Even Soldiers Hurt

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.'"