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"...thousands of people were already moving because Rescorla had not waited for permission. He kept them moving. He kept them off the elevators.
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Those who were guided to safety by Rescorla reported that he sang while he did it. His songs were familiar to him. He’d sung them in crisis before, in the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam in November 1965.
At that time, he was a young United States Army lieutenant from Hayle, Cornwall, England. He walked the perimeter of the U.S. camp, under fire, singing Cornish hymns calmly to his platoon into the night. One was based on the Welsh song “Men of Harlech”:
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!
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...A bullhorn in a crowded stairway is a crude instrument, but it was enough. The people who had resented the drills now found they already knew the steps.
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Thirteen of the firm’s employees and contractors would not survive the day. Nearly twenty-seven hundred others would, because a man with a bullhorn had willed them to.
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Rescorla was born Cyril Richard Rescorla on the Cornish coast in 1939. American soldiers trained in his hometown before the Normandy invasion. Rescorla watched them train and decided he would wear a uniform. He joined the British Army, served in Cyprus, then wore a Rhodesian police uniform. In 1963, he came to Brooklyn, lived in a hostel, and enlisted in the United States Army – still a British subject. He took the soldier’s oath and became a U.S. citizen a few years later.
Rick Rescorla went to Fort Dix, then Officer Candidate School, then Vietnam. In November 1965, at Ia Drang, he walked into the first major battle between the U.S. Army and the North Vietnamese. During that battle, his picture was taken.
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Rescorla’s face is dirt-streaked, his shoulders slumped from fatigue, the weight of exhaustion forming his expression. But that photo shows Rescorla just as he would be decades later in a building about to collapse in New York City – determined, moving forward, uphill, and into the fray.
May Rick Rescorla’s spirit never die, and may we all aspire to emulate his courage and patriotism."
Please read the whole article here
AMAC News Line
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