Rick Rescorla

Early life Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall, on May 27, 1939. largely composed of U.S. soldiers from Maryland and Virginia preparing for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. A young Rescorla idolized the U.S. soldiers and wanted to become a soldier because of them.

Rescorla was a natural sportsman, setting a school record in the shot put, and was an avid boxer. When a professional boxing match was scheduled between a British boxer and a U.S. heavyweight contender named Tami Mauriello, his friends backed the Briton. Rescorla said "I'm for Tammy" [sic] and after Mauriello won the fight, everyone in Hayle knew him as "Tammy".

Military and police career British military In 1956, at age 16, Rescorla left Hayle to join the army.

Northern Rhodesia and Metropolitan Police Services At the end of his Short-Service Commission, Rescorla joined the Northern Rhodesia Police (now the Zambia Police Service)

On returning to London, he joined the Metropolitan Police. He later moved to the United States after being unable to settle down in London, being interested in fighting instead.

U.S. military Upon arrival in the United States, Rescorla lived at a YMCA hostel in Brooklyn until he was able to enlist in the army. "Rick", as he would thereafter be known, enlisted in the United States Army in 1963 and, after basic training at Fort Dix, attended Officer Candidate School and airborne training at Fort Benning. Upon graduation, Rescorla was assigned as a platoon leader in the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile).

The image of Rescorla in Vietnam would be used on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once... And Young. Rescorla was sent to Vietnam, where he served under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore. The two participated in the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang, which Moore would later describe in a 1992 book he co-authored We Were Soldiers Once… And Young, (from which the 2002 Mel Gibson film We Were Soldiers would be adapted); Rescorla is the soldier pictured on the book jacket cover. Moore described Rescorla as "the best platoon leader I ever saw". Rescorla's men nicknamed him "Hard Core" for his bravery in battle and revered him for his good humor and compassion toward his men; Rescorla jokingly called his platoon "Hard Corps".

He is also mentioned in the book Baptism by Larry Gwin who also fought at Ia Drang. The fourteenth chapter of the book, "Rescorla's Game", describes him as the "Cornish Hawk". Despite this tough image, according to his second wife and widow Susan Rescorla in her book, Touched by a Hero, music was "so central" to Rick's life that he sang to his troops in Vietnam to calm them – something he would later employ during 9/11 evacuations.

Rescorla's Vietnam War honors included the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, a Purple Heart and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. In April 2001, Rescorla was chosen for induction into the Infantry Officer Candidate School Hall of Fame and was invited to participate in ceremonies at Fort Benning. and his Juris Doctor degree from the Oklahoma City University School of Law. He then moved to South Carolina, where he taught criminal justice at the University of South Carolina for three years and published a textbook on the subject.

Following the 1993 bombing, Rescorla invited Hill to New York, where he hired him as a security consultant in order to analyze the building's security. Although no arrests had yet been made in the case, Rescorla suspected that the bomb had been planted by Muslim terrorists or that an Iraqi colonel of engineers might have orchestrated the attack. Hill let his beard grow and visited several mosques in New Jersey, showing up for morning prayers at dawn. Speaking fluent Arabic, he took on the character of an anti-American Muslim in order to infiltrate and interview the other visitors to the mosques. He concluded that the attack was likely planned by a radical imam at a mosque in New York or New Jersey. Subsequently, followers of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a Brooklyn-based radical Muslim cleric, were convicted of the bombing. He recommended to his superiors at Morgan Stanley that the company leave Manhattan office space, mentioning that labor costs were lower in New Jersey and that the firm's employees and equipment would be safer in a proposed four-story building. However, this recommendation was not followed because the company's lease at the World Trade Center would not terminate until 2006. At Rescorla's insistence, all employees (including senior executives) then practiced emergency evacuations every three months.

After Dean Witter merged with Morgan Stanley in 1997, the company eventually occupied 22 floors in the South Tower and several floors in a building nearby. Rescorla's office was on the South Tower's 44th floor. He said, "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." Rescorla heard the explosion and saw the tower burning from his office window in the 44th floor of the South Tower (WTC 2). When a Port Authority announcement came over the P.A. system urging people to stay at their desks, and before United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03 A.M., Rescorla ignored the announcement, grabbed his bullhorn, walkie-talkie and cell phone, and began systematically to order the roughly 2,700 Morgan Stanley employees in the South Tower to evacuate, in addition to the employees in WTC 5, numbering around 1,000. While watching the news coverage, in a phone call to his best friend, Dan Hill, Rescorla said, "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate," and, "They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people the fuck out of here."

Rescorla had boosted morale among his men in Vietnam by singing Cornish songs from his youth, and now he did the same in the stairwell, singing songs such as one based on the Welsh song "Men of Harlech":

Poem quote|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! After successfully evacuating almost all of Morgan Stanley's 2,700 employees, he went back into the building. When one of his colleagues told him he too had to evacuate the World Trade Center, Rescorla replied, "As soon as I make sure everyone else is out." He was last seen on the 10th floor of the South Tower, heading upward, shortly before its collapse at 9:59 A.M., 56 minutes after being struck by United Airlines Flight 175. A total of 13 Morgan Stanley employees died in the September 11 attacks, including Rescorla, his deputies Wesley Mercer and Jorge Velazquez, and security guard Godwin Forde, who had stayed behind to help others. Rescorla was declared dead three weeks after the attacks. none have been identified as those of Rescorla. Rescorla had requested that he be cremated, and his ashes be strewn in Hayle. Having revered the eagle as a symbol of both American freedom and Native American mysticism, he had also told Susan that when he died he wanted her to contribute money to an endowment for eagles. The opera Rescorla Variations by Cornish composer William Lewarne Harris received its premiere in 2006. In 2009, a statue of Rescorla was unveiled on The Walk Of Honor at the National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning, Georgia. On November 11, 2009, Rescorla was inducted into the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame. In 2015, Rescorla was memorialized at the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment's conference room. The room is now called the "Rick Rescorla Conference Room". At the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Rescorla is memorialized at the South Pool, on Panel S-46. The Rick Rescorla National Award for Resilience was created by the Department of Homeland Security to "recognize outstanding response to a catastrophic incident and leadership in fostering resilient and prepared communities." On April 13, 2019, at the Long Rock train depot in Rescorla's native Cornwall, a new Class 802 train was named "Rick Rescorla" in a ceremony that also named another train the "Solomon Browne", after the lifeboat and crew lost in the Penlee lifeboat disaster. On September 11, 2019, President Donald Trump announced that Rescorla would be honored with the Presidential Citizens Medal, which was presented to Susan at a White House ceremony on November 7. In 2021, legislation introduced by state senator Anthony M. Bucco to designate May 27 as "Richard Rescorla Day" in New Jersey unanimously passed in the New Jersey Senate. Rescorla is honored by plaques at the Mount Soledad National Veterans Memorial in San Diego, California, and at the Raptor Trust near his home at Long Hill Township, New Jersey. The latter memorial is the only one he specifically requested before his death. Rescorla was the subject of a 2005 documentary entitled The Man Who Predicted 9/11. The film was shown on Channel 4 in the UK and the History Channel in the United States. Amanda Ripley's 2008 book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, profiles Rescorla. Stewart's book became the basis of an opera of the same name by Christopher Theofanidis. It was premiered by the San Francisco Opera on September 10, 2011, in a production starring Thomas Hampson as Rescorla.