EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS COMMENTARY FROM WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT BRAD MORTENSEN IS PART OF UTAH POLITICAL UNDERGROUND’S OPINION SERIES REFLECTING ON 9/11’s 20th ANNIVERSARY.

As I drove to work that Tuesday morning twenty years ago, I pulled out my seldom-used cell phone to call home. I said, “They say on the radio a plane just hit the Pentagon, too, and it’s on fire. I’m glad Brady is working the night shift.” 

“Actually,” my wife Camille replied, “He switched to the day shift this week. So he’s there now.”

Casual efforts to touch base turned into desperate calls to hospitals. No one had heard from or seen Camille’s brother, Brady Howell. Brady served as a civilian in the Chief of Naval Operations – Intelligence Plot (CNO-IP) as a watch officer. By early afternoon, I left work to be with our impromptu extended family gathering as we started to fear the worst despite the Pentagon’s expansive size and relatively small area of impact. 

No one ever heard from Brady and his on-duty CNO-IP colleagues again. They were among the 125 fatalities in the Pentagon, 2,606 at the World Trade Center site in New York City, and 265 on the four airplanes.

My 9/11 reflections are impossible to separate from Brady’s loss and the anguish and grieving that I saw and felt within his family – wife, parents, brothers, sister, in-laws, nieces, nephews – and many, many friends. The feelings, conversations, and events that transpired in the following hours, days, months, and years are inscribed deeply in my mind and soul.

Among those are the images of people coming together to support us and other victims’ families. From Brady’s co-workers at the Pentagon, hometown friends in Sugar City, Idaho, our neighbors in Centerville, Utah, and numerous total strangers, in our hours of need we experienced kind gesture after kind gesture to help promote healing and hope that better days would be ahead. 

I also reflect that every day many families experience significant losses and challenges with loved ones. Yet the world doesn’t always come to a stop, like it did on September 11th, and focus on their tragedy.

Whether their loss occurs as a result of an international terrorist act, military service, an act of violence, an accident, disease, or taking their own life, the anguish and grieving are just as deserving of sympathy, kind gestures, healing, and hope as Brady’s family and friends experienced after September 11, 2001.

Hopefully, when we say #NeverForget on this twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we mean that we will never forget the victims of that day AND that we never forget the victims of everyday tragedies that need our love and acts of compassion.

#NeverForget