Remembering Rick Rescorla, Vietnam War Hero Who Sacrificed His Life on 9/11 to Save Almost 3,000
Rick Rescorla, the Vietnam War hero who died after saving nearly 3,000 people on 9/11, knew it was coming. And he knew it was coming because had predicted the first Islamic terror attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
After that bombing, he concluded that an air attack was ahead.
But because Rescorla — head of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter — created an evacuation plan for his company’s employees, most of them made it out alive on 9/11.
Rescorla didn’t. He refused to leave the South Tower until he knew all his colleagues were out.
Vietnam Hero
As James B. Stewart recounted in the The New Yorker a year after the attack, Richard Cyril Rescorla was an Englishman born in Hayle, Cornwall, and joined the military to fight communist revolutionaries in Cyprus, then Rhodesia. He became an American citizen in 1967.
After joining the U.S. Army, he went to Officer’s Candidate School and landed in Vietnam, where he fought in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. His photograph is on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once and Young, by Lt. Gen Hal Moore and Joseph Galloway.
Rescorla received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart.
He landed at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in 1985, and was head of security in an office on the 44th floor of the south tower when he contacted an Army buddy, Dan Hill, to assess security at the WTC.
“Because of Hill’s training in counterterrorism, in 1990 Rescorla asked him to come up and take a look at the security situation,” Stewart wrote about the two:
“He knew I could be an evil-minded b**tard,” Hill recalls. At the World Trade Center, Rescorla asked him a simple question: “How would you take this out?” Hill looked around, and asked to see the basement. They walked down an entrance ramp into a parking garage; there was no visible security, and no one stopped them. “This is a soft touch,” Hill said, pointing to a load-bearing column easily accessible in the middle of the space. “I’d drive a truck full of explosives in here, walk out, and light it off.”
When Rescorla tried to explain the peril to security officials at New York’s Port Authority, Hill told Stewart, they told Rescorla to “kiss off.”
That was 1990. In 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a bomb in the garage of the North Tower.
Terror Attack Coming
Rescorla called Hill to New York immediately. Hill went undercover and infiltrated mosques. He “let his beard grow and visited several mosques in New Jersey, showing up at dawn for morning prayers,” Stewart wrote. Hill spoke fluent Arabic and feigned an anti-American view in speaking with Muslims. “His interviews formed the basis for much of Rescorla’s analysis, which concluded that the attack was likely planned by a radical imam at a mosque in New York or New Jersey,” Stewart wrote:
The prediction proved uncannily accurate. Followers of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a radical Muslim cleric in Brooklyn, were convicted of the bombing.
Rescorla knew what was coming, Hill told Stewart. Hill told Rescorla that his superiors should know what the attack might look like.
“Rescorla envisioned an air attack on the Twin Towers, probably an air-cargo plane travelling from the Middle East or Europe to Kennedy or Newark airport, loaded with explosives or chemical or biological weapons,” Stewart explained:
Rescorla also discussed his theories with another close friend, Fred McBee, a fellow-writer he’d met at the University of Oklahoma. He told McBee that he’d spoken up at company board meetings about unconventional threats, such as “dirty” bombs, small “artillery nukes,” and anthrax. He followed events in the Middle East closely. “He assumed that it would be the terrorists’ mission to bring the Trade Center down,” McBee said.
Rescorla concluded that the company should leave the World Trade Center and build quarters in New Jersey, preferably a three- or four-story complex spread over a large area.
The problem: The company’s lease ran until 2006.
Evacuation Drills
Knowing what was ahead, Rescorla ran regular evacuation drills to ensure that employees could leave the building quickly and efficiently. If an executive was on the phone discussing a multi-million dollar deal, no matter. He had to hang up and evacuate.
ThayerLeadership.com explained:
Multiple practice evacuations and training drills from the top floors of the towers probably cost the firm millions of dollars over the years in lost productivity and opportunity cost; somewhere an accountant must have been calculating the cost of every evacuation drill. However, Rick had the support of senior leadership at the highest levels of Morgan Stanley that those rehearsals and training were in the best interests of the safety of their employees and worth the cost.
One employee recalled the twice-a-month drills. “We had to do the full walking down the steps,” she said. “I could go downstairs with my eyes closed and know where I was going.”
Saving Lives
When American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., the New York Port Authority broadcast an intercom announcement to those in the South Tower. Ignore that. Stay at your desks.
Rescorla ignored the Port Authority and began evacuating his company’s employees immediately. Hill was in St. Augustine, Florida, at his home when Rescorla called him, Stewart reported.
As Rescorla moved employees out of the building, Hill told Stewart that he heard Rescorla singing Men of Harlech to them:
Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming;
Can’t you see their spearpoints gleaming?
See their warriors’ pennants streaming
To this battlefield.
Men of Cornwall stand ye steady;
It cannot be ever said ye
for the battle were not ready;
Stand and never yield!
Fifteen minutes after United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03 a.m., Recorla called his wife, Susan, Stewart reported:
She burst into tears and couldn’t talk.
“Stop crying,” he told her. “I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.”
One of the last employees to flee the building, Stewart continued, told Susan that “he had seen Rescorla on the tenth floor” and told the security chief “to get out himself.”
Replied Rescorla: “I will as soon as I make sure everyone else is out.”
At 9:59 a.m., the building collapsed, Rescorla still in it.
Rick Rescorla saved 2,687 lives.
