The first person I saw when I walked into the Pentagon for the final time was Jimmy. I don’t even know his last name, but I know his story. Before he started work at the labyrinthine headquarters of America’s armed forces, he was a medic in the Marine Corps. For the past 21 years, he has been a building police officer and an unofficial, affable greeter. Jimmy only told me about his military career in 2021, the morning after 13 troops were killed in a suicide bombing at the entrance of the Kabul airport amid the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Everyone talked about the 11 Marines killed that day, but Jimmy remembered the one Navy corpsman among them, a medic who, like him, had been assigned to travel with the unit, just in case.

For nearly two decades, Jimmy stood guard beside two large mosaics showing the faces of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks. The displays came down during the pandemic, a symbol of a nation that had moved on from the War on Terror and was beginning to focus on new threats. Last month, President Donald Trump told troops that the country’s adversary was “the enemy within.”

Nearly all of the Pentagon press corps is leaving the building this week, barred from working there under restrictions imposed by the Trump administration. My fellow journalists and I will continue to do our jobs, reporting on the U.S. military in every way we know how. But something is lost when the leadership of the Department of Defense chooses to close itself off to scrutiny in the way it has.