What does it mean when two military installations are shot at two days apart? Most likely, not much. The FBI is exploring possible links. But folks are riled, and as we have seen recently, folks who are riled like strutting around with their side arms and, who knows, maybe even taking shots at the National Museum of the Marine Corps and the Pentagon itself.
TARGET 1: The Marine Corps Museum
Someone fired five bullets into the empty museum’s windows in the early morning hours Sunday, perhaps from nearby Route 95. About 48 hours later, a half-dozen shots hit the Pentagon, some 30 miles away. Two bullets hit Pentagon windows on the third and fourth floors, investigators confirmed Wednesday, and four hit its limestone facade. Like the shots fired at the museum, those aimed at the Pentagon could have come from a nearby interstate highway. That would be Route 395, the infamous Shirley Highway dreaded by commuters since the Korean War. (Don’t think this is quite what Ike had in mind when he created what is officially known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.)
“Do you think it was one shooter or multiple shooters?” one of my intrepid colleagues asked Steven Calvery, director of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (shades of Dallas, 1963). In an answer sure to excite the grassy-knoll crowd, Calvery didn’t respond. But he did note that the Pentagon’s videotapes of the scene contain no audio tracks (such a track from a Dallas motorcycle policeman’s open mike on November 22, 1963, kept JFK conspiracy theorists busy for years). In addition to Calvery’s Pentagon Force Protection Agency and the FBI, he said the investigation is continuing with help from the Virginia and Arlington County police, and the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
TARGET 2: The Pentagon
Just like the military itself, with its increasing emphasis on cruise missiles and remotely-piloted drones, the latest shooter(s) favors stand-off attacks. That may be because the last guy to assault the Pentagon directly — John Bedell, who fired on guards at a Pentagon gate March 4 — was quickly shot and killed. But amid economic strife and on the verge of nationwide elections, the fact that anyone is firing on any buildings for any reason is profoundly disturbing, and, more dishearteningly, sad.