This item was first printed here on October 9, 2003.

U.S. Army

Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, Chief, Army Reserve, will present the Soldier’s Medal, the highest peacetime award for heroism, to Captain John Chovanes, an Army Reservist with the Army Medical Corps. The ceremony will be held today, 1 December 2003, at the Pentagon in Room 2B548 at 2 pm.

In the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001, Captain Chovanes at risk to his own life, voluntarily rendered medical aid, and assisted in the rescue of a New York Port Authority officer. The officer was buried well below the surface of the collapsed buildings. Rescue efforts involved slowly digging free the buried officer due to debris being above and around the rescue site. Captain Chovanes administered lifesaving medical treatment throughout the night to the buried officer, under the constant risk that the overhead debris, including girders, and masonry, would collapse on him, the buried officer and the rescuers. The officer was freed on the morning of 12 September 2001.

The following item was printed here on August 17, 2006.

The right-o-sphere has been agog about Oliver Stone’s new movie, World Trade Center. From all reports, it’s not a hatchet job.

There is a pair of Marines featured in a part of the movie. Their names are now known, though one had been a mystery. That’s nice. God bless them!

But I wrote about another military hero from Ground Zero on October 9, 2003.

U.S. Army

Chief of the Army Reserve Lt. Gen. James Helmly pinned Chovanes with the Soldier’s Medal for his deeds that fateful September day during a Pentagon ceremony Dec. 1.

“Once again, we see heroes rise to the occasion,” Helmly said, explaining the meaning of the medal to 22 family members who came to watch the ceremony. It’s the highest award a soldier can get for putting his life on the line to save someone else in a non-combat situation, he said.

“That’s what John did, he placed his life at risk to stay with his patient. I tell you, this speaks volumes of the courage and steadfastness of the Army Medical Corps,” Helmly said.

The rescued officer was John McLoughlin, played by Nicholas Cage in the movie.

Captain John Chovanes

Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, Chief, Army Reserve, will present the Soldier’s Medal, the highest peacetime award for heroism, to Captain John Chovanes, an Army Reservist with the Army Medical Corps. The ceremony will be held today, 1 December 2003, at the Pentagon in Room 2B548 at 2 pm.

In the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001, Captain Chovanes at risk to his own life, voluntarily rendered medical aid, and assisted in the rescue of a New York Port Authority officer. The officer was buried well below the surface of the collapsed buildings. Rescue efforts involved slowly digging free the buried officer due to debris being above and around the rescue site. Captain Chovanes administered lifesaving medical treatment throughout the night to the buried officer, under the constant risk that the overhead debris, including girders, and masonry, would collapse on him, the buried officer and the rescuers. The officer was freed on the morning of 12 September 2001.

Health State

Where were you on the morning of September 11, 2001? It’s a question people will ask each other over the years to come. Everyone remembers exactly where they were on days when history is made.

The morning of September 11, John Chovanes, DO, of Narberth, PA, was packing his car, getting ready to go on vacation, when a friend called to tell him a jetliner had crashed into the World Trade Center. Chovanes is a second-year resident in emergency medicine at UMDNJ-School of Osteopathic Medicine (SOM). He’s also a former paramedic. “Something told me to throw my rescue gear into the trunk, too,” he recalls.

On the road, he almost turned off at Allentown, PA, where one of his brothers lives. But on the car radio, he heard New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani appeal for medical personnel to come immediately to the site and help. Chovanes didn’t hesitate. “I wasn’t about to sit and watch CNN when there’s a disaster happening,” says the physician. He headed straight for New York City. [snip]

Here and there, amid the horror and destruction, are a few bright spots: the stories of a small number of survivors and the heroes who saved them. One of those heroes was John Chovanes. He arrived at the Holland Tunnel late that morning, so unfamiliar with the area that he’d had to buy a New York road map at a New Jersey rest stop. After identifying himself to police as a physician, he was waved through the tunnel and directed to an aid station near ground zero. Full-scale rescue efforts were underway, and the scene was chaos. Massive piles of rubble and twisted metal were everywhere, and the air was filled with smoke and fire.

Chovanes was not out of place at a disaster site. As a teenager, he’d lied about his age, claiming to be 16 when he was only 13 so he could join a volunteer ambulance company. He’d been an emergency room nurse and then head of a helicopter medical evacuation crew in northern Pennsylvania before going to medical school.

At first, there wasn’t much for him to do. True to his paramedic roots, he listened in on the conversations coming over the emergency workers’ radios. At 7:00 p.m., he heard that two Port Authority officers had been found alive, buried in the rubble. One had been freed, but the other would have to be dug out. Chovanes was asked if he could help. As he began assembling medical supplies, he realized he did not have enough morphine to treat a trauma patient.

“I saw a line of guys marching into the rubble like ants,” Chovanes says. “So I got in line with them, and we went into a huge crater.” A police officer pointed to the mouth of a tunnel where the officer was trapped. Looking at the piles of broken concrete underfoot, he suddenly spotted three boxes of morphine. “To find the one thing I desperately needed was incredible,” he says. “It was a good omen.”

Inside the tunnel, there was barely enough room to move. He and rescue workers crawled along a fallen girder to reach the officer, who was pinned face-down and buried up to his arms. All night long, Chovanes and a NYPD paramedic crawled in and out of the hole, administering intravenous fluids, anti-nausea and pain medication, and oxygen to the trapped officer, who had severe crushing injuries to both legs.

At one point, there seemed a very real chance that he would have to amputate the officer’s lower legs to get him out of the wreckage. “He said he had four kids, and begged me not to,” said Chovanes, who had even obtained a battery-powered saw, but hoped he wouldn’t have to use it.

At 7 a.m., nearly 12 hours later, the rescue efforts began to yield results. A cheer went up when diggers called for “spoons,” the smallest shovels used for rescues. A half hour later, the seriously wounded officer was pulled from the wreckage and transported to New York’s Bellevue Hospital.

Dr. Chovanes pictures from that day are here.

The following was first printed here on September 9, 2003.

Lt. Rick Rescorla, Platoon Leader, B Co 2/7 Cav

A hero for our time, England and Cornwall’s finest!

Lt Rescorla survived that engagement and many others.

He had grown up in a village on England’s southwest coast and left at age sixteen to join the British military. He’d fought against Communists in Cyprus and Rhodesia. He then came to America, he said, so that he could enlist in the Army and go to Vietnam. He welcomed the opportunity to join the American cause in Southeast Asia. He worked his way up through the ranks to Sergeant before being commissioned…

After fighting in Vietnam, he returned to the United States and used his military benefits to study creative writing at the University of Oklahoma. Literary minded, even before college he had read all fifty-one volumes of the Harvard Classics and could recite Shakespeare and quote Churchill. He had started writing a novel about a mobile-air-cavalry unit, and had several stories published in Western-themed magazines. He eventually earned a bachelor’s, a master’s in literature, and a law degree.

Rescorla then moved to South Carolina for a brief teaching career. He left for greener pastures; jobs in corporate security eventually led him to Dean Witter in 1985. He moved to New Jersey, commuted to Manhattan, and rose to become vice-president in charge of security at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.

And, oh by the way, was still in the Army, as a Reservist, having advanced to colonel before retiring in 1990.

Rescorla’s office was on the forty-fourth floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center. The firm occupied twenty-two floors in the south tower, and several floors in a building nearby. In 1990 Rescorla and Dan Hill, an old Army friend, evaluated the security, identifying load bearing columns in the parking garage as a weak point. A security official for the Port Authority dismissed their concerns. On February 26, 1993, a truck bomb exploded in the basement.

Rescorla ensured that every one of his firm’s employees was safely evacuated, and was the last man out of the building. ..

In St. Augustine, Dan Hill was laying tile in his upstairs bathroom when his wife called, “Dan, get down here! An airplane just flew into the World Trade Center. It’s a terrible accident.” Hill hurried downstairs, and then the phone rang. It was Rescorla, calling from his cell phone.

“Are you watching TV?” he asked. “What do you think?”

“Hard to tell. It could have been an accident, but I can’t see a commercial airliner getting that far off.”

“I’m evacuating right now,” Rescorla said.

Hill could hear Rescorla issuing orders through the bullhorn. He was calm and collected, never raising his voice. Then Hill heard him break into song:

Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming;
Can’t you see their spearpoints gleaming?
See their warriors’ pennants streaming
To this battlefield.
Men of Cornwall stand ye steady;
It cannot be ever said ye
for the battle were not ready;
Stand and never yield!

Rescorla came back on the phone. “Pack a bag and get up here,” he said. “You can be my consultant again.” He added that the Port Authority was telling him not to evacuate and to order people to stay at their desks.

“What’d you say?” Hill asked.

“I said, ‘Piss off, you son of a bitch,’ ” Rescorla replied. “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.” Then he said, “I got to go. Get your shit in one basket and get ready to come up.”

Hill turned back to the TV and, within minutes, saw the second plane execute a sharp left turn and plunge into the south tower. Susan saw it, too, and frantically phoned her husband’s office. No one answered.

About fifteen minutes later, the phone rang. It was Rick. She burst into tears and couldn’t talk.

“Stop crying,” he told her. “I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.”

Susan cried even harder, gasping for breath. She felt a stab of fear, because the words sounded like those of someone who wasn’t coming back. “No!” she cried, but then he said he had to go. Cell-phone use was being curtailed so as not to interfere with emergency communications.

From the World Trade Center, Rescorla again called Hill. He said he was taking some of his security men and making a final sweep, to make sure no one was left behind, injured, or lost. Then he would evacuate himself. “Call Susan and calm her down,” he said. “She’s panicking.”

Hill reached Susan, who had just got off the phone with Sullivan. “Take it easy,” he said, as she continued to sob. “He’s been through tight spots before, a million times.” Suddenly Susan screamed. Hill turned to look at his own television and saw the south tower collapse. He thought of the words Rescorla had so often used to comfort dying soldiers. “Susan, he’ll be O.K.,” he said gently. “Take deep breaths. Take it easy. If anyone will survive, Rick will survive.”

When Hill hung up, he turned to his wife. Her face was ashen. “Shit,” he said. “Rescorla is dead.”(2)

The rest of Rick Rescorla’s morning is shrouded in some mystery. The tower went dark. Fire raged. Windows shattered. Rescorla headed upstairs before moving down; he helped evacuate several people above the 50th Floor. Stephan Newhouse, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, said at a memorial service in Hayle that Rescorla was spotted as high as the 72nd floor, then worked his way down, clearing floors as he went. He was telling people to stay calm, pace themselves, get off their cell phones, keep moving. At one point, he was so exhausted he had to sit for a few minutes, although he continued barking orders through his bullhorn. Morgan Stanley officials said he called headquarters shortly before the tower collapsed to say he was going back up to search for stragglers.

John Olson, a Morgan Stanley regional director, saw Rescorla reassuring colleagues in the 10th-floor stairwell. “Rick, you’ve got to get out, too,” Olson told him. “As soon as I make sure everyone else is out,” Rescorla replied.

Morgan Stanley officials say Rescorla also told employees that “today is a day to be proud to be American” and that “tomorrow, the whole world will be talking about you.” They say he also sang “God Bless America” and Cornish folk tunes in the stairwells. Those reports could not be confirmed, although they don’t sound out of character. He liked to sing in a crisis. But the documented truth is impressive enough. Morgan Stanley managing director Bob Sloss was the only employee who didn’t evacuate the 66th floor after the first plane hit, pausing to call his family and several underlings, even taking a call from a Bloomberg News reporter. Then the second plane hit, and his office walls cracked, and he felt the tower wagging like a dog’s tail. He clambered down to the 10th floor, and there was Rescorla, sweating through his suit in the heat, telling people they were almost out, making no move to leave himself.

Rick did not make it out. Neither did two of his security officers who were at
his side. But only three other Morgan Stanley employees died when their building was obliterated.

However, over 2600 employees of Dean Whitter walked out of the south tower and in to the rest of their lives that morning.

Mudville Gazette via Silent Running.

Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming;
Can’t you see their spearpoints gleaming?
See their warriors’ pennants streaming
To this battlefield.
Men of Cornwall stand ye steady;
It cannot be ever said ye
for the battle were not ready;
Stand and never yield!