Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [115]
There were moments, truth be told, when Rescorla’s job felt too small for his imagination. In a September 5, 2001, e-mail to an old friend, Rescorla spoke about kairos—a Greek word for an existential or cosmic moment that transcends linear time. “I have accepted the fact that there will never be a kairos moment for me, just an uneventful Miltonian plow-the-fields discipline,” he wrote, “a few more cups of mocha grande at Starbucks, each one losing a little bit more of its flavor.”
“A Voice Straight from Waterloo”
On the morning of 9/11, Rescorla heard an explosion and saw Tower 1 burning from his office window. A Port Authority official came over the public address system and urged everyone to remain at their desks. But Rescorla grabbed his bullhorn, his walkie-talkie, and his cell phone and began systematically ordering Morgan Stanley employees to get out. They already knew what to do, even the 250 visitors who were taking a stockbroker training class and had already been shown the nearest stairway. “Knowing where to go was the most important thing. Because your brain—at least mine—just shut down. When that happens, you need to know what to do next,” McMahon says. “One thing you don’t ever want to do is have to think in a disaster.”
On 9/11, a handful of people might not have died if they had received Rescorla’s warnings. But they did not work at Morgan Stanley. About 50 percent of Trade Center employees did not know that the roof would be locked, according to the Columbia survey of survivors. In the absence of other information, some remembered that victims had been evacuated from the roof in helicopters in 1993. So they used the last minutes of their lives to climb to the top of the towers—only to find the doors locked. They died there, wondering why.
As Rescorla stood directing people down the stairwell on the forty-fourth floor, the second plane hit—this time striking about thirty-eight floors above his head. The building lunged violently, and some Morgan Stanley employees were thrown to the floor. “Stop,” Rescorla ordered through the bullhorn. “Be still. Be silent. Be calm.” In response, “No one spoke or moved,” Stewart writes. “It was as if Rescorla had cast a spell.” Rescorla immediately shifted the evacuation to a different stairwell and kept everyone moving. “Everything’s going to be OK,” he said. “Remember,” he repeated over and over, as if it were a tonic unto itself, “you’re Americans.”
Morgan Stanley employees had seen what had happened in the other tower after the first plane hit. They had a clear view of the flames scaling the building and people—people just like them—jumping out of windows, their ties flapping in the wind. So when the second plane hit, they knew exactly what was happening in the floors above them.
Rescorla had led soldiers through the night in the Vietcong-controlled Central Highlands of Vietnam. He knew the brain responded poorly to extreme fear. Back then, he had calmed his men by singing Cornish songs from his youth. Now, in the crowded stairwell, as his sweat leached through his suit jacket, Rescorla began to sing into the bullhorn. “Men of Cornwall stand ye steady; It cannot be ever said ye for the battle were not ready; Stand and never yield!” One of his security employees brought out a chair for him. But Rescorla chose to keep standing.
Later, U.S. Army Major Robert L. Bateman would write about Rescorla in Vietnam magazine. In this passage, he was describing Rescorla on the battlefield. But he could just as well have been writing about Rescorla in the Trade Center:
Rescorla knew war. His men did not, yet. To steady them, to break their concentration away from the fear that may grip a man