CDR Dan Shanower. Photo Victoria
Quarters K, the legendary Navy Exchange Gas Station closed last Friday. I stopped by on Saturday, having missed my chance to stop while it was still open on Friday.
As I have mentioned in these electrons before, the Secretary of the Army is expanding Arlington National Cemetery, and they are going to rip down the former NEX facility and re-route S. Joyce Street.
I am happy on the one side that I won’t have to worry about where to get buried, only when, but always sad to lose a source of high-test fuel and vodka.
Quarters K, RIP. Photo Socotra.
That is not the only way Quarters K will always be with me. Convenient to the vast building where I worked for years, it was the go-to stop for gas, alcohol and snacks. The manager was a long-term friend. She was a formidable woman who resembled former Texas Governor Ann Richards, and we talked about the video surveillance cameras that might have caught the images of the inbound airliner, and also informed me that Quarters K was the second-highest grossing NEX in the system. It certainly was the closest point the media or civilians were permitted to get to the Pentagon after the attack, so I always have a peculiar feeling when I am gassing up and looking over at the building. The pumps face directly at the façade behind which the Navy Command Center and the CNO Intelligence Plot (IP) were located.
Once the gas station is gone, they are going to tear down the venerable mustard-colored brick of the Navy Annex and expand the available grave sites on the Pentagon Military Reservation. That sprawl includes the navy Annex, Fort Myer, Henderson hall, the DISA complex, the Pentagon itself and of course the national cemetery. That covers, roughly, the footprint of Arlington Hall Plantation, once owned by Robert E. Lee.
I try to get over to the graves of those who were killed there that day, and if I have a particular preference for decorating the graves of Dan and Vince, it is only because I knew them.
Vince was a force of nature. He was a college running back, among other things, and a devoted family guy. My association with him was mostly professional. They named the JIOC building at Tampa after him- “The Vince” is what they call it. Vince had worked at CENTCOM before coming up to join Dan in IP as his deputy. So it was natural that the Tampa crowd would claim a special link to Vince.
I was at both funerals in the sad weeks that followed the attacks.
At Dan’s, I was in the crowd that followed the family, and the caisson that carried him to his rest. Behind the horses were 250 of us, including Admiral “Fox” Fallon, Vice Chief of Operations of the Navy.
We walked down the big hill parallel to the Navy Annex, down to Section 64, the closest to the gray sandstone of the Pentagon where he perished.
The fifteen minute service at graveside included the reading of a letter of condolences from President George W. Bush. The casket team performed the rite of folding the flag until it was a perfect blue triangle festooned with stars. The lead sailor solemnly passed it to the Director of Naval Intelligence, RADM Rick Porterfield, who in turn presented the flag to Pat Shanower, Dan’s mom.
I will never forget the color of the red Virginia dirt, freshly turned, nor the way that the tough lush green turf has grown up on the graves in the decade since.
In the face of tragedy and loss, Dan’s family has found solace in an article he wrote for the U.S. Naval Institute magazine, “Proceedings.” His 1997 opinion piece, “Freedom Isn’t Free,” paid tribute to four shipmates who died when their EA-6B Prowler crashed while attempting to recover on our old ship, USS Midway (CV-41).
In the article, Dan summed up his feelings this way: “I believe that because they died in the prime of their lives in service of their country their sacrifices take on special meaning.”
Ma Midway has a very large family. She is a memorial ship now, in San Diego, but in her active life I have heard that more than a quarter million of us served in her steel plates in all the world’s oceans. Dan and I shared a special chapter of the raffish carrier’s service in the Overseas Family Residency Program, the Navy scheme to permanently forward deploy a naval strike group in the Far East.
Dan started in the Navy the way I did- forward deployed. He joined Midway-Maru’s foreign legion in Yokosuka, and got a chance to earn the ropes as an Air Intelligence Officer, doing mission planning for contingency strikes and briefing and de-briefing the aircrews on routine cyclical operations in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. That closeness to the aviation mission is one of the things that caused him to write what he did when those Prowler kids lost their lives so suddenly.
We talked about that when he reported to the THIRD Fleet staff to work for me as when I was Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence. He had a sly sense of humor and an incredible tale to tell of his broken service. He had left active duty and worked “for the State Department,” which is the polite euphemism for those people who are emphatically NOT from Foggy Bottom.
As members of the Foreign Legion we shared something that all Midway sailors did. We had a blast in Japan. Dan climbed Mount Fuji and tried to learn Japanese, and we all have a bit of pigeon Nipponese that we still shriek when prompted, (“Hai! Dozo! Arrigato, go-zai mas! Gomen na-sai!”) and at the hail-and-farewell gatherings, or in the long hours onboard USS Coronado he would captivate the Intelligence Division with sea stories.
Dan was a smart, confident officer who loved his profession. He told me the bizarre part of his career. “Working for the State Department” in the Philippines, he found that he missed his Navy. He got a letter in the mail from the Navy Department- he was on inactive reserve status at the time- and discovered to his amazement that his record had qualified him for promotion to Lieutenant Commander.
He applied for return to active duty, something that rarely happened in those days, and was picked up as a regular lieutenant commander. I met him in 1995, and I realized within two or three sentences this was one of the funniest guys, with a dry wit and an absolutely captivating personality, and smart. At his in-call with me I realized he read extensively, understood cultural differences and really was a student of life and the world.
He bought an old Chris Craft cabin cruiser to live on while he was with the staff. He worked afloat, and lived afloat. He was the life of the party.
But we were lucky to have a very talented intelligence team. Another of the Lieutenant Commanders on the staff was a red-haired Annapolis Graduate and recovering Bear’s fan named Bob Poor.
Between the two of them, we were in stitches for nearly two years. It is Bob who made what happened, happen.
But before we get to that, we have to go from San Diego to the National Capital Region. A few years after our time on the waterfront in Coronado, Dan got orders to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Suitland, MD, where my son works now. Dan was recognized for his competence, and selected to be Chief at CNO-IP, the most prestigious and harrowing job in the business, confronting the Navy leadership each day in the bowels of the Pentagon.
Dan’s home-town of Naperville cared deeply about their native son. The paper called to interview me as the day drew near for the dedication of the memorial to him in Illinois. “Dan was drawn to intelligence work for the usual reasons,” I said in an interview with the Naperville paper years ago.
“We all wanted to know the secrets,” I said. “Dan enjoyed the cloak and dagger, and he also had the spirit many folks in the service had that you’re doing good for your country and for the world at large.”
In 2001, Dan was chief at the CNO Intelligence Plot (CNO-IP) in the Pentagon. The massive reconstruction of the building had required the Navy Command Center to move from the grand corridor on the 4th deck with the walnut paneling, portraits of past CNO’s and the elegant glass-cased ship models.
Dan was preparing for another career shift, even as he was working the 12-hour days in IP. He was finishing his final correspondence course for a master’s degree in international studies at the Naval War College, where he demonstrated an aggressive curiosity for the subject.
I would not have expected anything else. I last talked to him at his wetting down for Commander at the Capital Brewing Company. Dan knew that to advance to the next level, Captain, he would have to take another ship’s company tour as the intelligence officer on an aircraft carrier. But he had another goal: becoming an attaché, the senior naval officer assigned to an ambassador at a foreign post, and he knew what was coming in the future. He wanted to do HUMINT, and he wanted to do it in posts like Singapore, Hong Kong or Beijing.
He asked me about it, as a scheme, I told him that if he understood he career risks- seems sort of dumb now that the business has changed so much in the War on Terror- and I told him to go for it.
So that is where we were on the morning of September 11th. We were all going to be vey different by the end of that morning. But I need to tell you what Bob Poor did this month that will keep Dan familiar to the new generation coming up.
It is pretty cool, and I will get to that tomorrow.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com