On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, there was nothing unusual about the start of my day. I had worked an 18-hour shift the day before as general manager of the Pizza Hut in Hastings. Tuesday mornings were normally reserved for re-checking inventory counts from the night before, figuring out why the numbers from the previous week did not quite add up, and getting ready for another ordinary day at the restaurant. I had breakfast at home, helped feed my daughter, who had turned one that July, and headed to work.
Mark Kiibauch and I had opened the restaurant together for more than a year. We had a routine. I was sitting at the desk in the back corner of the office, Mark was doing prep work, and K102 was playing on the radio.
Then the broadcast was interrupted.
I remember looking toward Mark, trying to understand what I had just heard.
“Did they just really say that on the radio?”
“What just happened?” Mark asked.
Within minutes, the inventory numbers did not matter anymore. We found the small 13-inch tube television used for employee training videos and tried to get a clear signal. The picture was fuzzy, the reception crackled, but that little television became our view to the world that day. I called home. Customers eventually gathered around the front counter, eating from the lunch buffet while watching the news and wondering along with the rest of the country whether another attack was coming.
We watched the towers fall. We watched first responders run toward something everyone else was trying to escape. We watched journalists trying to explain the inexplicable as it happened. For the first time in my life, I understood that the United States could be attacked here, at home.
Roughly 1,200 miles from New York City, an ordinary Tuesday morning in Hastings had stopped being ordinary.
Twenty-five years later, that may be one of the most enduring truths of Sept. 11. The attacks happened in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, but their effects did not stay there. They reached classrooms and police departments, military bases and fire stations, airports and city halls, families and businesses in communities such as Hastings.
They changed what Americans feared, how governments prepared, how soldiers trained, how military families lived, how communities remembered and, for a generation, what it meant to feel safe.
For Dakota County Sheriff Joe Leko, the realization came with a very different responsibility. Leko was assigned to the Dakota County Drug Task Force on Sept. 11, 2001, and was getting ready to begin his shift when he began watching the attacks unfold. He was also serving on the SWAT team.
“I remember watching the news in disbelief as the events unfolded,” Leko said. “I was also serving on the SWAT team at the time, and before leaving for work, I made sure all of my tactical gear was loaded in my vehicle. None of us knew what the day ahead would bring or whether there would be additional attacks.”
There had been no attack in Dakota County, but there was no way to know that morning whether New York and Washington were the end of it.
“Our world changed that morning,” Leko said. “A nation that had long felt secure suddenly felt vulnerable, and we were confronted with questions we had rarely had to consider: Could this happen again? Could it happen here?”
Those questions became part of the work that followed. Leko said law enforcement today operates with a much greater awareness of terrorism, potential threats and the need for communication among agencies at the local, state and federal levels.
“We remain a safe nation, but when an attack of that magnitude occurs on our own soil, it changes how you think about security and preparedness,” he said.
He said there is now greater emphasis on security, communication between the public and law enforcement, reporting suspicious activity and preparing to protect infrastructure and other potential targets.
“Law enforcement has also evolved significantly,” Leko said. “We now train extensively to prevent and respond to acts of terrorism and to protect critical infrastructure and other potential targets. Those were things we did to some degree before 2001, but certainly not with the scope, coordination, and level of preparedness we have today.”
The distinction matters. Not every security measure in Hastings was created because of Sept. 11, and records from the weeks immediately following the attacks make that clear.
A Sept. 27, 2001, report in the local newspaper examined security at government buildings following the attacks. It found that a number of security measures in Hastings had already been in place before Sept. 11. Security at the Hastings Police Department, for example, dated to the department's move into its building in 1994.
That history complicates a simple before-and-after story. Sept. 11 did not invent security, emergency planning or cooperation between agencies. What people who have worked in those fields describe instead is a change in scale, emphasis and assumptions.
“We now have more awareness of potential threats of terrorism,” Leko said. “We ensure we have connections and work with the federal partners beyond domestic crime.”
For Hastings Fire Chief John Townsend, Sept. 11 began at a boat launch on Hilary Path. Townsend, then a new firefighter, was with a police officer who was showing him the area for duck hunting when word reached them that an airplane had struck the first tower. They decided to head home and find out what was happening.
“Like so many others, I watched the events unfold on television,” Townsend said. “As a new firefighter, I remember realizing that this was something completely different from anything I had experienced and that life in America was going to change.”
Twenty-five years later, Townsend can see changes he could not have understood that morning.
“As a new firefighter in 2001, 9/11 affected me in a way I could not fully understand that morning,” Townsend said. “I knew we had witnessed something horrific, but I could not have imagined how deeply it would change firefighting, emergency preparedness, and our sense of safety. Twenty-five years later, I see how much that day shaped our country and an entire generation.”
For the fire service, some of the changes were highly specific. Townsend said Hastings firefighters began preparing for incidents that previously had not been as prominent in local training.
“9/11 changed our approach to preparedness,” Townsend said. “We began training for WMD, Hazmat and structural collapse incidents, and the Dakota County Special Operations Team was formed. Minnesota Task Force 1 also became part of our larger response network. It taught me that we had to be ready for emergencies we never expected to face.”
Townsend said training, specialized equipment, federal funding and partnerships among local, county and state agencies expanded in the years that followed. WMD and hazardous-material response and structural-collapse capabilities became part of a much larger emergency-preparedness system.
“Much of what we consider standard emergency preparedness today can be traced back to 9/11,” Townsend said. “The Dakota County Special Operations Team and Minnesota Task Force 1 are examples of that lasting investment. As a firefighter, I’ve seen how those changes have become part of our normal way of preparing for the unexpected.”
Current Hastings Police Chief Kyle Linscheid saw Sept. 11 from another perspective entirely.
He was not a police officer.
He was a teenager sitting in algebra class.
“I was in my junior year Algebra class,” Linscheid said. “Word had gotten out about the attack. Our teacher went to get a tv and wheeled it into our classroom and we watched a good deal of live footage.”
His memory of that morning is striking partly because of what he did not understand.
“Truthfully, I didn’t understand the gravity of it at the time, but our teacher was crying, which signaled to me that this was something far more serious,” Linscheid said.
That experience was playing out in classrooms across Hastings. The Sept. 20, 2001, newspaper carried a story under the headline “A change in lesson plans,” documenting Hastings teachers trying to help students understand events that had suddenly pushed their way into classrooms.
For students such as Linscheid, history was no longer something contained in a textbook.
“Up until that point in my life, wars seemed like something that we learned about in history, not something that was currently happening,” he said. “Looking back, what followed was that terrorism, national security, and the possibility of violence at home was a realistic possibility.”
Linscheid also had never flown on an airplane before Sept. 11, so the dramatic transformation of airport security was something he learned about afterward rather than something he could compare through personal experience. Today, the teenager who watched the attacks beside a crying teacher is responsible for helping lead the police department charged with responding when emergencies happen in Hastings.
Linscheid said the post-Sept. 11 era brought major changes in communication and coordinated response.
“Post 09/11, inter-agency communication and coordinated responses changed dramatically,” he said. “Emergency planning started to include more of an ‘all-hazards’ type of approach.”
He said agencies now routinely prepare for severe situations and train to work together through them, while emergency alerts and communication systems have also changed significantly. Townsend's description of the fire service shows what some of that preparation looks like in practice, with firefighters training for hazardous materials, weapons of mass destruction and structural-collapse emergencies while working within broader county and state response networks.
That progression, from high school student to police chief, spans much of the 25 years since Sept. 11.
So does Mayor Mary Fasbender's experience.
Fasbender was getting ready for work that morning with KARE 11 playing on the television, as it normally did. She glanced toward the screen, saw the Twin Towers and stopped. She sat down to watch.
She remembers “teary eyes, fear,” and trying to understand what was happening. Friends lived in New York City, and she wondered whether they were safe.
At first, she had no idea how profoundly the attacks would change the country. Once authorities established that the United States had been attacked by terrorists, the fear became different. Twenty-five years later, some of it remains.
“I simply question more now than I ever have,” Fasbender said.
She said large public events occasionally bring thoughts about security that probably would not have entered her mind in the same way before Sept. 11. Sirens can produce a fleeting question about whether something larger is occurring.
As mayor, she has also seen public-safety personnel place significant attention on protecting participants, spectators and residents during major gatherings. She was not in government in 2001 and does not claim firsthand knowledge of how individual city procedures changed after the attacks, but she has seen the importance placed on public safety during her years in office.
The attacks also left visible symbols behind.
“On 9-11 when we hang the large flag at our fire department, it definitely brings a memory back to that day,” Fasbender said.
Each year, the enormous American flag suspended above Highway 61 becomes one of Hastings' most visible Sept. 11 remembrances.
For Townsend, the annual display is part of how the department carries the memory of Sept. 11 forward.
“I remember how raw and emotional 9/11 was,” Townsend said. “Today, Hastings continues to honor those who were lost while carrying forward the lessons of that day. Every year, our department hangs a large American flag on the station facing Highway 61 as a reminder of the lives lost and the sacrifices made.”
The sight is not new. Archival coverage from Sept. 20, 2001, shows Hastings Fire Department personnel hanging a large American flag from an aerial ladder above Vermillion Street in the days after the attacks. Elsewhere around the city, business marquees carried patriotic messages and flags appeared across the community.
Today, tens of thousands of vehicle trips pass through that corridor on an average day. A recent MnDOT Highway 61 corridor study, using traffic counts for downtown Hastings, put the volume at roughly 31,000 vehicles per day.
On Sept. 11, many of those vehicles pass beneath an American flag large enough to fill the space above the highway.
For Fasbender, the flag recalls how quickly an ordinary day can change. She also remembers the way Hastings responded afterward.
The community, she said, has long had a history of stepping forward when people need help, but Sept. 11 reinforced that impulse. She continues to think about the families who lost loved ones and the bond among firefighters, police officers and other responders who watched members of their professions die that day.
The newspaper pages from September 2001 preserve how quickly the attacks entered everyday life in Hastings. One week before Sept. 11, the front page reflected ordinary local concerns. Schools were opening, community projects were moving forward and the normal rhythm of fall was underway.
The following week's newspaper led with the words “Another day in infamy.”
The accompanying coverage described residents stunned by the attacks, local churches opening their doors, flags appearing across town and people trying to understand what had happened.
Some Hastings residents were far closer to the attacks than their neighbors initially realized. Hastings High School senior Peder Aarness was in New York and on his way into lower Manhattan when the World Trade Center was attacked. His experience became front-page news in Hastings the following week.
Another Hastings resident, John Ostrem, was in Washington, D.C., for meetings. He was riding in a taxi near the Pentagon when the attack there occurred. His firsthand account appeared in the newspaper later that month.
Those stories brought places that had seemed distant into kitchens and living rooms in Hastings.
The Sept. 11 attacks would soon reach Minnesota in another way, through the men and women of the military.
For Shane Hudella, there was no television playing quietly in the background that morning. He was already on active duty with the Minnesota Army National Guard and attending a training conference at Camp Ripley.
A few hundred noncommissioned officers were gathered in a large auditorium waiting for Minnesota Adjutant General Eugene Andreotti to speak. There were no smartphones delivering breaking-news alerts every few seconds. Hudella and the other soldiers had little idea what was happening outside the room.
Then Andreotti entered.
Hudella immediately noticed something unusual.
The Adjutant General was wearing a flight suit.
“We could tell there was something happening,” Hudella recalled. “The General and his Aides were talking quickly with the Commander before coming on stage.”
Then came words Hudella has remembered for 25 years.
“I’ll never forget after a brief exchange with our Commander the Adjutant General briskly walked to the microphone and said ‘Ladies and gentlemen, America is under attack. This conference is over and you are to return to your duty stations immediately!’”
Hudella remembers the collective “WHAT?” from the room as deafening. The soldiers poured out of the auditorium and gathered near a television in the vestibule. By then, the second plane had struck the World Trade Center.
“It was chaos at that point,” Hudella said. “Nobody fully understood what was happening, why, or what it meant for us. The only thing we knew was that we were going to be going to war, and soon.”
That prediction proved correct. For Minnesota National Guard members and their families, the years after Sept. 11 meant repeated deployments, long separations and, for many, combat.
Hudella said the following decade and more took a heavy toll on Guard members and their families as Minnesota soldiers deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere. Multiple deployments became common.
One of the most significant was the 22-month activation of Minnesota's 1st Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, which included 16 months in Iraq.
“Imagine being separated from your family, in heavy fighting, for almost 2 years,” Hudella said.
The National Guard itself changed.
“From a military standpoint, the National Guard was no longer a ‘weekend force,’” Hudella said. “Guard units across the country were deploying frequently and serving right alongside our Active Duty counterparts.”
Training changed with the mission. Hudella saw increased emphasis on combat skills and urban operations, along with major advances in equipment and technology.
But the effects of that transformation did not stay on military bases. They came home to families.
By the late 2000s, Hudella was a senior military leader and the father of four boys who played hockey. He had watched years of deployments and separation place pressure on service members, spouses and children.
“The time period between 2001 and 2008 when we stood up Defending The Blue Line, later renamed to United Heroes League, was the heaviest time for deployments, family separation, and injuries, both visible and not visible,” Hudella said.
Defending the Blue Line was formally created in 2009, after those years of wartime deployments helped Hudella see a need that was not being met. Hockey was expensive. Military families were dealing with long separations, and children needed stability and positive places to direct their energy.
“The kids needed something to do, something positive to focus on while mom or dad, and sometimes both, had to leave for a year at a time,” Hudella said.
Sports could provide exercise, teammates, coaches and a sense of normal life while a parent was deployed. What began as Defending the Blue Line eventually became United Heroes League, expanding beyond hockey to help military families participate in sports and other activities.
Its home in the Hastings area gives the community one of the clearest local connections between the consequences of Sept. 11 and something that exists today.
It was not created on Sept. 12, 2001, and no single moment produced it. Instead, it grew out of the years that followed, years when deployments and war changed the lives of military families Hudella knew personally.
Twenty-five years later, he still sees those consequences.
“There remains tremendous pride in the families that we serve,” Hudella said. “There is still a knot in the stomachs of those that saw our country get attacked that day.”
Some families are still living with physical injuries, emotional trauma and the effects of years spent apart.
“The fanfare and patriotism tends to die down when the war ends and our country moves on to the next headline but unfortunately the injury and emotional baggage for those who deployed never goes away,” Hudella said.
That passage may describe one of the most difficult parts of remembering Sept. 11 a quarter century later. The attacks remain frozen in American memory, airplanes striking buildings, smoke rising over Manhattan, firefighters climbing stairs, people standing in stunned silence before televisions.
The consequences did not freeze with them.
They continued through deployments, funerals, homecomings, injuries, marriages, childhoods and military careers. They shaped agencies and training, schools and airport security, public events and emergency planning. Some became permanent parts of everyday life.
For Americans born after Sept. 11, airport checkpoints, heavily secured stadiums and extensive security around major public events are normal. Hudella remembers when they were not.
“Security and emergency response is the biggest physical change I’ve seen,” he said. “Flying before 9/11 was a whole different ball game. The amount of security now around major events, stadiums, air travel, and infrastructure is incredible.”
He also points to the growth in organizations created to support military members, veterans and their families during and after the post-Sept. 11 wars. Veteran suicide remains a serious national concern, as do the long-term effects of combat trauma and repeated deployments.
Hudella said those issues do not disappear when a war leaves the front page.
“Do what you can to support your local Veteran,” he said. “Become active in a nonprofit, there are many great ones out there. Donate if you can. Most importantly continue to say ‘thank you.’”
The relationship between Americans and those who serve has also changed over Hudella's lifetime. He believes public support for service members has remained strong even when Americans disagree about the wars in which they are asked to fight.
“I think our country learned a valuable lesson from how we treated our service members coming home from Vietnam,” Hudella said.
He then directed a message specifically to Vietnam veterans.
“To our Vietnam Veterans who might be reading this, thank you, we love you, and welcome home.”
That connection across generations will also be part of United Heroes League's Freedom Fest this year. The event falls on Friday, Sept. 11, exactly 25 years after the attacks.
Hudella said the date is deliberate.
“Holding our event on 9/11 itself is meant to honor those we lost 9/11, and honor those who answered the call to duty afterwards to serve in a decade long war,” he said.
Searchlights donated for the event will represent the Twin Towers, and the program will recognize military members whose service followed the attacks.
“It’s also an opportunity for us to celebrate the resolve and resiliency of our community, state and nation,” Hudella said.
That word, resiliency, appears repeatedly when people talk about Sept. 11.
So does remembrance.
But 25 years is long enough for memory itself to change.
A high school student in 2001 can now be a police chief.
A SWAT officer preparing for the unknown can become a county sheriff.
A new firefighter who left a boat launch to watch the attacks unfold can now lead the department that hangs Hastings' enormous Sept. 11 flag each year.
A military leader who watched deployments strain families can build an organization serving those families.
A Hastings resident watching television before work can become Mayor.
Children born around the time of the attacks are now adults in their mid-20s. Many people entering police departments, fire departments, classrooms and the military today have no personal memory of Sept. 11 at all.
They inherited the world that followed.
For them, the security procedures, emergency planning, inter-agency communication and military structures shaped during the post-Sept. 11 era can seem ordinary because they have never known anything else.
Linscheid's experience illustrates the beginning of that transition. In 2001, even as a high school junior, he knew his teacher's tears meant what he was seeing was serious. The deeper implications came later.
Today, he helps prepare a community for emergencies that nobody wants to imagine.
“We truly do, as a whole, prepare and train for the worst and how to work together through those scenarios,” Linscheid said.
Leko reaches much the same conclusion from the perspective of someone who was already carrying a badge on Sept. 11.
“September 11 taught us that preparedness matters, and that we can never take our security for granted,” he said.
Townsend's experience reaches the same conclusion from the fire service. As a new firefighter, he watched a kind of emergency he had never imagined. As fire chief 25 years later, he leads a department that trains for WMD, Hazmat and structural-collapse incidents as part of what he describes as the normal work of preparing for the unexpected.
That may be the clearest institutional legacy of the attacks.
The emotional legacy is harder to measure.
Fasbender remembers sitting down in front of the television with tears in her eyes. Linscheid remembers his teacher crying. Leko remembers loading his SWAT equipment because he did not know what the day would bring. Townsend remembers leaving a boat launch and heading home to understand what was happening. Hudella remembers hundreds of soldiers erupting in disbelief when they were told America was under attack.
I remember a radio interruption, a conversation with Mark, and a fuzzy 13-inch television on the counter of a Pizza Hut.
Different places, different responsibilities, different ages.
The common thread was disbelief.
Then came the question of what happened next.
For Hastings, that answer unfolded slowly. Flags went up. Churches opened their doors. Teachers changed lesson plans. Police and fire agencies examined preparedness. Service members left home. Families waited for them to return. Communities learned new words and new security routines.
Years passed.
Children grew up.
Wars began and ended.
People changed jobs, raised families and entered public service.
Some memories faded.
Others did not.
Each Sept. 11, Hastings raises a giant American flag above one of its busiest roads. The image can be seen in the newspaper archive from the days after the attacks, and it can be seen again in Hastings today.
Thousands of vehicles pass beneath it. Some drivers remember exactly where they were 25 years ago. Others were children. Some were not yet born.
The flag does not require them to remember the day in the same way.
It asks only that the day not be forgotten.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I could not have known what the next 25 years would bring. None of us could. Sitting in that restaurant kitchen, listening to the radio and watching a tiny television, there was only the realization that something enormous had happened and that the world on the other side of that morning would be different from the one we had awakened to.
At that moment, the world did stop spinning, and we were left to pick up the pieces.
Twenty-five years later, Hastings is still living among some of those pieces. Some became memorials. Some became policies and training. Some became organizations such as United Heroes League. Some became habits so familiar that younger generations may never realize they were once new.
And some remain memories, of teachers crying, soldiers rushing from an auditorium, tactical gear being loaded into a vehicle, a new firefighter heading home to watch history unfold, customers gathered around a restaurant television, and an American flag raised above Hastings.
The attacks happened far from here.
The changes did not.