9-11 wounds hard to heal.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A face-numbing wind whips across the Potomac River.

It rattles the withered 9-11 remembrances that cling to a couple of trees outside the Pentagon as if they were stubborn leaves unwilling to give in to winter - peace cranes, wreaths, flags, wilted flowers and a handwritten note from Justin Bennett of Ohio: I love you, USA.

It stretches the American flag sideways on one of the four cranes being used to repair the damage done when a terrorist-hijacked jet smashed into the west side of the building six months ago Monday.

It reminds you, seeing the workers persevere against the chill, that there's nothing easy about healing. Nothing easy about putting a nation back together again, brick by brick. Nothing easy about trying to find our national balance between the way we were and the way we have become - a lesson I am about to learn firsthand on this March morning.

It is 6:15 a.m. The parking-lot lights reflect in the well-shined shoes of military men and women who are coming to work. Quiet people. Serious-looking people. People who walk with a sense of purpose that, at first, disquiets you, then comforts you.

Civilians and soldiers. The people whose job it is to protect the freedom we enjoy: men wearing overcoats, getting out of chauffeur-driven Cadillacs that sport Virginia plates; women in camouflage, carrying briefcases; blue-collar types, hard hats in one hand, thermoses in the other, coming to help repair this five-sided home to national defense.

A half moon hangs above the Washington Monument as dawn arrives. The Humvees at the Pentagon - engines idling, headlights on, two soldiers in each - lurk here and there, like glassy-eyed animals ready to pounce.

I chat with soldiers in a couple of the vehicles, to find out where I can go to see the damage. (Public tours were suspended after the attack and haven't resumed.) They point to a spot near a freeway cloverleaf, well-worn by winter and thousands of visitors.

"It gets packed, usually in the afternoons," says a National Guardsman from Ocean City, Md., who says he can't give me his name - and reminds me: no photos.

"No camera," I say.

THE CLOSEST view - and, really, the only view, unless driving by in a car - is about a half-mile from the building. The two giant cranes - they make the big one at Autzen Stadium look like something from a kid's erector set - swing back and forth, lifting material in place.

The outside of the building is nearly back to its old self, but the inside will take longer.

And so it is for those who lost loved ones in the attack, whose interiors will never be the same. In one flaming moment, with concrete spraying like shrapnel, 125 Pentagon workers and 64 American Airlines passengers died in the suicide attack.

In age, the Pentagon victims range from 21-year-old Matthew Michael Flocco, a Navy aerographer's mate second class from Newark, Del., to 69-year-old Max Beilke, a retired master sergeant in the Army. In geographic breadth, they range from Waldorf, Md.'s Kris Romeo Bishundat, a 23-year-old information systems technician second class, U.S. Navy, to Newport, Ore.'s David Lucian Williams, a 32-year-old lieutenant commander in the Navy.

Coincidentally, the day the Pentagon was attacked by terrorists was 60 years, to the day, of the 1941 groundbreaking ceremony for the building. Now, a huge digital clock on the construction site counts down the days, hours, minutes and seconds (191-03-14-50) until the one-year anniversary of the attack - the goal to have the project finished.

I walk down from the grassy hill, near a chain-link fence that seals off the construction area, pausing to jot some notes. Suddenly, a military guard confronts me. What am I writing? Who am I? He calls over a second guard, who appears to be general security, not military.

He demands identification. Wants to know what I'm doing, why I have a map of Washington, D.C.

"Let me see your notebook," he says. I hand it to him. He says he's going to need to confiscate it.

`But ....'

"You're in an unauthorized area," he says, though the signs say only no photographs.

Eventually, he returns the notebook and tells me to stay back. As I walk away, I find myself resenting his tough-guy demeanor and yet understanding why he might question me.

The rhetoric is right: The world did change after Sept. 11. As I leave, an orange sunrise bleeds through clouds to the east, a promise of better times. For now, I'm reminded that countries, like nature and people, go through seasons of change, often not by choice.

It's winter in America, a time when healing comes hard.

Bob Welch can be reached by phone at 338-2354 or by e-mail at [e-mail].