Posted on 10/03/2001 4:53:49 PM PDT by Gamecock
After a lifetime in which he cheated it many times, death caught up with Rick Rescorla halfway up the south tower of the World Trade Center.
But like a good soldier, he didn’t sell his life cheaply. Death took him only after he had cheated it again, helping to save 2,700 lives by relying on the instincts and the preparation that had served him well in battles on two continents.
Rescorla was a retired Army Reserve colonel and the head of security for Morgan Stanley’s Individual Investor Group at the World Trade Center. But many readers will be more familiar with him as Lt. Rick “Hard Core” Rescorla, one of the heroes of the 1965 battle of the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam.
“Rick was the best combat leader I ever saw in Vietnam,” said Pat Payne, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment’s reconnaissance platoon leader in Ia Drang.
Featured in book
Rescorla’s role in that battle is recounted in detail in the book “We Were Soldiers Once… And Young,” a searing account of the action by retired Lt. Gen. Harold “Hal” Moore and Joe Galloway. In 1965, Moore was a battalion commander in the center of the battle, and Galloway was a UPI reporter who covered the entire engagement.
Even those only vaguely familiar with the book have seen Rescorla’s image — he is the gaunt soldier on the cover with the 2-day old beard and the bayonet fixed to his M16.
When Rescorla showed up for Basic Training at Benning in 1963, he’d already seen more adventure than most soldiers do in a lifetime. Born in Cornwall, England, he joined the British army’s Paratroop Regiment as a teen-ager, then became a military intelligence warrant officer. He served in that position in Cyprus during the violence that wracked that island in the 1950s, then left the British Army for a London police job in Scotland Yard’s famous “Flying Squad” of detectives.
He left England for another military job, this time as a commando in the Rhodesian Colonial security force in Africa. From there he came to seek his fortune in the United States.
After breezing through basic training, Rescorla was picked up for Officer Candidate School. Last year he was inducted into the OCS Hall of Fame.
He graduated as a second lieutenant in 1965, just in time to ship out to Vietnam with the 1st Air Cavalry Division. In November of that year, still a British citizen, he would draw on all his youthful experience in the battle of the Ia Drang.
Headed the ‘Hard Corps’
Ia Drang was the Army’s first major battle in Vietnam, and one of its bloodiest. The battle claimed 305 American lives, soldiers who died in fierce combat with a North Vietnamese regiment that also took heavy losses. Rescorla commanded 1st Platoon, B Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, and was almost worshipped by his soldiers, who called themselves the “Hard Corps” after his nickname. But his courage and infectious optimism resonated beyond those under his immediate command.
Payne remembers Rescorla “leaping off [a] chopper and strutting into our small very beat-up group of survivors” during the night. After placing his men to fill the gaps in Payne’s line and pausing to speak quietly to each soldier, he walked toward Payne.
“I was so amazed to see him walking around because we had all been crawling on our stomachs for eight hours,” Payne said. Speaking in a low, confident voice, Rescorla complimented Payne on establishing good fields of fire.
“Then he looked me in the eye and said, ‘When the sun comes up we are going to kick some ass.’ I will never forget his words or the look in his eye. He said it in a confident, matter-of-fact way. He was not boasting, it was resolve.”
Rescorla earned a Silver Star for his actions at Ia Drang, and, in Moore’s words, “went on to establish himself as a living legend in the 7th Cav in Vietnam.”
But behind the swagger and the self-confidence, Rescorla hid a keen intellect, according to Dan Hill, a former captain who met Rescorla at basic and remained his best friend. This fine mind served Rescorla well when he left the Army in the late 1960s and put himself through college and law school, before going on to establish himself as a specialist in security for financial firms.
His will to live came to the fore again three years ago, when he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer and given six months to live. Against the odds, he beat the disease into remission.
As Morgan Stanley’s security chief, Rescorla brought his belief in the “seven Ps” — proper prior planning and preparation prevents poor performance — to bear, to the immense good fortune of his co-workers.
Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the south tower, with about 2,700 employees in 20 floors. But incredibly, only six, including Rescorla and two security folks who worked for him, still are missing. Everyone else made it out alive.
Obsessed with preparation
Those survivors owe their lives in no small part to Rescorla’s quick thinking at a time of crisis, and his obsession with being prepared for every eventuality.
“He’d take every possible contingency that could happen, and he’d come up with a plan for it,” Hill said. When the first plane hit the north tower, the Port Authority told workers in the south tower to stay put. But Rescorla disagreed and immediately executed an evacuation plan he had made the employees rehearse twice a year.
The plan worked, and when the second plane hit the south tower, almost all Morgan Stanley employees were on their way to safety. So was Rescorla, who made it to the ground floor, singing “God Bless America” to calm the nerves of the evacuees.
But he insisted on going back upstairs to check for anyone left behind. He was probably still climbing when the building collapsed.
His wife, Susan, and his two children likely will remember Rick Rescorla for his generosity of spirit and his dry English wit.
But middle-aged veterans of a hellish battle long ago in the sun and the elephant grass are more likely to remember Rick Rescorla as Bill Lund, another second lieutenant in that battle, does: “This was the bravest man I ever knew.”
I will never forget.