Tales from the USA, Part 6: Rick Rescorla
"I need to know what it feels like to run without shoes."
When I visited New York City last November, one of my first destinations was the 9/11 memorial. I’d been to Ground Zero before, 13 years earlier, but back then it had been very different – the memorial itself was still 18 months away from completion, and construction was also underway on the new One World Trade Center. Even though it was an active building site in the heart of the bustling Financial District, the area had an eerie quietness about it that created an unsettling atmosphere. I was glad to leave.
This time, however, I was going back with a purpose: to visit the 9/11 memorial, and find the name of Rick Rescorla.
In September 2001, I was 9 years old. Curiously, and especially since I remember earlier world events, I have no memory of the day itself. Presumably I was told about it, and must have seen footage on TV and pictures on the front pages of newspapers the next day. It’s possible that it was simply too big for me to comprehend.
Slightly embarrassingly, my only specific memory of that week is from the following Saturday morning, when (as I always did at the time) I tuned in to WWF Smackdown at 10am on Sky One. Instead of the usual larger-than-life wrestling action, the programme was a tribute to the victims of the attacks: ring announcer Lilian Garcia sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” stars like The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin gave speeches, and the wrestlers abandoned all pretence of animosity to concentrate on sending the crowd home happy and reassuring the viewers at home.
I still don't think I fully understood what had happened, but I realised that if it was significant enough to penetrate the colourful fantasy world of professional wrestling, it must have been something big.
It was only in 2008 or 2009 that I began to grasp the events of that terrible day. In drama class of all places, we watched the documentary 9/11 (directed by brothers Jules and Gideon Naudet) as inspiration for a piece of devised theatre.
The Naudet brothers had been making a documentary about the firefighters of the Engine 7/Ladder 1/Battalion 1 firehouse in Lower Manhattan. While filming the firefighters investigating a possible gas leak on the morning of September 11th, they inadvertently captured American Airlines Flight 11 sailing overhead and into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
From there, the brothers stayed with the firefighters and documented the FDNY’s efforts to rescue those trapped inside, creating an invaluable record of events on the ground. It’s a harrowing watch, but also captures some truly uplifting acts of bravery and kindness.
Over time, I heard more and more inspiring 9/11 stories. There was Betty Ong, the flight attendant on Flight 11 who calmly relayed crucial information to air traffic control. There was firefighter Orio Palmer, who single-handedly repaired an elevator to get to the 41st floor of the South Tower, before sprinting up a further 37 floors to reach the impact zone where he set to work helping the injured. And what about the amazing, intertwined stories of Stanley Praimnath and Brian Clark, who escaped the South Tower together and remain close friends to this day.
These are just a fraction of the incredible stories to emerge from that day. One, however, stood out to me amongst all the others: the story of Rick Rescorla, the English security chief of financial services firm Morgan Stanley.
I’d heard bits and pieces about Rescorla over the years – that he was responsible for saving thousands of lives on 9/11 – but I only recently got hold of a copy of his biography, Heart of a Soldier by James B. Stewart, which was languishing in the reserve stock at my local library.
I was excited to learn more about what was sure to be an interesting life, but what I didn’t expect was a love story – two love stories in fact. Besides chronicling Rescorla’s eventful life, the book also tells the stories of his best friend Dan Hill, an American soldier, and Susan Greer, the woman Rescorla would marry in 1998, as all three of their lives move ever closer to that fateful day in 2001.
Cyril Richard Rescorla was born in the picturesque seaside town of Hayle in Cornwall, England on 27th May 1939. When Hayle served as the headquarters for a regiment of US soldiers during WWII, the young Rescorla was mesmerised, and resolved that he too would one day become a soldier. This, alongside Rescorla’s frequent visits to the cinema to watch war and cowboy films, was the beginning of his lifelong fascination with the United States of America.
At fourteen, Rescorla joined the Royal Air Training Corps, and three years later proudly announced to his family that he was leaving home to join the army. He completed a three-year tour of duty in Cyprus, before traveling to what was then Rhodesia in 1960 to join the Northern Rhodesia Police Force.
Rhodesia was where Rescorla would encounter American soldier Daniel J. Hill. Both Rescorla and Hill would later report that, upon meeting, they each experienced a feeling of instant recognition, as if they were being reunited rather than introduced for the first time. They remained the closest of friends, exchanging letters when apart and, in later years, speaking on the phone every afternoon.
Rescorla left Rhodesia to fulfil his childhood dream of traveling to America and enlisting in the US Army. Before long he, alongside Hill, was training at Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Almost as soon as Rescorla qualified as a second lieutenant, President Lyndon Johnson made the historic decision in 1965 to increase the US military presence in Vietnam. Rescorla and his platoon would be going, and he spent the month-long boat journey learning to speak Vietnamese via cassette tape.
By this time Rescorla had evolved into a kind of super-soldier, uncommonly proficient at any task required of him. Not being accustomed to reading military history, I have to admit that I was more than a little disturbed by some of his exploits in battle. In Heart of a Soldier, Rescorla’s fellow officer Larry Gwin is quoted describing the experience of being passed by Rescorla and his men in the Vietnamese jungle:
“Then I saw Rescorla, and all I can say is that I’m glad he was on our side. Jesus, he looked mean. He saw me, too, and we were friends, but his mind was like a steel trap, tense and ready to spring, and he walked right by me as if I weren’t there. He was walking slowly, watching where he put his feet. His people followed him like ghosts, gliding by me silently with their camouflaged faces, soft hats, eyes scanning the trees, weapons at the ready. Had it been dark, I doubt that I would’ve heard them. It was eerie.”
Rescorla may have been a formidable soldier, but he had a softer side. In his spare time he loved to read, and dreamed of one day becoming a novelist. He also made a habit of singing old Cornish songs in a booming voice during challenging situations, which proved to be an effective way to diffuse tension amongst the troops.
The Vietnam War affected Rescorla deeply. He enjoyed forging strong personal connections with the members of his platoon and was devastated when any of them were lost in battle. The death of medic Thomas Burlile, who had never been enthusiastic about the war, left a particularly deep scar.
Rescorla’s tour of duty in Vietnam ended in July 1966, and – thoroughly disillusioned following his Vietnam experience – he left the army to pursue his dream of becoming a writer, enrolling to study for a creative writing degree at the University of Oklahoma. After gaining both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s, Rescorla, realising how difficult it would be to make a living through his writing, immediately enrolled into law school as a means of gaining a deeper understanding of his adopted nation.
Rescorla taught criminal law at the University of South Carolina for a period, co-authoring a book on criminal justice, before moving to Chicago to begin a new career in corporate security. In 1984, he was hired as the director of security for financial services firm Dean Witter, necessitating a move to New Jersey. The following year, Dean Witter moved to its new offices in New York, located inside the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
Rescorla approached his job in security with the same fastidious attention to detail he had brought to his career in the military. The 1988 Lockerbie bombing alerted him to the fact that a new kind of threat was brewing, and he quickly realised that the twin towers could potentially become targets. In 1990, he hired his old friend Dan Hill as a consultant – Hill by this time having built up considerable experience in counterterrorism – and the two of them performed a risk assessment. Hill quickly identified the underground parking levels, which were open to the public, as a vulnerable area.
Rescorla and Hill presented their findings to the Port Authority, who owned the buildings, but no action was taken, the Port Authority fearing that increased security measures would jeopardise the revenue generated by public parking. It wasn’t until February 26th 1993 that the exact scenario Rescorla and Hill had feared came to fruition: a van bomb was detonated in the parking lot beneath the North Tower, killing six people and injuring many others. Rescorla had already begun conducting regular evacuation drills with Dean Witter employees – making him somewhat unpopular with those who saw the drills as excessive – but after the attacks these became more frequent and were taken much more seriously.
Rescorla was sure that, since the 1993 attacks had, he assumed, been unsuccessful in their ultimate goal, the terrorists were sure to try a second time. He once again enlisted Hill as a consultant, along with another friend, Fred McBee, to conduct another risk assessment. Their conclusion was that another attack, if there was to be one, would most likely come from the air.
Perhaps knowing that the Port Authority was unlikely to listen to him, Rescorla presented his report to his employers at Dean Witter, urging them to move their offices out of the building. The company did take him seriously, but had no option but to remain in the tower until the end of their lease, which expired in 2006.
Dean Witter merged with another financial services firm, Morgan Stanley, in 1997, becoming Morgan Stanley Dean Witter before eventually shortening its name to Morgan Stanley. The company was the single largest tenant on the World Trade Center complex, with the offices in the South Tower spread across 21 floors.
In 1998, Rescorla was interviewed by filmmaker Robert Edwards, taking the opportunity to offer a withering assessment of US foreign policy and the likelihood of it prompting another attack on American soil. “Things will come home to roost – and they may be 20 years later – of cavalier actions we’re taking out there,” said Rescorla, seated in his office on the 44th floor of the South Tower.
That same year, Rick Rescorla met Susan Greer. As had been the case when Rescorla met Dan Hill more than three decades earlier, the two of them seemed to recognise each other instantly despite never having met before. So began a whirlwind, middle-aged romance between two survivors of unhappy marriages, built upon a shared love of conversation and dancing. Rescorla had by this time been diagnosed with prostate cancer that had spread to his bone marrow, but Susan was able to introduce him to alternative treatments that seemed to be improving his health. Rick and Susan were married in 1999.
When United Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46am on 11th September 2001, Rick Rescorla knew immediately that the scenario he had spent eight years preparing for had come to pass. The Port Authority initially instructed workers in the South Tower to remain at their desks, but Rescorla ignored the edict and began evacuating his people. Having been drilled for years by Rescorla in anticipation of this exact situation, they knew precisely what to do.
Rescorla commandeered a megaphone and began shepherding people down the stairs (incredibly, a photo exists of Rescorla in the stairwell, alongside his deputies Jorje Velasquez and Godwin Forde). Just as he had done in Vietnam, he sang old Cornish songs to lift people’s spirits, occasionally leaning in to tell them to get out as fast as they could. Even as United Airlines Flight 175 plunged into the South Tower at 9:03am – momentarily causing the building to sway from side to side – Rescorla remained an oasis of calm amidst the chaos.
In between herding people out of the building, Rescorla made calls to Hill and Susan, both of whom urged him to evacuate himself. Instead, Rescorla began to ascend back up the tower, ready to start working with the emergency services to coordinate the rescue of anyone still inside. Later, Hill would reflect that Rescorla, who still remembered the men he had lost in Vietnam, would never have been able to live with himself if he had left the building without ensuring that everyone was out.
The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed at 9:59 am, followed by the North Tower at 10:28am. All but six of Morgan Stanley’s 2,700 employees were successfully evacuated. The only trace of Rick Rescorla ever found was his military I.D. card.
The atmosphere at Ground Zero in November 2023 was very different to what I had experienced there in 2010. Whereas then it had felt eerie and unsettled, now it was pleasant and peaceful, bustling with people eager to pay their respects. The memorial was bigger than I expected, and for the first time I was able to appreciate just how enormous those two buildings really were.
Looking down over it all was the uniquely American structure that is the “new” One World Trade Center. 13 years earlier, I’d stood in more or less the same place looking at an artist’s impression of what this building would look like, and thought it looked very futuristic.
Rick Rescorla’s name wasn’t hard to find on the South Tower memorial. It turns out that you can search the name you’re looking for online and it will tell you which panel to go to. His name is on panel S-46.
After Rescorla’s death, Dan Hill, Susan Rescorla and Fred McBee formed the Rescorla Memorial Fund, with the aim of raising money for construction of a statue to be erected at Fort Benning (now Fort Moore). This goal was achieved in 2009, and – at Hill’s insistence – the monument was moved to a more prominent outdoor position five years later. There’s another monument in honour of Rescorla in his hometown of Hayle in Cornwall, and also a seaside walk named after him that I hope to do someday.
Historian James B. Stewart’s biography of Rescorla, Heart of a Soldier, was published in 2002, and (somewhat bizarrely) adapted into an opera in 2011. Dan Hill passed away in 2015, while Susan Rescorla continues to keep her husband’s memory alive. The Rick Rescorla National Award for Resilience was inaugurated in 2012, and Rescorla was posthumously awarded the Presidential Citizen’s Medal in 2019.
Rick Rescorla’s story is an inspiring one, and I am fully aware that this article cannot hope to do it justice. With that in mind, I urge you to read James B. Stewart’s 2001 New Yorker article ‘The Real Heroes are Dead,’ (from which the book Heart of a Soldier was expanded) and to watch the 2005 documentary The Man Who Predicted 9/11. Most of all, I encourage you to tell someone about Rick Rescorla, the American hero from Cornwall, England.
Sources
Heart of a Soldier by James B. Stewart (book, 2002)
“The Real Heroes Are Dead” (New Yorker article 2001)
Dan Hill: Mission (almost) accomplished (staugustine.com)
The Man Who Predicted 9/11 (documentary, 2005)
9/11 (Naudet Brothers documentary, 2002)
Former Morgan Stanley resident Reflects on his 9/11 experience (video)
James B. Stewart & Susan Rescorla NBC News interview (video)
A Conversation with Susan Rescorla (video)
Remembering Rick Rescorla | Vietnam Vet who saved 2,700 lives on 9/11 (video)
Heart of a Soldier - What makes a hero? - San Francisco Opera (video)
Remembering 9/11 - with Twin Towers Survivor Brian Clark (video)