Twenty-five years after hijacked airliners inflicted the worst terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil, communities across East Idaho are marking the anniversary with ceremonies, stair climbs and a documentary film.
For many who remember that fateful, transformative day, one reflection returns again and again — that in the days that followed, Americans set aside what divided them and stood together to remember the nearly 3,000 people who died.
Twenty-five years later, that solemn truth still holds. Communities across the Gem State are honoring the heroes and the fallen and remembering a simple promise: The United States will never forget.
In Pocatello, the Bannock County Veteran Services Office is hosting its annual 9/11 Patriot Day Community Commemoration Friday at 5:30 p.m. on the front steps of the Bannock County Courthouse, 624 E. Center St.
Sixth District Judge Rick Carnaroli will read "The Events As They Unfolded," a chronological account of the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Carnaroli was 100 miles from New York City at the time of the attacks, burying his father with military honors. The judge has said it falls to older generations to keep the story alive.
"We hold this ceremony to remember the souls lost and the acts of bravery by ordinary Americans and first responders," said Melissa Hartman, Bannock County Veteran Services coordinator.
A community dinner hosted by local veterans service organizations will follow immediately at the Bannock County Veterans Memorial Building, 300 N. Johnson St. in Pocatello. More information is available by calling Bannock County Veterans Services at 208-282-4245.
The Bannock County Courthouse ceremony is one of several remembrances being held across the region this week as East Idahoans remember one of the nation's most solemn days.
A soldier's solitary morning
Paul Loomis was already 22 years into a 26-year Army career when the towers fell. A lieutenant colonel at the time, he had just transferred that summer from U.S. Army Europe in Heidelberg, Germany, to the Nevada Test Site, where he served as chief of a detachment for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, conducting anti-terrorism and anti-proliferation research.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he was driving the 65 miles from his home to the desert site when a radio report said a plane had hit the first tower.
He continued on to the base, arrived early and was alone in his office when he turned on the news — just in time to watch the second tower get hit.
"All of a sudden, it became very real that this was a terrorist activity," Loomis said.
He barely had time to process the news before the site locked down and he found himself in constant contact with his headquarters near Washington, D.C., helping assess the threat.
Within weeks, his team's research helped develop methods to clear the cave complexes at Tora Bora, where 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding — work the Defense Threat Reduction Agency would later acknowledge publicly. Loomis said his team didn't take its first day off until Thanksgiving.
Now living in Blackfoot, Loomis helped establish the city's America 250 committee, which has held a monthly event since January in honor of the 250th anniversary of American independence.
In collaboration with the upcoming Eastern Idaho State Fair, Loomis will speak at a 9/11 memorial event set for Sept. 12 at Blackfoot High School, sharing his account of that day and everything that followed.
"It's pretty close to me," Loomis said about 9/11. "I had a friend who was killed in the attack at the Pentagon. It is a sobering day, but it's also a day to remind us that we're still standing and that we're united as a country, even though we have a lot of different distractions. But as a country, we're still standing. We're still strong."
The 9/11 attack on the Pentagon carries a direct connection to East Idaho as well. Rexburg native Brady Howell, a presidential management intern in Naval intelligence, was among 189 people killed when hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the building.
He was 26 years old.
Sobering reports on the radio
Bear Lake County Sheriff Bart Heslington was a member of the Ogden, Utah, SWAT team, gathered with his colleagues for a training session on the morning of 9/11 when word of the attacks reached them. There was no television in the room — just a radio.
"It just took everybody aback," Heslington said. "It got very quiet. Everybody gathered around and we were listening to the news as it came in. It's a vivid memory."
What stands out to Heslington now, decades later, is how easily Americans take stability for granted. Over his career, he has traveled to parts of the world marked by violence, by the ever-present danger of bombings and other tragedies.
"I think we don't experience that here," he said. "So to have it hit home like that was pretty sobering."
Emotions on his SWAT team on 9/11 ran from disbelief to solemn reverence to anger, Heslington said, with the strongest reactions coming from teammates who had served in the military.
Looking back 25 years later, what stands out most to him is the contrast between the unity that followed the attacks and the political division of today.
"It just feels like we've swung so far the other way with the political division in the country," Heslington said. "It's really sad, honestly, how quickly we forget."
He hopes the anniversary can serve as a reminder to find common ground again.
"I think the balance of the country really lives somewhere in that middle ground," he said. "It seems like the loud voices you hear are the extreme sides of it. I really hope at some point, as a nation, we can come back and find that middle ground and some unity."
A call to serve
Paul Kucherek was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois on the morning of Sept. 11, coordinating military transportation for the U.S. Transportation Command. He and his colleagues watched the attacks unfold on television screens in the base's operations center before their three-star general ordered a shift to around-the-clock operations. For the next two years, Kucherek helped coordinate the movement of troops and equipment for Operation Noble Eagle in defense of the U.S. homeland and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, working long stretches of 14- to 16-hour days.
After 30 years in the Air Force, Kucherek retired and now teaches math at Bear Lake High School in Montpelier, where each September he shows students a video about the Twin Towers so the generations born after the attacks can understand what happened.
"I saw teaching as an extension of my military service," Kucherek said. "I had to feel like I was going to work every day with the same sort of purpose that serving in the military did."
Reclaiming Ground Zero
Filmmaker Josh Sabey, who lives in the Arbon Valley, recently released a documentary timed to the 25th anniversary that takes a different approach to the story of 9/11 — one focused not on the attacks themselves but on what New York City did in their aftermath.
The idea began at a conference, where a chance conversation introduced Sabey to "Listening to the City," an often-forgotten chapter of the Ground Zero rebuilding process.
After early public meetings over what to do with the site collapsed into chaos, organizers tried something different. They gathered roughly 5,000 people at 500 tables of 10, each with a moderator and note-taker and let them talk through their disagreements — no microphones, no monologues. Those sessions helped shape what stands at the site today.
Sabey's film, "Reclaiming Ground Zero," spends its first 15 minutes recounting the attacks and their devastating toll. The rest follows the long road of reclamation — tracing how New Yorkers from every walk of life, including those who had lost the most, found their way to a shared outcome. The documentary is available on YouTube and several streaming services including Amazon Prime.
"You respond to an attack on democracy by practicing democracy," Sabey said, quoting one of his favorite lines from the film. "It's a powerful story of people coming together across these really deep personal differences. It's a really important lesson for today, where we struggle to come together across our differences. So often our processes just aren't up to the task and we can do a better job. We can find a way to come together. It just takes real intentionality and better process. It's a story of the past and a vision of what's possible today."
A collective climb
In Idaho Falls, Police Chief Bryce Johnson has led the Police Department's 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb since establishing it locally around 2021, a tradition he first encountered years earlier as police chief in Juneau, Alaska.
Idaho Falls holds its climb on a malt house tower owned by Anheuser-Busch, which opens its stairs to participants each year.
Climbers who complete the full course make a little over seven and a half trips up and down the tower — 2,071 steps in all, equal to the 110 floors firefighters and police officers climbed at the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks.
Johnson said the number is meant to connect participants to what first responders faced that day, though he's quick to note the event isn't really about finishing.
"Don't let that scare you away from doing it," Johnson said. "If you can do one flight of stairs, do one flight of stairs. It's not about how many stairs you do. It's about remembering."
Participants have included the Police Department's bomb squad in full protective gear, its SWAT team, an honor guard that carried a U.S. flag up the stairs in formation, police records staff, 911 dispatchers and firefighters, along with visiting police officers from other states.
The event also raises money for the Chaplains of Idaho, the Idaho Falls Fraternal Order of Police's Officer Wellness Fund — which helps cover counseling costs for first responders and their families — and Heroes Defense, which is building a new training facility for local firefighters and police.
Johnson, who was a police officer and had recently joined the Naval Reserve when the 9/11 attacks happened, said the day changed the course of life in America. He sees the climb as a small, physical way of recreating what he considers 9/11's one enduring gift.
"If there was one good outcome, as you remember back then, we pretty much all put our differences aside for a brief period of time and were just wanting to look out for each other," Johnson said. "That's kind of what we're hoping to recreate a little bit."
Unity amid the chaos
A common thread runs through every reflection gathered here — a sense of unity and collaboration among Americans in the weeks, months and even years after the attacks. In the 25 years since, political polarization has carved rifts deep enough to tear friends and families apart throughout America.
The 25th anniversary of 9/11 offers a chance to try to rebuild that unity — not by waiting for another tragedy, but through the same deliberate, face-to-face engagement that Americans in places like Pocatello, Blackfoot, Montpelier and Idaho Falls are each, in their own way, trying to create.
For Sabey, that's the whole point of revisiting Ground Zero's rebuilding 25 years later — proof that coming back together is possible, even after devastating loss, if people are willing to do it on purpose.
"We can come together and work through things a lot more than we think we can," Sabey said. "We're less divided than we're told we are. It's not rose-colored glasses — democracy doesn't just work on its own. But if we're willing to put in the process and the intentionality, we can do it. We've done it before."