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John Ceriello looked up.
The sky over Veterans Plaza on Monday afternoon was clear and blue, a little cooler than the morning he was thinking about. New Yorkers “woke up to a beautiful day,” the retired FDNY captain said, with no idea what was coming.
More than a thousand miles separate Mountain Home from lower Manhattan. Ceriello, who retired last year as captain of FDNY Rescue 1 after 37 years, had flown in the day before to stand in front of a monument built around a piece of the World Trade Center.
The city held its 25th anniversary ceremony for the Sept. 11 attacks at 4 p.m. Labor Day, in front of the memorial Mountain Home firefighter Tommy Feliccia brought here.
Feliccia organized the ceremony and emceed it. Rep. Stetson Painter, Mountain Home Police Chief Eddie Griffin and Baxter Health ambulance services director James Pinkston stood on the platform with him.
John Foreman opened with a prayer, asking the crowd to bow their heads and the men to remove their caps. He thanked God for the day and for the people standing in front of him.
“We know that this world is an evil world, and these men and women are here to fight that evil,” Foreman prayed. “We are so thankful for them.”
Painter spoke first, and he started with a classroom.
“Twenty five years ago, I was an eighth grader sitting in English class,” he said. “Our world forever changed.”
Like a lot of Americans, he said, he remembers the confusion, and then watching the country come together in the days that followed. “I was young, but I understood that something had changed,” Painter said, and that a way of life could never be taken for granted.
For him, the date stopped being something to observe. “For me, September 11th became more than a day I remember,” he said. “It became the reason to serve.”
He joined the Army a few years later, he told the crowd, in large part because of what he watched on television that morning.
Painter said the country lost nearly 3,000 people that day, along with the firefighters, police officers and paramedics who died in the line of duty. But he said the toll did not stop there.
“The sacrifice did not end that day,” Painter said. “Thousands and thousands of first responders and survivors have since died from illnesses attributed to Ground Zero.”
He closed by putting the day in a line with the one his grandparents’ generation carried. “9/11 is my generation’s Pearl Harbor,” Painter said.
“We are Americans first,” he said. “May we never forget.”
Then Feliccia introduced the man who had flown in from New York.
Ceriello told the crowd the attacks are remembered as a New York story, but that they were never only that. The hijackers went after financial institutions, defense and the federal government, he said.
“That attack wasn’t just targeted at FDNY,” Ceriello said. It ran out across the lakes and valleys and rivers of the whole country.
That is why a monument in Arkansas matters, he said, and why the phrase carved into so many of them is harder than it sounds.
“It takes effort,” Ceriello said. He said it looking at the flag stitched with the names of the dead, and again looking at the steel behind him. “This has gone across the entire nation.”
He told the crowd he had recently seen a figure that stopped him. Close to a third of the country, he said, is now too young to remember the attacks happening.
“It’s really important that we have events like this, and monuments like this, and flags like that, that remind our young people of what happened,” Ceriello said.
His own daughter is 20. He has had to explain to her what the day meant and what the country would look like if it had gone differently. His father’s generation did the same thing with Pearl Harbor, he said, and “you’ve got to keep that alive.”
What came after the attacks mattered as much as the attacks, he said. Places like this one help a country climb out of the ashes and rebuild bigger, and the rebuilding was never only New York’s.
“You can knock us down, maybe for a little while,” Ceriello said. “But we will rise up.”
There is a reason that keeps happening, he said. “We do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.”
Then Ceriello talked about his firehouse.
He was in Squad 18 on Sept. 11, 2001. Seven of the men he worked with were killed. Anyone in the fire service understands what that means, he said, because “we broke bread around a table on numerous occasions.”
“I lost these friends that I had for the last 25 years,” he said, calling it a selfish way to look at it. “That’s something to be sad about.”
“But on the same token, we bounced back,” Ceriello said. “We’re stronger than ever.”
One person he expected to have beside him was not there. Feliccia’s uncle, retired FDNY Capt. Joe Russo, had planned to travel down with him. Russo is the reason the steel is in Mountain Home at all, having secured the 50 pound section from the department and presented it here at the 20th anniversary in 2021.
A family health matter kept Russo in New York. Ceriello did not dwell on it, except to say that in the fire service, family comes first.
He closed by telling the crowd he had come to like the town, and that anyone with questions about that day could find him at the dinner afterward.
“Feel free to ask me anything you want,” Ceriello said. “I’m free to talk about it, because it will help.”
Feliccia spoke last, and read from a page.
“Today, we gather as a community to remember the day that forever changed our country,” he said. “Americans woke up expecting an ordinary day. People went to work. Kids went to school. Firefighters reported for duty.”
In a matter of hours, everything changed.
“There are people here today who remember exactly where they were when they heard the news,” Feliccia said. Everyone he talks to says that first. He remembers watching the television and trying to understand what he was seeing.
But what he believes people remember most is what came next.
“When others were running away from danger, first responders ran into it,” Feliccia said. Firefighters, police officers, paramedics and ordinary citizens made the choice to help. “They did not know what the outcome would be.”
He put it in the language of his own job. “As firefighters, we are taught that when the alarm sounds, we respond,” he said. They train for it and prepare for it, knowing they may someday be called into somebody’s worst day.
Then he came to the number.
“343 members of the FDNY answered the call, but they never came home,” Feliccia said. He listed them out as fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters and friends.
“They were not just firemen,” he said. “They were people who had families. They had dreams. They had plans for the next day, and yet when they were needed, they did what firefighters have always done.”
Twenty five years on, he said, the job has changed hands. “The responsibility to remember now belongs to all of us.”
It gets easier every year for young people to file Sept. 11 away as something in a history book, Feliccia said. For anyone wearing a uniform, it has to stay more than that.
“It must be a reminder,” he said. “A reminder of sacrifice, a reminder of courage, a reminder of service to others.”
Mountain Home sits a long way from New York, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, he said, but that morning made the distance beside the point. “We flew our flags. We supported one another. We mourned together.”
Even in the darkest moments, Feliccia said, courage and compassion and unity can still show through. That is why the town keeps gathering at this spot.
“We are here to make sure that their sacrifice is never forgotten,” he said. “We remember that freedom is not free, and service comes with sacrifice.”
He asked the crowd to stand for a moment of silence. Then the bell rang.
Foreman closed with a reading from Isaiah and a short prayer. One thing he had heard over and over during the ceremony, he said, was fear, the fear people felt when the attacks happened.
“I don’t believe we’re still in that fear today,” Foreman said.
Afterward, the departments went to eat. Feliccia had invited every firefighter, police officer, paramedic and dispatcher in Baxter County, along with their families, to the Mountain Home Community Center gym for a meal paid for with local sponsorships.
The point was never really the food. “We’re going to get everybody together under one roof,” Feliccia told the crowd. “We’re going to build bonds, we’re going to get closer.”
The rest of the year, he said, these departments see each other on scenes. “We don’t have that time” there.
Ceriello stayed a day longer to teach. He leads a free eight hour class on evidence based fire operations Tuesday at the Sheid at ASUMH, hosted by IAFF Local 4496, with firefighters traveling in from around the state.
He flies home Wednesday. FDNY members past and present are gathering in New York, and on Friday he will be back with his own department.
Mountain Home will mark the morning too. Feliccia holds the annual memorial stair climb at Bomber Stadium at 8:46 a.m. Friday, the minute the first plane hit.
