Tom Bowman

If you own a copy of We Were Soldiers Once... And Young, you are already holding a picture of him. The soldier on the cover, bayonet fixed, coming out of the elephant grass, is Rick Rescorla. Hal Moore called him the best platoon leader he ever saw. He was born in Hayle, Cornwall, in 1939, a boy who watched American GIs stage through his town before Normandy and decided that was the life. British Parachute Regiment first, then Cyprus, then a uniform from a country he was not yet a citizen of. He joined the US Army in 1963 and by November 1965 he was a lieutenant in the 7th Cavalry in the Ia Drang Valley, the first major battle between American troops and the North Vietnamese Army. His men called him Hard Core. He came home with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with oak leaf cluster, and a Purple Heart. Then he became a corporate security director, which is where the story actually starts. In 1990 Rescorla and an old Vietnam friend named Dan Hill walked the World Trade Center looking at it the way two infantrymen look at terrain. They found the weak point fast. The basement parking garage was wide open. They wrote it up and told the Port Authority that a truck full of explosives could be driven in and parked under the tower. The fix cost money, and it was declined. On February 26, 1993, a truck bomb went off in that garage roughly thirty feet from the spot the two of them had circled. Most people would have taken the vindication. Rescorla took the next step. He told Morgan Stanley the building was still a target and that they should get out of it entirely. The lease ran to 2006, so the answer was no. So he did the only thing left to him, which was to assume the attack was coming and train for it. Every three months, no warning, he ran a full evacuation of every Morgan Stanley floor in the South Tower. Everyone went, down the stairwells, two abreast, at a pace he set. Senior executives went too, and he did not care that they hated it, and they did hate it. Traders being pulled off desks by a 60-year-old Cornishman with a stopwatch. He timed them. He made them do it again. 8:46 on the morning of September 11, 2001. The North Tower is hit. Over the public address system, the South Tower is told to stay put and return to desks. Rescorla got on his bullhorn and told everyone to get out. He was 62 years old. He was near the end of his career and he had every reason to be somewhere else that morning. Instead he stood in the stairwells and moved roughly 2,700 Morgan Stanley employees, plus hundreds of other people, down out of the building. To keep them steady he sang into the bullhorn. Men of Harlech. God Bless America. The Cornish songs he grew up on. Grown adults later remembered the strangest thing about the worst day of their lives was the sound of a man singing in a stairwell. At 9:03 the second plane hit their tower, above them. Most of his people were already low or already out. He called his wife Susan. She was watching it on television and she was falling apart. What he said to her was this. Stop crying. I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I've never been happier. Then he went back up. He was last seen on the 10th floor, climbing, still going against the flow of people coming down. The South Tower collapsed at 9:59. His body was never recovered. Morgan Stanley had about 2,700 people in that building. Six of them died. Rescorla and members of his own security staff, who stayed with him. He spent eleven years telling people that an attack was coming and being told it was too expensive to prepare for. Then he spent the last hour of his life proving he had been right, and making sure it did not matter.