On the morning of September 11, 2001, Rick Rescorla was at his desk by half past seven. He was 62 years old and had survived a serious bout with prostate cancer that had spread to his bone marrow. But that morning, he had risen at 4:30, told his wife Susan he had never felt better, and caught the train into Manhattan from Morristown.
That afternoon, Rescorla, head of security for Morgan Stanley’s 2,700 employees in the South Tower, was preparing to give a deposition in the company’s suit against the Port Authority over the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The next day, he and his wife were headed to Italy to attend her daughter’s wedding.
He would not make the flight.
At 8:46 a.m., the North Tower shuddered under the impact of a jetliner. Rescorla heard the blast and saw the fire from his window. Those in the South Tower received a message over the public address system to stay at their desks, the building was secure.
Rescorla believed otherwise. After the 1993 truck bomb failed to bring down the tower, Rescorla told Morgan Stanley the next attack would come from the air. He wanted the firm out of the tower. But the company’s lease wasn’t up until 2006. So, Rescorla ordered evacuation drills – quarter after quarter, drilling two-by-two down the stairs until brokers complained that the interruptions were costing them money.
At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, Rescorla picked up a bullhorn, a walkie-talkie, and a cell phone and began the effort to evacuate Morgan Stanley employees. They were in the stairwells when the second plane hit.
At 9:03 a.m. United Flight 175 struck the South Tower between the 77th and 85th floors. The building lurched. Lights shivered. Heat and smoke pushed into the shafts. Below the impact, thousands of people were already moving because Rescorla had not waited for permission. He kept them moving. He kept them off the elevators.
At a bottleneck on the 44th floor, he directed the flow of people into a clear stairwell and told them to watch out for one another.
Those who were guided to safety by Rescorla reported that he sang while he did it. His songs were familiar to him. He’d sung them in crisis before, in the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam in November 1965.
At that time, he was a young United States Army lieutenant from Hayle, Cornwall, England. He walked the perimeter of the U.S. camp, under fire, singing Cornish hymns calmly to his platoon into the night. One was based on the Welsh song “Men of Harlech”:
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!
A bullhorn in a crowded stairway is a crude instrument, but it was enough. The people who had resented the drills now found they already knew the steps.
Between songs, Rescorla called Susan. She was crying. “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.”
The phone went dead.
By the time the Morgan Stanley floors were nearly clear, it was deep into the morning. Thirteen of the firm’s employees and contractors would not survive the day. Nearly twenty-seven hundred others would, because a man with a bullhorn had willed them to.
He could have walked out with them. He did not.
Rescorla told a co-worker in the lobby as he turned to ascend again, “You hear those screams? There’s more people up there.”
There were indeed still people further up the tower—stragglers, colleagues, men and women from other firms, firefighters climbing into the heat. The job was not done. Rescorla’s service inspired loyalty in others. Members of his security team went back with him: Wesley Mercer, Godwin Forde, Jorge Velazquez.
The last time anyone saw Rick Rescorla was at about 9:49 a.m., when Morgan Stanley employee Bob Sloss saw him on the tenth floor. The South Tower was minutes from collapse. Sloss told him to get out. Rescorla responded, “I will as soon as I make sure everyone else is out.” He then turned and started back up.
By the time Rescorla was ascending from the tenth floor, the passengers of Flight 93 knew about the Pentagon. They knew about the towers. Passenger Jeremy Glick had told his wife Lyz they were thinking of rushing the hijackers. Tom Burnett had told his wife Deena they were going to do something. Todd Beamer was on the line with operator Lisa Jefferson trying to reach his wife.
By the time Beamer finished reciting the 23rd Psalm and he and his fellow passengers would rush the hijackers, the South Tower had four minutes left. At 9:57 a.m. the passengers of Flight 93 had retaken control of the cabin and charged the cockpit.
At 9:59 a.m. the South Tower collapsed. It had stood 56 minutes after it was struck. Rescorla was still inside. So were Mercer, Forde, and Velazquez. Rescorla’s body was never recovered.
Four minutes later, at 10:03, Flight 93 exploded into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The two struggles ended around the same time – one in a stairwell, one in an airplane aisle. In both cases, exceptional Americans chose courage over fear. They refused to submit to the terror visited upon the country that day.
The deranged men who seized the planes did not understand the kind of man who answers danger and threat with song. They did not understand a group of passengers voting to sacrifice themselves to thwart evil. They did not understand that their enemies are a people who know that duty and gratitude at times require sacrifice.
Rescorla was born Cyril Richard Rescorla on the Cornish coast in 1939. American soldiers trained in his hometown before the Normandy invasion. Rescorla watched them train and decided he would wear a uniform. He joined the British Army, served in Cyprus, then wore a Rhodesian police uniform. In 1963, he came to Brooklyn, lived in a hostel, and enlisted in the United States Army – still a British subject. He took the soldier’s oath and became a U.S. citizen a few years later.
Rick Rescorla went to Fort Dix, then Officer Candidate School, then Vietnam. In November 1965, at Ia Drang, he walked into the first major battle between the U.S. Army and the North Vietnamese. During that battle, his picture was taken.
That picture adorns the cover of Hal Moore and Joe Galloway’s book We Were Soldiers Once…and Young.
Rescorla’s face is dirt-streaked, his shoulders slumped from fatigue, the weight of exhaustion forming his expression. But that photo shows Rescorla just as he would be decades later in a building about to collapse in New York City – determined, moving forward, uphill, and into the fray.
May Rick Rescorla’s spirit never die, and may we all aspire to emulate his courage and patriotism.
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