Cold is the Sea

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To most of the outside world, the Pentagon, is a huge five-sided pile of cement, looming squat and commanding on the Virginia bank of the Potomac River across from Washington, D.C. It contains the offices of the Secretary of Defense, the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military Chiefs of the three Services. Behind their windows in the impressive, four-story, two-block-wide façade, these important personages can doubtless draw inspiration from the wide patriotic vista spread before them: it encompasses the mighty Potomac River in a single grand panorama from its confluence with the shallow Anacostia to Georgetown (the colonial “head of navigation”). The Lincoln Memorial on its banks, the spire of the Washington Monument and the Capitol dome all rise as if from a garden above the low screen of green bordering the river. One can visualize the high councils taking place behind those severe windows, the critically important, low-voiced briefings, the great decisions by which United States military policy is determined.

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