I never met him and I”ll never get the chance. My loss … and yours.
My first introduction to Rick Rescorla, though I wouldn”t know it for years and years, was through a picture of him snapped way back in 1965. When I first saw that photo, in the mid-1990s, I remember wanting to know who it was because his name wasn”t on the cover of the book. I located it on the inside cover and filed that name away somewhere in my mind. It was almost a decade later before I finally made the connection.
The same Rick Rescorla who was now on my TV screen and being featured in a History Channel special dealing with Sept. 11, 2001, was the same Rick Rescorla on that book cover, leading his troops, and I went to my bookshelf, located the book, and checked the name just to be sure. It finally sank in. I couldn”t believe it.
Rescorla, the World Trade Center security chief for the firm Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter, was murdered along with nearly 3,000 others on Sept. 11, the day the World Trade Center, Towers 1 and 2, collapsed before our very eyes in New York City, targets of terrorists who plowed hijacked airliners into both buildings.
Rescorla, who had predicted the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and who had warned of just the kind of attack that took place eight years later on a sunny Tuesday in September of 2001, died in Tower 2 … a hero to the very end. His remains were never found, but his heroic deeds on that day live on forever, just as they had some 36 years earlier.
Long before he correctly predicted the Sept. 11 attacks and had tried to convince the head honchos at Morgan Stanley-Dean Witter to move out of the World Trade center to a safer location in New Jersey, Rescorla served as a second lieutenant and a platoon leader in the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) during the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, a battle which was well-documented in the book “We Were Soldiers Once … And Young.” A movie dealing with a portion of the Ia Drang battle, the first major engagement between U.S. forces and the North Vietnamese Army, came out in 2002 and starred Mel Gibson, among others. It was a good movie, though not nearly as good as the book, which is almost always the case.
Rescorla”s life story is even better than the book … and the movie … put together.
A decorated war veteran (Silver Star, Bronze Star) who retired as a colonel in 1990, ending a 27-year military career, Rescorla also was beating prostate cancer when he was died somewhere in the vicinity of the 10th floor of WTC Tower 2.
Rescorla wasn”t heading down the stairs when it collapsed, but back up them.
When the first airliner hit WTC Tower 1 at 8:46 a.m., 17 minutes before another airliner would strike Tower 2, Rescorla ordered the evacuation of the 3,700 Morgan Stanley-Dean Witter employees who were occupying some 20 floors in Tower 2 and another 1,000 employees in WTC Building 5, even though the official word from those “in the know” was to stay put and do nothing … shelter in place, if you will.
Rescorla was no one”s fool, however, and he knew that minutes meant lives. A military man and a combat veteran, he acted quickly, boldly and precisely, as you would expect.
Long before the Sept. 11 attack, it was Rescorla who instituted an evacuation plan and who supervised evacuation drills for Morgan Stanley-Dean Witter employees in the World Trade Center. He wasn”t taking any chances should an attack ever come, and he was well-prepared for that day unlike the other 99.9 percent of us.
As a result, Rescorla safely evacuated nearly all of those under his charge by the time Tower 2 collapsed.
“Nearly all” wasn”t nearly good enough for Rescorla, however. He was headed back to get the others out when Tower 2 collapsed. When he was told he needed to get out of Tower 2 right away, Rescorla said, “As soon as I make sure everyone else is out.”
He saved thousands of his co-workers – all but three, of which he was one.
Rick Rescorla survived war and cancer to die under tons of concrete and steel in the blink of an eye. In the years since his death he has been honored with statues, various memorials, medals, documentaries and books. He”s also still there, sitting on my bookshelf, leading his men in the Ia Drang. He looks tired, he looks scared, but he”s leading them forward.
Brian Sumpter is the Record-Bee Sports Editor. He obtained a BA in history at San Francisco State University in 1984. He can be reached at rbsports@aol.com.
