This is Part 1 of a two-part interview with my brother, Lieutenant General Michael Fenzel, U.S. Army, Retired. We called it “Before the Day” on purpose.

Catastrophe has a way of making everything that preceded it look obvious. Once you know what happened, the warnings get louder and the missed chances get bigger, and the people who were there start to look like they should have seen it. But the people inside the national security system in the summer of 2001 were living in the present tense. They had bosses and meetings and intelligence reports and a dozen problems that looked urgent because some of them were. What they did not have was the morning of September 11, and everything that began with it.

So Michael and I spend Part 1 in that world. He talks about becoming a soldier and finding out what fear actually is, and about the strange confidence that comes from learning that panic is optional. He talks about mentors, about rooms full of very smart people, and about what it takes to move a room when nobody in it works for you. He talks about the difference between having authority and having credibility, and about a threat that was visible and serious and still very hard to turn into action.

He’s my brother, which changes an interview. I suppose there were questions I could ask that another interviewer would never think of, and answers I understood before he finished them. The conversation wanders into our parents, football, old commanders, and the plain fact that two brothers once walked into the White House every morning convinced they were already having the most remarkable professional experience of their lives. But they had no idea what was coming. Nobody did.

Part 1 ends when the phone on his desk rings the morning of September 11, 2001. I’m going to leave that account to him.

Part 2 comes out tomorrow, Friday, September 11. It goes where you think it goes and then keeps going, through Iraq and Afghanistan and a story Michael has never told outside the handful of people who were in the room. He’s been carrying it for twenty-five years. So have I.

There’s a reason we waited twenty-five years to have this conversation.

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