Cyril Richard Rescorla (May 27, 1939 – September 11, 2001) was a British-American soldier, police officer, educator and private security specialist. He served as a British Army paratrooper during the Cyprus Emergency and as a commissioned officer in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. He rose to the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army before entering the private sector, where he worked in corporate security.
As the director of security for the financial services firm Morgan Stanley at the World Trade Center, he died during the September 11 attacks after returning to the South Tower to help evacuate more people following his successful evacuation of the Morgan Stanley offices. Rescorla anticipated attacks on the towers after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and implemented evacuation procedures which are credited with saving as many as 2,687 lives on 9/11.
Early life Cyril Richard Rescorla was born on May 27, 1939, in Hayle, Cornwall. He grew up there with his grandparents and his mother, who worked as a housekeeper and companion to the elderly. In 1943, during World War II, the town of Hayle served as headquarters for the 175th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. 29th Infantry Division, largely composed of soldiers from Maryland and Virginia preparing for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. As a boy, Rescorla idolized the American soldiers and wanted to become a soldier because of them.
Rescorla was a natural athlete, setting a school record in the shot put, and he 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".Stewart, James B., The Heart of a Soldier, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2002, Chapter 2.
Military and police career British military In 1956, at age 16, Rescorla left Hayle to join the army. At the time, Britain practiced conscription (known as National Service), which required every young man to serve for two years in the Armed Forces. Rescorla, however, chose to volunteer instead. This required him to serve three years, as the conditions for volunteers were considered better than those of conscripted soldiers. He enlisted in the British Army in 1957, training as a paratrooper with the Parachute Regiment and then serving with an intelligence unit in Cyprus during the EOKA Cypriot insurgency from 1957 to 1960.
Rescorla was awarded the General Service Medal with clasp Cyprus.
General Service Medal with clasp Cyprus
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) as a police inspector on a three-year contract from 1960 to 1963, experiences that made him a fierce anti-Communist. It was during this period that he met and forged a "life-altering friendship" with American soldier Daniel J. Hill, who encouraged Rescorla to join the U.S. Army after he chose to accept discharge from the police rather than turn his guns on fellow white colonists resisting independence.
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 join 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).
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 later described 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;Moore, Harold G.; Galloway, Joseph L. (2009), We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam, Harper Perennial, 2009. . pg. 212. 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. In the 1965 Vietnam battle, Rescorla sang the Australian version of "Wild Colonial Boy" to give confidence to his troops.Woodruff, M., Unheralded Victory 2000 p.80 ISBN 0004725190
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.
Silver Star Bronze Star with one Oak Leaf Cluster Purple Heart Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry
He left active duty in 1967 and reached the rank of colonel in the United States Army Reserve before retiring from the military in 1990. 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.
Post-military career Education and teaching After service in Vietnam, Rescorla returned to the U.S. and used his military benefits to study creative writing at the University of Oklahoma, eventually earning a Bachelor of Arts degree, followed by a Master of Arts degree in English,Ripley, Amanda (May 29, 2008). "A Survival Guide to Catastrophe" . Time. Page 3 of 4. 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.
Corporate security Rescorla left teaching for higher-paying jobs in corporate security. Moving to New Jersey in 1985, he joined Dean Witter Reynolds at its offices at the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
After the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Rescorla worried about a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Because his old American friend from Northern Rhodesia, Daniel Hill, was trained in counterterrorism, in 1990 Rescorla asked him to visit the World Trade Center to assess its security. When Rescorla asked Hill how he would attack the building were he a terrorist, Hill asked to see the basement, and after the two walked down to the basement parking garage without being stopped by any visible security, Hill pointed to an easily accessible 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." That year, Rescorla and Hill wrote a report to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, insisting on the need for more security in the parking garage. Their recommendations, which would have been expensive to implement, were ignored, according to James B. Stewart's biography of Rescorla, Heart of a Soldier. In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, terrorists detonated a truck bomb 30 feet from where Rescorla and Hill had predicted.
Following the 1993 bombing, Rescorla invited Hill to New York, where he hired him as a security consultant to analyze the building's security. Although no arrests had yet been made, 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 to infiltrate and interview 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.
Rescorla gained credibility and authority after the bombing, which resulted in a change to the culture of Morgan Stanley. Rescorla wanted the company out of the building because he continued to feel, as did Hill, that the World Trade Center was still a target for terrorists and that the next attack could involve a plane crashing into one of the towers.Stewart (2002), chapter 11. He recommended to his superiors at Morgan Stanley that the company leave Manhattan office space, noting 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) practiced emergency evacuations every three months.The Man Who Predicted 9/11. 2002. History
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. Feeling that the authorities lost legitimacy after they failed to respond to his 1990 warnings, he concluded that employees of Morgan Stanley, the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, could not rely on first responders in an emergency and needed to empower themselves through surprise fire drills, in which he trained employees to meet in the hallway between stairwells and go down the stairs two by two to the 44th floor. Rescorla's strict approach to these drills put him into conflict with some high-powered executives, who resented the interruption to their daily activities, but he insisted that the rehearsals were necessary to train employees for an emergency. He timed employees with a stopwatch when they moved too slowly and lectured them on fire emergency basics.
In a 1998 interview conducted on the 44th floor of the World Trade Center that was later incorporated into the short film Voice of the Prophet, which premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, Rescorla recounted his experiences in battle and warned that American military actions abroad could spur retaliation by enemies of the United States. 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 and Hill were also critical of the police response during the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, commenting, "The police were sitting outside while kids were getting killed. They should have put themselves between the perpetrators and the victims. That was abject cowardice." Rescorla felt that if he and Hill were younger, they "could have flown to Colorado, gone in that building, and ended that shit before the law did."
Personal life Rescorla and his first wife, Betsy Nathan, met as students at the University of Oklahoma. They married in Dallas in 1972. Their first child was born in South Carolina in 1976. Their second child was born in 1978 while they were living in Chicago. The family then moved to New Jersey. Rescorla and Nathan divorced after their children were grown.