It was the specific, seductive certainty that I knew how to do something about this and that everybody else was going to be slow.

It was a plan.

It had steps in it.

It was the feeling of being the most capable person in a situation and being told to sit in a chair.

That is much harder to refuse than anger, because anger feels like a thing you should be ashamed of and competence feels like a duty.

What stopped me was a phone call at 1:10 in the morning to a retired sergeant major named Delroy Buckhalter, who I had worked for from 2009 to 2013, and who answered on the third ring the way that generation of men do.

I told him where I was standing.