DAVID A. DRABKIN
Posted by Mariah Walters
Not long after 9/11, I received an e-mail from a person I’d never met. She thanked me for the work that I had done as the Defense Department’s deputy program manager on the Pentagon Renovation Program.
The e-mail explained that the writer’s husband was an Army employee who, on 9/11, had only recently moved back into Wedge 1 of the Pentagon. The plane that was flown into the Pentagon hit the newly renovated E Ring part of Wedge 1.
Work that we had decided to add to the renovation program — the reinforcement of the walls with steel beams, the installation of Kevlar within the walls and the installation of bomb windows — had all worked together to give the writer’s husband extra time to get out of the Pentagon before the outside walls collapsed.
Our work had saved her husband’s life.
The writer said she had learned I had been instrumental in the decision to reinforce the walls and that, in her opinion, those decisions had been responsible for returning her husband to her safely that day.
That e-mail is lost, but I will never forget it or that a decision I participated in had such significance in one family’s life.
Drabkin is acting chief acquisition officer at the General Services Administration.