Why has no one made a movie about Rick Rescorla, the man who predicted 9/11?
Every year, countless films and TV shows are made based on real people and their stories. Whether it’s the latest music biopic, a new true crime adaptation, or even the bizarre modern impulse to bring the stories of a product’s creation to the screen, audiences are never short of a true story to dive into. Every now and then, though, you read about a person whose life story is so incredible, so moving, and so downright unbelievable that you assume it must have already been turned into a movie. That was how I felt when I read about Rick Rescorla, the man who predicted 9/11. In truth, though, he didn’t only see it coming – he also saved nearly 2,700 lives on that awful day.
On February 3rd, 2002, journalist James B Stewart published ‘The Real Heroes Are Dead’ in The New Yorker magazine. The article told the stunning tale of Rescorla’s life in a fiercely emotive fashion. Rescorla was born in Cornwall in 1939 and lived his childhood in the sleepy town of Hayle. He enlisted in the British Army, the first chance he could, though, and at 16 years old, he was posted to an intelligence unit in Cyprus. From 1960 to 1963, he served in Northern Rhodesia – now Zambia – as a police officer, where he met the man who would become his best friend for the rest of his life. Daniel J Hill was a US Army soldier, and he convinced Rescorla to move to America and enlist in the army alongside him.
Rescorla and Hill both went on to serve in Vietnam. Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore called Rescorla “the best platoon leader I ever saw” and later wrote a book about his experiences during the Battle of Ia Drang in 1965. The book We Were Soldiers Once… And Young actually had a picture of Rescorla on the cover, which was adapted into the 2002 Mel Gibson film We Were Soldiers. However, despite his image being so closely associated with the book, Rescorla’s unit was omitted from the movie entirely.
In the end, perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing that Rescorla was left out of We Were Soldiers. After all, he always refused to talk about his experiences in Vietnam, and Hill believed it was because he carried tremendous guilt about all the deaths he witnessed. He revealed Rescorla would cover his hands in his fallen comrade’s blood as a ritual to honour them and admitted, “He was terribly compassionate, unlike me. Rick died a little bit with every guy who died under his command.”
Rescorla went on to marry and have kids, but by the late 1990s, he was divorced and working in the World Trade Centre as Morgan Stanley’s corporate security expert. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1994, and in 1998, he met Susan Greer, the woman who would become his second wife. It was a late-period love affair for both, and Hill revealed his smitten pal told him, “I think I met the woman of my life.”
As part of his work at Morgan Stanley, Rescorla revolutionised the investment bank’s security protocols. It occupied 22 floors in the South Tower, and he would regularly run security drills for evacuating the bank’s 2,700 employees in the event of an emergency. The higher-ups became frustrated at him for interrupting everyone’s day on such a consistent basis, but Rescorla was convinced his vigilance was entirely necessary.
You see, as far back as 1990, Rescorla began to worry that the World Trade Centre could be a viable target for terrorist attacks. After all, it was the tallest building in New York, and it symbolised American economic might. He and Hill presented a report to the New York Port Authority encouraging it to beef up security in the basement parking garage. Why? Because they felt someone could easily drive a truck bomb down there to take out a load-bearing column and bring the towers down. Their pleas were ignored, and only three years later, a truck bomb exploded barely 30 feet from where Rescorla and Hill had pinpointed. It was only through sheer luck that the terrorists didn’t achieve their goal of causing the towers to collapse.
Over the next eight years, Rescorla updated his doomsday scenario. Hill had converted to Islam earlier in his military career and felt he had a greater understanding of how much hatred there was toward America from radical Islamic terrorists. Incredibly, when the two decorated soldiers imagined how the next attack could pan out, they pictured a passenger plane being flown into the Twin Towers.
On September 11th, 2001, Rescorla’s worst fear was realised. When the first plane struck the North Tower, he rallied his people into action and began evacuating against the orders of the Port Authority, which was telling people to stay at their desks. He phoned Hill and scoffed, “Everything above where that plane hit is going to collapse, and it’s going to take the whole building with it. I’m getting my people the fuck out of here.”
Rescorla was last seen on the tenth floor of the South Tower, heading up into a stairwell to search for anyone else who needed to be rescued. He got nearly all of Morgan Stanley’s 2,700 employees out safely, though, and managed a final call to his beloved wife, too. Amidst all the smoke and fire and chaos, he told her, “If something should happen to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.” A tearful Greer replied, “You made my life, too.”
Rescorla was eventually declared dead three weeks after the devastating attacks, and Hill’s final tribute to him is so moving that it’s almost hard to get through. It must be said, though, that it’s also the kind of speech most actors would kill for. While Greer struggled to accept why her husband had chosen to go back into that doomed tower instead of staying alive for her, Hill argued, “She knew him for four or five years. She knew a 62-year-old man with cancer. I knew him as a 180-pound, six-foot-one piece of human machinery that would not quit, that did not know defeat, that would not back off one inch.”
Hill truly believed that if Rescorla had made it out of the South Tower in one piece but then found out one of his colleagues had died on his watch, he would have committed suicide. To a soldier like Rescorla, dying in the heat of battle while doing everything you can to save your people’s lives is the most noble way to go. Anything less would have been a failure on his part.
“For Rick Rescorla,” Hill stated with utter certainty, “This was a natural death. People like Rick, they don’t die old men. They aren’t destined for that, and it isn’t right for them to do so. It just isn’t right, by God, for them to become feeble, old, and helpless sons of bitches. There are certain men born in this world, and they’re supposed to die setting an example for the rest of the weak bastards we’re surrounded with.”
If that doesn’t sound like the makings of an emotional, thrilling, and heartbreakingly poignant Hollywood biopic, we’re not sure what does.
