Image via Wikipedia

We were young and naïve. We were like children who trust and believe that the world is a safe place. We hadn’t yet grasped the fact that there were people in the world who meant to harm us. But among us were those who were not naïve.  Men who understood the threat and tried to warn us and prepare us for what they suspected was coming.  One of those men was Rick Rescorla. Rick Rescorla died on September 11, 2001, when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.

Scott Johnson at Power Line posted an article today reminding us of the accomplishments of Rick Rescorla.

Scott Johnson reports:

I first wrote about Rick Rescorla in 2003 after finishing James Stewart’s Heart of a Soldier, the book based on Stewart’s New Yorker article “The real heroes are dead.” (“The real heroes are dead” is what Rescorla would say in response to recognition of his heroism on the battlefield in Vietnam.) The book is good, not great, but it touches on profound themes in a thought-provoking way: life and death, love and friendship, heroism and sacrifice, destiny and fate, man’s search for meaning, all fall within the book’s compass.

On September 11, 2001, Rick Rescorla was working for Morgan Stanley in the south tower of the World Trade Center. He was head of security for the company and had routinely conducted evacuation drills. On September 11, he led the employees down the tower’s one usable fire escape to safety. He was killed when he went back into the tower looking for stragglers.

We need to learn the lesson of September 11. Even when things are peaceful, we need to be aware of the events and people around us. We need to understand that the world is not always welcoming to the principles of freedom and democracy. We need to remember the heroes of that day—there were many—some we know about and some we don’t know about. We honor those heroes by moving forward with the lessons we learned on September 11, 2001.