At 8:46 this morning a bell rings in lower Manhattan and somebody starts reading names. It takes most of four hours to get through them. They’ve done this every year for twenty-five years, and every year there are fewer people standing there who remember the sound the first one made.

Twenty-five years ago at 8:46, my brother was at his desk in the White House, finishing a memo. He thought the memo was going to be the most important thing he did that year.

This is Part 2 of my interview with my brother, Lieutenant General Michael Fenzel (USA, Ret.). Part 1 stayed in the summer of 2001 and ended when the phone on that desk rang. This one picks it up where that day began.

Michael was thirty-four, an Army major on the counterterrorism staff, the most junior man in every room he walked into that day. When the complex was evacuated, I went with everyone else. He stayed. Where he went and what he was handed over the next eighteen hours on those 18 acres is his to tell, and he tells it plainly, the way soldiers tell things they’ve decided to stop carrying alone.

We built this in two parts because September 11th was never the ending of anything. For the people in those rooms it was the first day. Everything that we now call the war on terror, the longest war this country has fought, started for Michael before lunch, and it didn’t let go of him for twenty years. Iraq. Afghanistan, three times. A battalion on the Pakistan border. A chair, near the very end, across a table from the men who had spent years trying to kill his soldiers. He was in the room on the first day and he was in the room when we tried to end it, and there aren’t many people alive who can say both.

He’s my brother, which meant I could ask him what that costs. I could ask him about the soldiers he lost, who he still thinks about every day. I could ask him what he wants his own kids to understand about that Tuesday when they’re old enough to ask, and I could sit there while he decided how to answer.

There is a story in the middle of this hour that he’s never told outside a handful of people who were in the room. I was one of them. I told him he didn’t have to. But he told it anyway.

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