ARMED FORCES: The House of Brass

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Squatting hugely across the Potomac from Washington, it is a defiant enclave of non-segregation in segregated Virginia: Negro & white personnel use the same rest rooms and eat in the same dining rooms. Its teeming workers communicate with each other through 2,100 intercoms, 15 miles of pneumatic tubes, and the world's largest private branch telephone exchange. The Pentagon switchboard, Liberty 5-6700, plugs in 40,000 telephones and is growing at the rate of 200 phones a week. Every military man working in Washington (inside the Pentagon and out) is on the exchange. The Defense phone bill: $4,000,000 a year.

Except for electric power, which it buys, the Pentagon is as self-sufficient as a city. Most of its 31,300 inhabitants—of whom only 10,000 are uniformed, the rest civilians—are fed in six cafeterias, at ten snack bars, or at the pavilion in the middle of the central courtyard, surrounded by beach umbrellas. There are two private dining rooms, one for general officers, another for field-grade officers (lieutenant colonels and colonels eat from 11:30 to 1, majors either before or after). The Secretary of Defense and the chiefs and secretaries of each service have their own dining rooms where they and their guests eat in sacrosanct seclusion. There are two hospitals, a television-radio studio which transmits three nationwide programs each week. Underneath the River Entrance there is an officers' club and gymnasium with five handball courts, Turkish baths and four bowling alleys.

In the low-ceilinged concourse, 21 broad stairways lead to 28 bus-loading stations where 750 buses load and unload the building each day. The concourse's walls are lined with shops where the Pentagonian can buy a uniform or a brassiére, a bestseller or a funeral wreath, a birthday cake or a railroad ticket, get a haircut or a loan. Once a guiding officer boasted to visiting General Henri Giraud that the Pentagon office girl could buy both a wedding ring and a baby carriage within its walls. The Frenchman asked: "Which do they buy first?"

Guards & Sewage. Just to service and guard this vast machine takes about 1,000 men & women. A daytime visitor no longer needs a pass to enter the building as in wartime, but some 170 security officers prowl its corridors, bar the unauthorized from restricted areas. There is but one chimney atop the Pentagon; black smoke rising from it is a sign that sergeants are busy burning classified papers.

Four workers are assigned the sole task of replacing the 600 light bulbs which burn out each day. Another four are professional clockwatchers; their job is to keep an eye on the master control panel on which 4,000 Pentagon clocks are synchronized. Carpenters pedal from job to job on bicycles. The day's waste paper (ten tons of it, not including classified material) is trucked away and sold for an average $80,000 a year. In an outlying building, the sewage is processed and tidily packed for use as fertilizer on the Pentagon's surrounding lawns.