THERE'S A REASON THE rIGHT HATES HISTORY:

Mike Fanone--wiry, bearded, his arms and neck covered in tattoos--nursed a Modelo at the bar and took it all in again. It had been four months since the day Fanone nearly died defending the Capitol--the day a self-described redneck cop who voted for Donald Trump was beaten unconscious by a mob waving Thin Blue Line flags and chanting "U.S.A." The day Fanone, a narcotics officer with the D.C. metropolitan police department (MPD) who'd planned to spend his evening shift buying heroin undercover, voluntarily rushed to defend the seat of American democracy and wound up in hand-to-hand combat with a horde hellbent on unstealing the election. The day Fanone was dragged down the Capitol's marble stairs, beaten with pipes and poles, tear-gassed and stun-gunned. The day he pleaded for his life as they threatened to shoot him with his own gun, telling the rioters he had kids, until they relented and spared him.

On the TV at the bar, Fanone's hand strained to push them away. The crush parted, and the full scene came into view: the grand terrace, the teeming crowd. Bodies upon bodies as far as the eye could see. Red hats and camo, Trump flags and American flags, all pressing forward, trying to break the cops' tenuous hold on the central door into the building. There is a thin blue line between order and chaos, and at that moment, Mike Fanone was it.

The footage showed Fanone getting pulled out into the scrum. A man's voice: "I got one!" Then Fanone began to scream the high-pitched, undignified screams of a man being tased in the back of the neck.

The bar fell silent as the body-cam footage played. And suddenly, for the first time since that day, Fanone was sobbing uncontrollably, shoulders heaving as his buddies put their arms around him.

Fanone--40, nearly broke, living with his mother, seeing ghosts, unable to return to duty in the only job he'd ever loved, possibly forever--had seen the footage a hundred times. But this was the first time he'd viewed it with other people, watched them witness what he lived through, see it through his eyes, feel his aggression, his valor, his abject terror. He sat there crying for a good 20 minutes. At some point he looked up and realized he was surrounded: everyone in the bar had come inside from the patio and gathered around him, watching the footage on the screen.

The months since Jan. 6 had not been easy for Fanone. Still recuperating from life-threatening injuries and posttraumatic stress disorder, he'd found himself increasingly isolated. Republicans didn't want him to exist, and Democrats weren't in the mood for hero cops. Even many of his colleagues didn't see why he couldn't just get over it. That very day, a GOP Congressman had testified that what had happened was more like a "tourist visit" than an "insurrection." But no one could see this footage, Fanone thought, and deny what really happened that day. History would be forced to record it.

This is the story of what happened after Jan. 6. This is Mike Fanone's story, recounted over weeks of searching conversations and corroborated by witnesses, public records and videotape. It is a story about what we agree to remember and what we choose to forget, about how history is not lived but manufactured after the fact. In the aftermath of a national tragedy, we are supposed to come together and say "never forget," to agree on the heroes and the villains, on who was at fault and how their culpability must be avenged. But what happens if we can't agree? What if we're too busy arguing to face what really happened?

"There's people on both sides of the political aisle that are like, 'Listen, Jan. 6 happened, it was bad, we need to move on as a country,'" Fanone tells me one recent afternoon on the well-kept back patio of his mother's house, between long swigs from a beer can. It's in a quiet exurban Virginia neighborhood, ranch houses alternating with McMansions, American flags flying over big green yards. "What an arrogant f-cking thing for someone to say that wasn't there that day," he says. "What needs to happen is there needs to be a reckoning."

What makes a hero? Is it bravery, charging into danger to protect others? Is it sacrifice, the damage sustained in the process? Or is it the man who refuses to let us forget?

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