Tour of duty: Former Honor Guard soldier spent months cleaning Pentagon devastation

Stephen Curran

Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2002 | 10:54 a.m.

Standing in line to register at the Community College of Southern Nevada, Timothy Beaudry looks like any other student.

Unshaven and clad in standard issue cargo shorts, Beaudry wades through the heavily automated and notoriously frustrating process.

But while his fellow students come to class armed only with a high school diploma, Beaudry will bring lessons that can't be learned in a classroom.

On Sept. 11, fresh from an early morning practice at Arlington National Cemetery, Army Specialist Beaudry, part of the Army's prestigious Honor Guard, heard the devastation at the Pentagon -- in the form of a low rumbling.

"I thought it might have been a car accident," Beaudry said.

Of course, what he heard was far more serious, although he wouldn't know until later that morning.

Beaudry and his company learned about the terrorist attacks the same way many other Americans had -- secondhand, in his case from the bus driver who rushed the platoon back to Fort Myers.

Over the next few days the destruction became far more real to him than a voice over the radio or images on TV.

The rest of the week his unit -- famous for guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery -- prepared funeral services delayed by the attacks.

"We were not going to let Osama bin Laden take away the honors of these people," he said.

Then the following Monday, after the dust settled at the Pentagon site, Beaudry traded in his perfectly pressed dress uniform for a stark white decontamination suit and went to work amid the devastation.

His unit was assigned to recovery, sorting rubble from remains and preparing the Defense Department headquarters for its eventual reconstruction.

When Beaudry and his unit returned to the Pentagon, he was reminded of a decision he had made only weeks earlier -- to turn down a tour guide position at the famed military complex, a decision his mother, Debbie Beaudry, was thankful he made.

"It made me feel like angels were looking over him," Debbie said. "He could've been right there."

Before going into the wreckage, Beaudry's platoon leader, 1st Lt. Steven Uejio, remembers preparing the soldiers for what they would have to do.

"The best way to prepare them is to be honest," Uejio said. "That way they know what they're going to be seeing."

What Beaudry saw inside more closely resembled a war zone than the nerve center of the most powerful military in the world. Amid the destruction, he remembers, entire portions of the offices were perfectly preserved, complete with computer monitors glowing and Top 40 music coming from small radios.

But all the honesty in the world couldn't prepare the platoon for the carnage that lay within feet of the seemingly pristine office space. Beaudry and his platoon were given the gruesome task of removing human remains.

The only problem was that the human remains were often indistinguishable from the structural ones, he said.

It was this contradiction that proved too much for some of the men and women at the scene, he said.

"You can't associate when you're doing the job, but the little things sink in," Beaudry said.

The little things included removing the bodies of the people who worked at those still-running computer terminals and clearing the plaster that was once overhead.

To focus attention away from the grisly task, Beaudry remembers a running joke within the company -- that the full-body decontamination suits they wore were reminiscent of those in a Beastie Boys music video.

For some of his fellow soldiers, however, humor wasn't enough to take their minds away from the job they had to do. The Army provided counseling services for the men and women at the site, but some of his crew had to be reassigned, he said.

"We lost a couple guys, but surprisingly the majority of my squad stayed up in there," Beaudry said.

His thoughts then turned to the friend who had taken the job Beaudry almost did. It wasn't until weeks later he found out his fellow soldier wasn't working that day.

Now, nearly a year later, as he gets ready to take psychology and criminal justice classes at CCSN, Beaudry says his former life in the Army seems a world away. In July he loaded his all of his earthly belongings into his aging Chevy Cavalier to start a new chapter in his life back home, in Las Vegas.

What exactly that new chapter entails, he doesn't know.

But after four years in the Army, old habits die hard. Even though his hair is no longer in an Army-regulation buzzcut and T-shirts and cargo shorts have replaced the signature olive-drab uniform, military jargon still peppers his everyday conversation.

"I said 'Roger' to my mom once," Beaudry said.

That doesn't bother Beaudry, though. It's a reminder that each chapter in his life has provided its lessons.

It is too early to tell how the events will affect Beaudry and others in his platoon in the long run, said Uejio, himself a two-year Army veteran.

"I have no way of telling what it has done to me or what it may do in the future," Uejio said.

But one thing the events of Sept. 11 taught him, Beaudry said, is to live in the present and not spent too much time planning.

When classes begin this fall, Beaudry may be just another face in the crowd at CCSN, but he will already be more educated than most of his peers, he said, having worked under circumstances most people can't imagine.

"I think education is not just a sheet of paper, it's your life experiences," Beaudry said.

"I think it's a bad idea to plan too much. You can't say four years from now what you'll be doing. Right now, I just want to get registered for classes."