We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (25 page)

We think of our fallen comrades, forever young as we grow old, and of how they died before they had even begun to live. We were all young then and had no real understanding then of all they would never know—the joy of a good woman’s love, of watching our children grow, of savoring all that is good and bad in a long life. We who were fortunate enough to survive have tasted all those experiences and now we know all that they gave up when they laid down their precious lives for us. Far from fading in memory, the pain and sorrow only grow more acute.

We are reminded of the words of an old friend and comrade, the late Capt. B. T. Collins, who came home from Vietnam missing an arm and a leg: “We are the fortunate ones! We survived when so many better men all around us gave up their precious lives so that we might live. We owe them a sacred obligation to use each day to its fullest potential, working to make this world a better place for our having lived and their having died.”

We are invited to speak at West Point and the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy and the military service schools and to individual units of today’s Army and Marine Corps, and we almost always say yes because we feel an obligation to give something back to our country and our troops in a time when we are, again, at war and these young men and women will be fighting that war and other wars. We owe that to this new generation of warriors just as we owe it to our fallen comrades.

Each of us, in his own way, continues to serve our country because We Are Soldiers Still….

APPENDIX

Two Heroes for America

T
wo of the most beloved members of the Ia Drang fraternity—one a battlefield hero, the other a home-front hero—are recently gone and their leaving has left empty places in our hearts that can never be filled. One was a big burly Englishman who took great joy from finding the love of his life near the end of his life, and from mortal combat and poetry and the study of the world’s religions. The other was a petite woman who was an Army daughter, an Army wife, and an Army mother whose moment of trial arrived with the flood of telegrams announcing a death in battle to Army families in a small southern Army town in Georgia in the fall of 1965. She followed in the wake of the yellow cabs delivering that terrible news and comforted the grieving wives and children of soldiers who fell in the Ia Drang Valley under command of her husband. She helped persuade the Army to change its casualty notification procedures and establish a strong family support system for the future.

Cyril R. “Rick” Rescorla, the finest platoon leader I ever saw in action during two wars, died as he lived—a hero saving lives—on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center in New York. My beloved wife, Julia Compton Moore, died on April 18, 2004, in a hospice in Auburn, Alabama, comforted by her children and grandchildren and mourned by thousands of veterans and their families who counted her a close friend and were warmed and comforted by her smile.

It was just past 8:46 a.m. on 9/11. The chief of security for Morgan Stanley Brokerage stood at the window of his office on the forty-fourth floor of Building Two of the World Trade Center in New York. The nightmare he had so accurately predicted eight years before had come true: Terrorists had flown an airliner into Building One just across the way. Plumes of smoke belched from the blazing skyscraper. The squawk box that connected him to the Port Authority Police advised him to keep all his people—2,700 on twenty-two floors of Building Two and another 2,000 in Building Five across the street—at their desks. There’s no need to panic, the authorities told him.

“Bugger that!” was his response in the slang of his native England. He grabbed a bullhorn and began working his way down, floor by floor, ordering Morgan Stanley’s huge staff to immediately evacuate the building and once they hit the streets to run, not walk, toward safety. Rick Rescorla, who had been a larger-than-life hero all his sixty-two years of living, was just doing what came natural to him: taking care of everyone in sight. We had known him as 2nd Lt. Rick Rescorla, platoon leader in Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion 7th U.S. Cavalry in both the big battles in the Ia Drang Valley and in a score of other battles in 1965 and 1966 across the Central Highlands. It was his company that was airlifted into LZ X-Ray to reinforce us late on the first day of battle. Bravo Company had been held in reserve until the second day of battle, when I ordered them to replace the battered remnants of my Charlie Company on the southeast side of the landing zone.

Rick was the finest platoon leader I had ever seen in combat and his company commander, Capt. Myron Diduryk, was the finest at his job as well. We joked, proudly, that they were the 1st Cavalry’s Foreign Legion. Diduryk was born in Ukraine and came to America as a young boy after World War II. Rescorla was born and grew up in the little tin-mining and seaport town of Hayle in Cornwall in southwest England. That night, after they had tightened the perimeter and shortened the defense lines and dug new, deeper fighting holes and were waiting in the darkness for the attack they knew was coming, Rescorla slipped from hole to hole talking to his men. When spirits were lowest he even sang to them—Old Cornish and Welsh mining tunes and British army songs from the Zulu Wars. He lent them strength from his own fearless heart.

His troops and those of Bravo Company’s other platoons drove off four consecutive human wave attacks before the sun came up on November 16, 1965, at a cost of five Americans lightly wounded. The bodies of over 200 North Vietnamese soldiers were piled around their fighting holes and in the tall elephant grass out front.

Later in the morning Rick led the final push to clear the perimeter of the last enemy snipers roped into the trees and hiding behind the termite hills. It is a photograph of Rick Rescorla snapped on that final push that graces the cover of our book
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
. The young lieutenant holding his M16 rifle with bayonet fixed, dirty, unshaven, and weary is captured in a classic Infantry lieutenant’s “Follow Me” pose.

Later that day Bravo Company evacuated X-Ray with my 1st Battalion troops, leaving the rest of the 2nd Battalion behind, along with the 2nd Battalion 5th Cavalry. Rescorla and his men were headed for some hot chow and hot showers and clean uniforms back at Camp Holloway in Pleiku. But their break was all too brief. The 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry walked into an ambush near a clearing called LZ Albany and by nightfall on November 17 were surrounded and fighting for their lives. The brigade commander, Col. Tim Brown, ordered Bravo Company to go to the rescue. They were lifted by helicopter from Holloway to Albany, in a daring night insertion under fire. They had to jump ten feet into the darkness from the hovering choppers. Rescorla strode into the perimeter shouting: “Good. Good. Good. We’ve got them surrounded now!” He was not only a breath of fresh air but the symbol of new life and strength for men sheltering in shallow fighting holes and crawling to avoid the enemy snipers, if they had to move at all.

Before the fighting was done this battalion and its reinforcements suffered 151 men killed in action, some 130 wounded, and another 4 missing in action whose bodies would not be recovered until April of the following year. As he helped police the bloody battleground the following morning Rescorla retrieved a battered old French army bugle from the body of a North Vietnamese soldier. It was dated before the turn of the century, and had been crudely marked with Chinese characters by its new owners, who had captured it at Dien Bien Phu or in some other desperate last-ditch battle that ended badly for its original owners. Now it belonged to the Cavalrymen of Rescorla’s platoon and, in the months following Ia Drang, they would signal their attacks by blowing that bugle in many another battle across the Central Highlands and on the broad coastal plains of the Bong Son.

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.”