volunteers from other offices -- most of them friends and former colleagues of those killed -- to complete the budget documents the terrorist attack left unfinished.

Working up to 18 hours a day, through tears and memories and destroyed records, they managed to close out the fiscal year and are now firing up the fiscal 2002 budget.

"It's a phenomenal thing that's occurred," said Sharon Weaver, who led the budget division until several years ago and recently came back to help. "Actually it's been a miracle."

Her close friend Ada Mason, who took over when Weaver left, is among the dead. Indeed, the budget division lost 24 out of 28 workers. Of those who survived, one was on leave, two were in the restroom, and one had just returned from a doctor's appointment in time to see the jet plunging into her section of the Pentagon.

Last week, Jaworski gathered what was left of his staff and told them that what they had accomplished was a tribute to their fallen co-workers and the work they had done before the attack. But more trials were ahead. The office would be reconstructed, with new people hired to replace those lost.

He told them about the flood of pending funerals and memorial services. It would be impossible for everyone to attend every service, he said. But no one would be buried alone, without colleagues on hand.

People comforted each other, passing tissues, patting shoulders, rubbing hands. They ended the meeting by joining hands and praying.

"It's going to take a long time before we ever get to normal," said Jaworski, director of the office for 12 years. "We've redefined normal to basically mean survival."

The scope of the disaster that befell Resource Services Washington was not immediately apparent to those who survived it.

"You couldn't get a fix on who was missing," Jaworski said. "In a normal process, you would rely on a supervisor where their employees might have been. In our situation, there were no more supervisors."

Half the office -- the budget and accounting divisions -- had moved two months earlier into newly renovated space on the west side of the Pentagon, on the outer ring near the heliport.

Jaworski, who had yet to move, was supposed to attend a meeting in the new office on the morning of Sept. 11, but his plans had changed the night before. The meeting was to start at 9:45 a.m. -- about the same time the jet hit.

Hearing the explosion and evacuated from the Pentagon, Jaworski saw thick clouds of black smoke coming from a spot near where many of his workers had moved.

Initially he thought his staff might have missed the worst of it. But there was no way of knowing.

From home, Jaworski and others began calling the families of the budget and accounting workers to find out who had heard from their loved ones. Almost nobody had. Some said they had been on the phone to husbands or wives or mothers about the attacks in New York when the line went dead.

In the hours and days that followed, those who survived learned how many of their colleagues were among the 125 Pentagon employees who didn't. The list went on and on: Ada Mason, who'd been a mainstay in the office for nearly two decades. Dave Laychak, with his young children. Capt. Cliff Patterson, who had a 3-year-old. Carrie Blagburn and Brenda Kegler, inseparable friends. Terri Martin and Cortez Ghee, who'd worked there for years.

"I wanted to cry," said Cheryl Reed, a longtime employee. "I couldn't cry, because there were so many to cry for."

The office essentially pays the bills for the Department of the Army Headquarters -- more than $3 billion worth. To keep cash flowing, Army agencies around the world were relying on the staff to balance accounting and budget records by Sept. 30.

"Essentially, we were decimated at the worst time of the year," Jaworski said.

Even as he and other officials consoled families, Jaworski began assembling a "shadow organization" that could reconstruct and close out the year.

The call went out for volunteers familiar with the office's procedures, and they came from across the Pentagon and across the country.

Shirley Freelon, who'd leftthe department in 1999, came back from Texas, where she was working as a budget analyst at Fort Bliss. "I explained to my children that it was something I needed to do, because I felt like I owed it to my friends. We were a family, and I feel like I lost a part of my family."

Freelon came back to find some of her best friends -- Brenda Gibson, Janice Scott, Robert Russell -- gone. "I knew it would be hard when I came back, but to actually walk in the office and not be able to see them, it really hits you," she said. John Olson, who in years of working at another Army agency had developed a friendship with Cortez Ghee, volunteered to finish Ghee's work.

Initially, they had no place to work, with the budget offices reduced to "burnt rubble," Jaworski said. A sister organization -- the Defense Supply Service -- moved some of its people out of the Pentagon to give them a place to set up.

Much of the budget data had been destroyed and needed to be restored. "We lost everything," said Maj. Sean Hannah, another volunteer. "We lost every single paper in the office. We lost all three of the servers that stored all our electronic information, and so when we came in, the task was basically, reconstruct a whole year's worth of activity for $3.6 billion, and you've got 10 days to do it."

Much of the institutional knowledge was gone as well. "You don't realize how much you take for granted until you start asking for something," Jaworski said. "You would call so-and-so, and they always had that answer. Well, that answer's not there."

The workers consulted with other Army offices, looking for e-mails or copies of reports, anything they could use to reconstruct budgetary items that had been in the pipeline. All four of the budget division's survivors, battling survivor's guilt and fears of returning to the Pentagon, went back to work. Gradually they reconstructed the budget information that had been lost.

Every day, not far away, the bodies of their friends were being pulled from the rubble. Early on, Jaworski called meetings to announce who had been identified, but that soon stopped. "Frankly, it was too emotional," he said.

But there were constant, hard reminders. "Every time you'd look you'd see the names of those people who've passed," Hannah said. "Every day people are calling and saying, 'I'd like to speak to Miss Blagburn.' Well, Miss Blagburn is not here anymore. They're looking at documents which have the signature blocks of the people. They're having to relive this every day."

Motivation was not a problem. "We wanted to do that in their honor, because they worked so hard through the whole fiscal cycle; for us to let them down was unacceptable," Reed said. "We kept saying, 'You know they're looking down on us, saying, 'You go, you get those books closed.' "

Weaver said, "It made the whole office come together, and finish what they had started. We kind of put ourselves on the side of the brain that says we want to accomplish this mission."

They worked through the final weekend, staying until 3 a.m. on Oct. 1 to finish the job. They didn't celebrate, but they hugged before going home. Then they came back at 8:30 to start work on the fiscal 2002 budget.

In one sense, closing the books, with the distractions it afforded, was the easy part. Now comes the painful ordeal of so many funerals for so many friends. "Five funerals in a day," Jaworski said. "It's going to get worse before it gets better. It's going to take an emotional toll on everybody."

Just beyond that are difficult long-term decisions.

"One of the big concerns, and we're going to see more of this, is that some folks feel they don't really want to be in the building anymore, and I understand that, and I'm not sure how we collectively are going to deal with that," Jaworski said.

"Everybody's here. They may be physically present. I know at times they are mentally trying to deal with a lot of this. That's understandable. If it doesn't impact you, there's something wrong."

[Watered Garden]

Thank you for posting this article. Not all the heroes were in uniform.

WG