Rick Rescorla - Wikipedia

Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for another. Rick Rescorla was a hero in the Battle for the Ia Drang Valley and a hero on 9/11.
From the article:

"As the director of security for the financial services firm Morgan Stanley at the World Trade Center, Rescorla anticipated attacks on the towers and implemented evacuation procedures credited with saving many lives.[3] He died during the attacks of September 11, 2001, while leading evacuees from the South Tower...
Rescorla left teaching for higher-paying jobs in corporate security, joining Dean Witter Reynolds at their offices at the World Trade Center in New York City in 1985, and living in New Jersey.[3] After the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Rescorla worried about a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.[8] Because his old American friend from Rhodesia, Daniel Hill, was trained in counterterrorism, in 1990 Rescorla asked him to visit the World Trade Center to assess its security. When Rescorla asked Hill how he would attack the building were he a terrorist, Hill asked to see the basement, and after the two walked down to the basement parking garage without being stopped by any visible security, Hill pointed to an easily accessible load-bearing column, and said, "This is a soft touch. I’d drive a truck full of explosives in here, walk out, and light it off."[3] That year, Rescorla and Hill wrote a report to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, insisting on the need for more security in the parking garage. Their recommendations, which would have been expensive to implement, were ignored, according to James B. Stewart's biography of Rescorla, Heart of a Soldier.[8]

Following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Rescorla invited Hill to New York, where he hired him as a security consultant in order to analyze the building's security. Although no arrests had yet been made in the case, Rescorla suspected that the bomb had been planted by Muslims, probably Palestinians, or that an Iraqi colonel of engineers might have orchestrated the attack. Hill let his beard grow and visited several mosques in New Jersey, showing up for morning prayers at dawn. He took on the character of an anti-American Muslim, speaking fluent Arabic, in order to infiltrate and interview the other visitors to the mosques. He concluded that the attack was likely planned by a radical imam at a mosque in New York or New Jersey. Followers of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a radical Muslim cleric based in Brooklyn, were subsequently convicted of the bombing.[3]

Rescorla gained credibility and authority after the bombing, which resulted in a change to the culture of Morgan Stanley.[8] Rescorla wanted the company out of the building because he continued to feel, as did Hill, that the World Trade Center was still a target for terrorists. Rescorla predicted that the next attack could involve a plane crashing into one of the towers.[9] He recommended to his superiors at Morgan Stanley that the company leave Manhattan office space, mentioning that labor costs were lower in New Jersey, and that the firm's employees and equipment would be safer in a proposed four-story building. However, this recommendation was not followed as the company's lease at the World Trade Center did not terminate until 2006. At Rescorla's insistence, all employees, including senior executives, then practiced emergency evacuations every three months.[10]

After Dean Witter merged with Morgan Stanley in 1997, the company eventually occupied twenty-two floors in the South Tower, and several floors in a building nearby. Rescorla's office was on the forty-fourth floor of the South Tower.[3] Feeling that the authorities lost legitimacy after they failed to respond to his 1990 warnings, he concluded that employees of Morgan Stanley, which was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, could not rely on first responders in an emergency, and needed to empower themselves through surprise fire drills, in which he trained employees to meet in the hallway between stairwells and go down the stairs, two by two, to the 44th floor.[8] Rescorla's strict approach to these drills put him into conflict with some high-powered executives who resented the interruption to their daily activities, but he nonetheless insisted that these rehearsals were necessary to train the employees in the event of an actual emergency. He timed employees with a stopwatch when they moved too slowly and lectured them on fire emergency basics.[8][10]

Rescorla and Hill were also critical of the police response during the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, commenting, "The police were sitting outside while kids were getting killed. They should have put themselves between the perpetrators and the victims. That was abject cowardice." Rescorla felt that if he and Hill were younger, they "could have flown to Colorado, gone in that building, and ended it before the law did."