(re-posted every September 12)

Rick Rescorla in the Ia Drang Valley, Vietnam, 1965

I did not want this day to pass without making some reference to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and in particular one American, Rick Rescorla, who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The Powerline blog has put up this story every year on this date, and you should read it and also the links.

Rescorla was a British native who moved to the United States to join the Army and fight the Communists in Vietnam. Rescorla was inspired to move to the United States in part by his friendship with Dan Hill. Their friendship is the one constant theme of the book (Heart of a Soldier). Hill and Rescorla had become friends in Rhodesia; they consciously modeled themselves on the characters of Peachy and Dravot in Kipling’s story “The Man Who Would Be King.” Later they both served as officers in Vietnam, where in 1965 Rescorla saw harrowing combat in the Ia Drang Valley.

That story alone is worth a post, as Rescorla played a key role in organising his troops and keeping their moral up, often by singing Cornish songs like Men of Harlech (his ancestors were from there and he often visited with his many relatives in the area).

Rescorla died a hero’s death saving his charges at Morgan Stanley in the south tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Rescorla was head of security for the company; he directed the evacuation in which he had long drilled the company’s WTC employees. He knew that a terrorist attack on the WTC was coming and he knew what had happened as soon as the building was hit. His message was one of resolve. Using a bullhorn, he shepherded his charges into the tower’s one usable fire escape and exhorted them that it was “a day to be proud to be an American.”

I’d like a movie to be made about him because it’s a hell of story. And I’d like to think he was occasionally singing Men of Harlech as he guided people to safety.

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On the downside is this article, The Forgetting of 9/11 by a man who was just starting his career as a Liberal Arts professor when the attack happened. He writes of the responses of his professorial peers at the time and ends with this:

9/11 has already reached a space of collective oblivion that it took Pearl Harbor many more decades to reach. This is because the force that ultimately pushed both of these hallowed days of  our civil religion into the twisted narratives of the America-hating Woke elite is the same: the fracturing of our culture into two irreconcilable sides, and the vast and rapid increase of the cultural reach of those who want all narratives of traditional American heroism and national identity to disappear.

We will in these days around September 11 read a good number of claims of how “we must never forget.” I know what these claims look like, as I have made them myself. I have spent a good deal of the 21 years since the attacks doing work to keep alive the memory of the heroes of that day. I regrettably admit that my faith in this project is extinguished. Most of America has already forgotten, and at least half of it remembers the day as a sign of American fallenness and failure.

Half a world away a war rages on soil that once meant something only to WWII history buffs. The world moves on.

But I will not forget.