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Pentagon Recovery
V.O.: Öa call to service that led them into the ruins of the Pentagon. And the job that
they did there helped speed the recovery of the nerve center of the US military, and to
get the war on terrorism up and running. BA: ìÖwondering what my country was going
to ask me to doÖ.î V.O.: For Bill Alderson, challenges usually
come without warning. But the Sunday afternoon call from a Pentagon general still came as
a shock. BA (quoting Pentagon General): ìWe need the
best company in the world at doing critical problem resolution, and everyoneís told us
that youíre the company.î V.O.: When flight 77 hit the Pentagon, much
of the damage came at the heart of the US Armyís computer network, and the toll on
human lives was far worse. BA: ìOne of the most tragic things that happened
was that the plane flew through the window of the man who was in charge of the Armyís
portion of the networkÖ. So, they lost many critical personnel.î
V.O.: Computers, servers, the entire network had been shattered, its remains reassembled
in another part of the buildingÖ But after eleven days, it was barely working ñ the
Pentagon could hardly talk to itself. V.O.: Alderson and his engineers went to work,
searching for bottlenecks and broken connections in a maze of systems whose online documentation
was mostly missing. V.O.: The Folsom-based company is to computer
networks what a forensics expert is to a *** investigation ñ trying to decipher clues
that will solve a mystery others have given upÖ.
BA: îÖI basically try to get a three-dimensional view of the technology; I tron into these
systems and try to figure out how they are workingÖ.
BA (on the Pentagon IT resources working under extreme pressure): ìÖyou know, they had
to get up in the morning every day and they had to decide to move themselves into harmís
way ñ to go back to that building which could still be a target.
V.O.: His team began quickly finding the bottlenecksÖ. Performance on one important data link soon
improved by six times, and within days, the system was up and running near capacityÖ.
V.O.: To Alderson and others at the Pentagon, getting things up and running normally was
the best way to answer back (in response to the 9/11 terrorists.)
BA: ìWe should be moving on with life as usual or even more so in the face of danger;
thatís what Americans are aboutÖ. Our retaliation is going out and doing what we always do;
and thatís the best retaliation, and thatís how weíre going to overcome.