Rick earned a righteous Silver Star for his actions in both battles, and earned the admiration and respect of all those around him. Awestruck comrades would tell and retell the story of how, early in 1966, Rick and a few volunteers were doing a high-risk reconnaissance mission in the hills above the Bong Son Plain on Vietnam’s central coast. They were checking out an abandoned village when Rick stepped through a door and interrupted a dozen or more North Vietnamese soldiers at a meeting. Rick blurted out to the startled enemy troops: “Oh, I beg your pardon,” fired off a burst from his M16 rifle, and then ran like the wind for the cover of the jungle with the North Vietnamese in hot pursuit.
Rescorla was no stranger to soldiering and war by the time he landed in the United States and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He had served in the British army on Cyprus and with the Rhodesian police fighting Marxist guerrillas in Africa, and had briefly been a member of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad. But his native England had run out of wars to fight and he found police work boring, so Rescorla came to America in 1963, when the coming war in South Vietnam was little more than a rumor. He was looking for action and he found it. He was tapped to attend Infantry Officer Candidate School (OCS) at Fort Benning, Georgia, in Officer Candidate Class 52 in 1965. That class would become the most decorated group ever to pass through what Army officers call the “Benning School for Boys,” with the Medal of Honor recipient Lt. Joe Marm and Rescorla himself leading the way, both of them soon to see combat in the Ia Drang.
Rescorla did only one tour in Vietnam and left active duty in the Army in 1966. He thought that the leadership in Washington, D.C., was looking at this war through rosy-hued glasses and, by dismissing the Vietnamese enemy as no more than a small cog in the wheel of monolithic Communism, were seriously underestimating the nationalism that was at the heart of the enemy’s dogged attempts to drive the foreigners, first the occupying Japanese, then the French, and now, us Americans, out of their country.
Although he remained an Army Reserve officer for many more years and rose to the rank of colonel before he retired from service, Rescorla was done with Vietnam. In 1966 he raised his right hand and swore the oath of allegiance to become an American citizen. He went to the University of Oklahoma on the GI Bill and earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in literature at the University of Oklahoma, and went on to earn a law degree there as well.
For a time he taught at a university in North Carolina, but it was too tame a life and the pay was too low to suit him. He drifted into security work and eventually wound up at Dean Witter Brokers in New York, and then became vice president for security at Morgan Stanley when those firms merged. In the 1993 terrorist truck bombing of Building Two at the Trade Center, Rick was once again a hero. When there was near-panic among the brokerage employees on one floor and he couldn’t get their attention, Rick jumped on a desk and shouted for silence. When he didn’t get it he threatened to drop his trousers and moon the terrified crowd. They fell silent and Rescorla then calmly instructed them where the stairwell doors were located and told them to get out of the building. Then he worked his way up and down the building’s floors ordering everyone out, not just those people for whom he was responsible. Rescorla was the last man to walk out of the smoke-filled building.
The following week he went to his superiors and told them that the terrorists had failed in their attempt to destroy the building and predicted with eerie accuracy that “they will be back.” He recommended that the brokerage house move to New Jersey, where most of its employees lived, and construct a low-rise high-security headquarters building. Impossible, they said. The company had a long-term lease on the space in these two Trade Center buildings. Rescorla then insisted that he be given the authority to run several surprise full-dress emergency evacuation drills each year. There was grumbling and grousing about what they called “Rick’s fire drills” and the expense and trouble involved in pulling hundreds of high-powered brokers off their telephones and then making them and all the support staff hike down forty or fifty or sixty flights of stairs.
But on this day, September 11, all that practice—and Rescorla’s instinctive judgment that this was no accident but a coordinated terrorist attack—would save thousands of lives. By the time the second hijacked airliner plowed into Building Two most Morgan Stanley employees were already out in the street running for safety and all the rest were in the stairwells on their way down, two by two, using the buddy system just as they had learned from Rick’s fire drills. As the building shuddered and the stairwells filled with smoke and even the well trained were on the verge of panic, Rick lifted his bullhorn and sang to them. This time it was “God Bless America,” survivors recall, and some of those old mining songs as well.
He found time to use his cell phone to call his new wife, Susan, who was weeping as she sat glued to the television images of the horror. “I don’t want you to cry,” he told her. “I have to evacuate my people now. If something happens to me, I want you to know that you made my life.” The phone went dead. On her television Susan Rescorla saw the collapse of Building Two and ran screaming out into the street in Morristown, New Jersey, where they lived. She was not the only woman to do so on her street and other suburban streets for miles around.
Rick was on his way back up the staircase to make absolutely certain everyone had gotten out. Two of his security people were with him, along with teams of courageous firemen of the New York City Fire Department. The building came down on them and to date no trace has been found of the body of Rick Rescorla. He and nearly three thousand others died in those two buildings—but only six employees of Morgan Stanley, including Rick Rescorla, were among them.
Now, as Paul Harvey likes to say on the radio, here’s the rest of the story. Three years before 9/11 Rick had been diagnosed with prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. The doctors told him he had only about six months to live. He had fought the death sentence with conventional cancer treatments, and Chinese herbal remedies suggested by Susan as well, and the cancer was in remission. But the steroids he continued to take had bloated Rick’s body and he now weighed nearly 300 pounds. He had written and spoken to close friends about his fears of retirement in a year or two and how it appeared that his life would end without the kind of great and meaningful cosmic event summed up in the Greek word kairos. “I have accepted the fact that there will never be a kairos moment for me,” Rescorla wrote in an e-mail to his old battlefield buddy, battalion surgeon Dr. William Shucart, six days before 9/11. “Just an uneventful Miltonian plow-the-fields discipline…a few more cups of mocha grande at Starbucks, each one losing a little bit more of its flavors.”
To another friend Rescorla grumbled, “God, look at us. We should have died performing some great deed—go out in a blaze of glory, not end up with someone spoon-feeding us and changing our nappies.” Rick Rescorla’s kairos moment came, and his departure in a blaze of glory as well. He embraced that moment and his duty, just as he had done at age twenty-six on the battlefields of the Ia Drang Valley and just as anyone who knew him expected he would do. He was a warrior prince, a singer of songs, a poet, a writer, a romantic, a father to two children, Trevor and Kim, and our good friend and comrade. They broke the mold when they made Rick Rescorla. There is no tombstone in Arlington Cemetery with his name engraved on white marble. He told any and all that he didn’t want that. There’s just a small bronze memorial plaque on an eagle’s cage in a wildlife sanctuary called Raptors in New Jersey. That, and a life-size, quite accurate bronze statue of the young lieutenant from that iconic photo taken in Landing Zone X-Ray, which is in the Infantry Museum in Fort Benning, Georgia, where they still turn out Infantry officers and soldiers for America’s wars.
Across the Atlantic in Hayle, Cornwall, they collected small donations, little by little from the townsfolk, to build a lovely granite memorial topped with a bronze eagle, in memory of their hero, the boy nicknamed “Tammy” who was the only child of a single mother. Their Tammy is remembered as a brawler a
nd tough competitor in the local rugby football games. He had never forgotten his hardscrabble roots and the hometown folks, and when he came back on trips to visit his mother he always made a point of visiting a lonely old blind man, Stanley Sullivan, at the nursing home. Rick would smuggle in cans of stout and he and Stanley would stay up late drinking and singing tearful renditions of the old Cornish songs.
We who served with him began a petition campaign within weeks after 9/11, urging President George W. Bush to bestow a posthumous award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Rick Rescorla. Over 40,000 signatures have been collected to date and many personal appeals have been made to the White House, without either action or response.
His comrades at arms remember one Rick, the tough guy who could be a hard-eyed killer one minute and the life of any party at the tin-roofed homemade officers club back at home base in An Khe. We remember a lieutenant whose radio call sign was Hard Core. The folks of Hayle remember another, the hometown boy. Susan Rescorla remembers still another Rick—the romantic who would suddenly grab her and dance her joyously around the house, the street, or a shop full of strangers. She remembers the poet, the lover, the wood carver, the playwright, the man who could suddenly begin reciting from memory great chunks of Shakespeare or Proust or Milton. She talks of how they had been married for months and she knew nothing of his role in combat in Vietnam or his medals, only that he had been in the Army a long time ago. It was not until she accompanied Rick to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to attend a lecture I was giving to the Corps of Cadets that Susan found out she was married to a genuine hero.
I introduced Rick to the cadets and told them of his critical part in the fighting in LZ X-Ray and LZ Albany and his superb leadership—something they already knew—and he received a boisterous standing ovation. Afterward Susan watched in amazement as the young cadets lined up by the hundreds to have Rick sign their dog-eared copies of our book and reach out and shake the hand of a true hero and role model. She remembers their first meeting, on a dawn walk with her dog through the streets of Morristown, New Jersey, when Rick jogged by barefooted. He stopped to take a breath and she asked why he had no shoes. Rick told her he was writing a screenplay about Africa and needed to know what it was like to run barefooted, as his characters did. Susan talks of her new husband who took her on a visit to Hayle a year after their marriage and there suggested that they renew their wedding vows outside an ancient, abandoned church, reciting his version of those words that join a man and woman together. Today, in the suburbs of New Jersey and the skyscrapers of Manhattan, there are thousands of men and women who are living their normal lives and doing their normal jobs because of a man named Rick Rescorla. But for him and his sense of duty the death toll at the World Trade Center would be twice as high. No one will ever have to spoon-feed or change the diapers on one particular old veteran in a nursing home. Near the end Rick was studying Zen Buddhism, and if what he read is right, one day he may return to live another life filled with adventure and even greater deeds. His sort are always needed in this world, and somehow they always appear when most needed.
It was the middle of April 2004, and spring had come to the hills of Alabama and southern Georgia. The wild dogwood and redbud brought color to the woods and the azaleas were in full bloom in well-tended yards.
Drivers on Interstate 85 east of Auburn, Alabama, must have been startled when a phalanx of State Highway Patrol cars, red lights flashing, waved them off the highway and raced ahead to block the entrance ramps that fed into the river of traffic moving east.
Other state troopers and police led a hearse and long black limousines and a convoy of hundreds of other cars onto the interstate. It stretched back a mile and more. Then the cortege turned off the interstate and onto U.S. Highway 280, traveling south and east through the rolling Georgia hills.
Must be some former governor or maybe an old general to receive such an escort, such a cleared path to the cemetery, those sidelined motorists surely were thinking; never seen them block an interstate highway for a funeral procession before. But this honor and tribute was not for a politician or a general or a bishop. It was the final, sad ride home for a true unsung American hero: we were carrying Julia Compton Moore from the home she loved in the sleepy southern college town of Auburn to the old Post Cemetery on the grounds of Fort Benning, Georgia, her final resting place in the arms of what she only half-jokingly called “Holy Mother Army.”
Julie’s life began and ended with the United States Army and was inextricably bound to that institution for all of her seventy-five years. She was every inch a soldier herself all of those years, as much as, perhaps even more than, the men she loved who wore the Army uniform: her father, husband, and sons.
Her story and her own quiet heroism during five of our country’s wars in which those she loved served in combat—World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Panama, and the Gulf War—had been told in our book and in the movie based on that book. In those dark days of November 1965, it was my wife, Julie, who followed the taxi drivers, house to house, trailer park to trailer park, in Columbus, Georgia, as they delivered the telegrams to Army wives and Army children telling them they had lost the one person who mattered most in their lives. It was Julie, the wife of their husband’s battalion commander, who came to their door to help them grieve and stood beside them at graves dug in the red earth of a Georgia Army post and helped them say farewell as an Army coffin was lowered into that red earth.
It took all her strength and courage to face those grieving women, even as she lived in fear that the next telegram to arrive might carry her name and address. She worried that those families would hate her because it was her husband who had led their men into the battle that took their lives. But there was no hate for a woman who came to share their sorrow; no anger directed toward another Army wife who was doing her duty as she had been taught by her own mother and father, and by her husband, who was now commanding soldiers in his second war.
Her own anger, her own considerable strength and iron will, would now be directed at righting what she considered a huge mistake by the Army she loved: dispatching taxi drivers to deliver the Western Union death notifications to the families of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. She and the wife of the 1st Cavalry Division commanding general together would lay telephone siege to the Pentagon, demanding that their Army do the right thing, right now. Within a matter of weeks Army policy would change. Those terrible telegrams would no longer arrive in the middle of the night and be handed over by a taxi driver. Instead an Army officer and an Army chaplain would personally come to break the news that would break so many hearts.
Just as she was brought home to an Army post at the end of her life, so, too, had she begun that life on another Army post: Julie was born on February 10, 1929, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home of the Army Field Artillery, to Captain and Mrs. Louis J. Compton. She was their only child and she was the quintessential Army brat, growing up on Army posts across America during the years between the two great World Wars as her father moved from assignment to assignment in the small, tightly knit Army of that time. She and her mother lived in Washington, D.C., off Reservoir Road in the shadow of Georgetown University, during the years when Colonel Compton was serving overseas in World War II in the European theater. Julie attended and graduated from Chevy Chase Junior College just across the line in Maryland.
Her father in 1948 was assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Julie went off to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In June of that same year I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg. Julie was visiting her parents there in August of that year when the two of us met. She was nineteen years old, an auburn-haired beauty with an outgoing personality. I burned up the roads between Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Chapel Hill during the next year and a half, courting the woman I knew was meant for me. We were married at Fort Bragg on November 22, 1949, and our wedding reception was held at the old Officers Club on that post.
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r first son, Greg, was born in the spring of 1951 at the Army hospital at Fort Bragg. Our second son, Steve, was born a year later at Martin Army Hospital on Fort Benning. By then I was on orders to deploy to Korea, where the war was raging. Just a month later, in late June, I boarded a plane in Louisville, Kentucky, and left Julie standing there with two babies in her arms. By then her father had retired from the Army and was living in Auburn. Julie and the two babies moved in with the Comptons and lived with them for fourteen months while I was soldiering in Korea.
When I got home Julie resumed the gypsy life she had known as an Army brat, only now as an Army wife and Army mother. Packing up, moving, unpacking, settling in for a year or two years in places like Fort Benning; Fort Myer, Virginia; West Point; Fort Belvoir; Fort Leavenworth; Newport, Rhode Island; Oslo, Norway; Fort Benning again; Korea; Fort Ord, California; then back to Fort Myer. We lived in nine states, two foreign countries, twenty-five different homes, and Julie packed and unpacked our household twenty-four times over the years.
Our daughter Julie was born at West Point in the fall of 1954 and daughter Cecile at Fort Belvoir in the winter of 1958. We were in Norway when Julie gave birth to our third son, Dave, with the help of a Norwegian midwife, in 1961. The two older sons attended a Norwegian Catholic school and rapidly became fluent in Norwegian.
Julie was the rock of our family. On her we built a home rich in love, caring, and tradition. She volunteered as a den mother for the boys, taught sewing and crafts to the girls, and drove them to all the countless activities. She kept the house running amid times of chaos and joy that five growing children present. Never at a loss for song at the spur of the moment, always accurately sensing the mood of a situation, she knew how to instantly lighten our hearts. The Army was her family as well. The love she gave our family was selflessly extended to every community where we were assigned—“Bloom where you are planted,” Julie told us. It is this love that she extended to the wives and children of the Army family that would prove invaluable in times of crisis and help me build unit cohesion in times of peace.
We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam Page 18