Application of Army Combat Stress Control doctrine in work with Pentagon survivors

The authors are Army psychiatrists and were members of the mental health team that responded to the Pentagon attack of September 11, 2001. They were assigned to work at the Hoffman Complex in Alexandria, Virginia, with displaced employees from the Office of the Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel. Never before had anyone committed an unexpected act of war on a garrison unit within the continental United States, making the appropriate psychiatric interventions difficult to discern. The authors conducted a retrospective analysis to examine how closely their interventions paralleled official Army doctrine on Combat Stress Control as detailed in Field Manual 8-51, Combat Stress Control in a Theater of Operations. They discovered that the parallels were considerable but not comprehensive and concluded that following future acts of terror or other disasters on United States soil military mental health providers should apply both traditional and novel principles of Combat Stress Control.