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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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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