Forging a Lasting Tie to Victims Of the Attack on the Pentagon

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Emotional Scene as Final Memorial Benches Take Form

Family members of victims from the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the Pentagon discuss their emotions as they watch the final memorial benches take shape at MetalTek foundry in Pevely, Mo.

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Neither man, nor the company, had worked on anything like the benches before. Each bench is 14 feet long and weighs 1,100 pounds, a rustproof, corrosion-proof cantilevered arc of stainless steel.

Engineers said the benches were extremely difficult to make, even for a company that specializes in making precision parts for undersea oil exploration. The technical challenges forced innovations in techniques and equipment to prevent the narrower sections of the steel from warping as they cooled. If measurements were off by as little as a quarter of an inch, the massive objects had to be recast.

"The benches aren't just a casting; they're a work of art," MetalTek President Jerry Markham said. It took the company and the memorial's designers four years to perfect the prototype and the production method, he said. Workers then began making three to four a week.

From the MetalTek foundry, a dim, clamorous warehouse along Interstate 55, the benches are trucked north to Bucthel Metal Finishing in Elk Grove Village, Ill., just outside Chicago, where they are smoothed and polished to glimmering uniformity. After that, they're loaded on trucks and driven to Arlington.

Some 110 have already been installed at the Pentagon. The benches will be arranged according to victims' ages, from 71-year-old John D. Yamnicky to Dana Falkenberg, one of five children to die in the attack. A shallow reflecting pool of flowing water will be under each bench and will illuminate the steel at night. If a victim had family members who were killed in the attack, their names will be engraved on the bottom of the pool.

"I'm beginning to see that this will actually be built, that it'll be finished," said Wendy Ploger, whose father, Robert Ploger, and his wife, Zandra, died on their way to a honeymoon in Hawaii. "All these past years, I haven't allowed myself to think that, because we've been so focused on the details of the project."

Ploger watched the liquid metal flow into the castings and thought of how much her father, an Annandale resident who was an engineer and furniture maker, would have delighted in the scientific and technical aspects of the foundry process.

Often, Ploger said, it seems to her as if he has been gone a long time. "But then you sort of forget about what happened and think your father's there, and you can just call him," she said. "I guess it's still pretty fresh."

After losing her father, Ploger quit her job as a graphic designer and moved to New York to become a professional photographer.

"I don't know if it was because of 9/11, but I just started to realize that life was too short, and I needed to be following my passion, no matter what the cost," she said. "He would be proud of the direction I've taken."

Like Ploger, Dillard moved away from the Washington area, returning to her native Michigan to care for her mother. "It's a lonely life," Dillard said. "My husband and I had so many things we were going to do. We were in our 50s, and this was going to be our slow-down period. I think about the things he would be doing, the things he'd be saying."

When Dillard returned home after visiting the foundry, she searched online through news stories of the past few years, thinking about the changes since the day her husband was killed. The world has grown darker and more troubled, she said.

"The price of gas. The price of food. There are all these things happening to us and to the world," Dillard said. She thinks the country is divided now. She sees "the hurt, the anger, the disgust."

The memorial, she hopes, will remind people of a different time, when the country came together to face fear and grief.

"We have to go back to the days and nights following September 11th," Dillard said. "People were kind to each other, even driving down the street. I think we became a closer nation for a certain amount of time, and I don't think we're as close now as we were then."