Rick Rescorla

Some of the people who came down the stairs of the South Tower that morning remember a voice on a bullhorn keeping them steady, and some remember that the voice was singing. "God Bless America," moving down through the smoke and the crush of bodies. The 9/11 Memorial records that the voice belonged to Richard Cyril Rescorla (https://www.911memorial.org/connect/blog/recognizing-war-hero-who-led-wtc-survivors-safety-911), Morgan Stanley's vice president of security. He had spent years getting ready for a morning exactly like that one.

Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall, on May 27, 1939. He served with the British Army in Cyprus during the Emergency, then as a police inspector with the Northern Rhodesia Police (https://www.army.mil/article/155632/retired_col_rick_rescorla_gave_his_life_saving_others_on_911). In 1963 he immigrated to the United States and joined the U.S. Army. After Officer Candidate School he fought in Vietnam as a second lieutenant with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, from 1965 to 1966 (https://news.va.gov/30840/veteranoftheday-army-veteran-cyril-rick-rescorla/), and became an American citizen the following year. At Ia Drang, his battalion commander Hal Moore called him "the best platoon leader I ever saw," and his men called him "Hard Core." When the fighting was at its worst, he walked the perimeter singing to his troops, the Australian version of "Wild Colonial Boy," according to a fellow Ia Drang veteran who wrote about him later. He had already learned, decades before Manhattan, what a song can do for men who are afraid.

He had also learned what terrorists do to buildings. In 1990, after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, he asked his old friend Daniel Hill, a counter-terrorism-trained veteran he had known since the Rhodesia years, to look at the World Trade Center the way an attacker would. The two men walked into the basement parking garage without being stopped by any visible security. Hill pointed at an exposed load-bearing column and said, "This is a soft touch. I'd drive a truck full of explosives in here, walk out, and light it off." They wrote a report (https://army.togetherweserved.com/dispatches-articles/69/608/A+Day+of+Heroes) to the Port Authority urging better security in the garage. It was ignored. On February 26, 1993, a truck bomb detonated in that garage, within roughly thirty feet of the spot Hill had named, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand. Rescorla was vice president for corporate security at Dean Witter Morgan Stanley that day, and he led the firm's evacuation through the smoke.

He treated 1993 as a warning, not a closed file. The Memorial's timeline records that after the bombing he wrote a report advising the company to move out of the towers (https://timeline.911memorial.org/timeline/10691/images/202/213) to low-rise headquarters in New Jersey. The company declined. Convinced the terrorists would return, he built a disaster contingency plan and rehearsed it relentlessly: surprise evacuation drills every three months, every employee including senior executives, timed with a stopwatch, moving down the stairs two by two. In 1998, sitting in his office on the 44th floor of the South Tower for a filmed interview, he warned that American actions abroad could bring retaliation home: "Terrorist forces can tie up conventional forces and bring them to their knees. Just one man willing to give his life for what he believes in, chooses the time and place and there is no way that any soldiers can be 100% alert." He told colleagues the next attempt on the towers could come from the air. The details in this paragraph come from his biographical record (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla).

On September 11 he put the plan to work. When the Port Authority's public address system told South Tower occupants to stay at their desks, he ignored it, took up the bullhorn, and started moving Morgan Stanley's people down the stairs, the same stairs they had drilled on until the drills felt like a nuisance. Drills are dull until the day they are not. The Memorial records that some of those coming down remember him singing "God Bless America" over the bullhorn; other accounts recall the old Cornish and Welsh battle songs he had sung to his platoon in Vietnam. At 9:03:11, the 9/11 Commission reported, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower between the 77th and 85th floors. The building was already dying. The people in it were already moving.

Thirteen Morgan Stanley employees and consultants could not get out. Rescorla was one of them. The Memorial records that he was last seen climbing the stairs to make a final sweep for anyone still above, minutes before the building fell. At 9:58:59 the South Tower collapsed in ten seconds (https://9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch9.htm), the Commission reported, killing everyone still inside. His actions that day are credited, by the Memorial's own accounting, with thousands of lives. The Museum holds the contingency plan binder (https://collection.911memorial.org/Detail/objects/109735) he wrote, dated December 1999, a gift of his family, along with his dog tag. And every year on his birthday, staff place a single white rose at his name on the Memorial parapet, part of a tradition begun in 2013 of marking each victim's birthday with a rose.

There is no way to soften any of this, and no reason to. A man who had carried a rifle through Ia Drang carried a plan through a burning tower, and the plan worked because he had refused to let anyone treat it as theater. He got them out, then he went back. The Memorial says he epitomized the soldier's code, leave no man behind, and the record backs the phrase up. He was climbing stairs into smoke while everyone else was coming down. Courage is not a shield. It is a direction. His direction was up.