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Giant Nontypical
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Comanche Co., OK
Posts: 8,889
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RE: New york fire fighter bravey are second to none
The real hero of 9/11 was Rick Rescorla. Rescora had warned the NYC Port Authority of the danger of more attacks on the WTC by AlQueda. Rudy Baby and the Port Authority blew it off.The Port Authority and the NYC Fire Dept. toldfolks to stay in the towers.Rescorla got his folks out and paid for it with his life. Rudy Baby, the cops and fire dept. do not want to talk about Rescorla.
"Rick Rescorla was calling from the 44th floor of the World Trade Center, icy calm in the crisis. When Rescorla was a platoon leader in Vietnam, his men called him Hard Core, because they had never seen anyone so absurdly unflappable in the face of death. Now he was vice president for corporate security at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., and a jumbo jet had just plowed into the north tower. The voices of officialdom were crackling over the loudspeakers in the south tower, urging everyone to stay put: Please do not leave the building. This area is secure. Rescorla was ignoring them.
"The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate," he said during a quick call to his best friend, Dan Hill, who had indeed been watching the disaster unfolding on TV. "They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people the [expletive] out of here."
"Keep moving, Rescorla commanded over his megaphone while Hill listened. Keep moving.
"Typical Rescorla," Hill recalls. "Incredible under fire."
"Morgan Stanley lost only six of its 2,700 employees in the south tower on Sept. 11, an isolated miracle amid the carnage. And company officials say Rescorla deserves most of the credit. He drew up the evacuation plan. He hustled his colleagues to safety. And then he apparently went back into the inferno to search for stragglers. He was the last man out of the south tower after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and no one seems to doubt that he would've been again last month if the skyscraper hadn't collapsed on him first. One of the company's secretaries actually snapped a photo of Rescorla with his megaphone that day, a 62-year-old mountain of a man coolly sacrificing his life for others.
"Rescorla, after all, was once an infantryman himself, declared a "battlefield legend" in the 1992 bestseller "We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young." Another photo of Rescorla -- gaunt back then, unshaven, carrying his M-16 rifle with bayonet fixed -- graced the book's cover and became an enduring image of the Vietnam War.
The survivors of the 7th Cavalry still tell awestruck stories about Rescorla. Like the time he stumbled into a hooch full of enemy soldiers on a reconnaissance patrol in Bon Song. Oh, pardon me, he said, before firing a few rounds and racing away.
"Rescorla was born in Hayle, a seaport on the north coast of Cornwall. He was the only child of a single mom, although he didn't know that as a boy. He thought he had a traditional family with married parents, a much older sister and an older brother. He only found out later that his parents were really his grandparents. His "sister" and "brother" were his mother and uncle. No matter. It was still a close family. He called his mother Sis until the day he died. He never did meet his father.
"So Rescorla reported for basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., a mercenary at 24. "He was looking for bang-bang shoot-'em-up," says his best friend, Hill, who met him at Fort Dix.
Rescorla and Hill, who was starting his second Army tour, were the only grunts at Fort Dix with combat experience. It was the same story when they began Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Ga. -- the so-called Benning School for Boys was a hotbed of fresh-faced college graduates. Again, Rescorla emerged as a swaggering leader, belting out Cornish songs in his lusty baritone when his classmates were stressed out and exhausted."
"After graduating as a second lieutenant in April 1965, Rescorla was assigned to lead a platoon in Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry -- once General Custer's outfit at Little Big Horn, now the vanguard of a new helicopter-based "air-mobile" fighting concept designed for Southeast Asia. That fall, President Johnson shipped him to Vietnam."
"The Vietnam War entered a new realm of seriousness on Nov. 14, 1965, in the elephant grass and termite hills of the Ia Drang Valley. That remote swath of the Central Highlands became known as the Valley of Death. And as retired Army Gen. Harold G. Moore and war correspondent Joseph Galloway wrote in "We Were Soldiers," their narrative of Ia Drang: "Rescorla, as usual, was in the middle of it all." In "Baptism," another Vietnam memoir, Larry Gwin dedicated an entire chapter of hagiography to Rescorla, describing him as a charming raconteur with a "crazed irreverent twinkle" at play, but also a ruthless killer with a "cold steely glint that could sear through you like the icy stare of death" in the bush."
"Rescorla was the best platoon leader I ever saw," says Moore, who will be played by Mel Gibson in an upcoming movie based on "We Were Soldiers." "What a unique man."
Rick Rescorla, a man of convictions, extraordinary insight and bravery. A real hero.
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