Heart of a Soldier

James B. Stewart

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781439188279
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

From Pulitzer Prize winner James B. Stewart comes the extraordinary story of American hero Rick Rescorla, Morgan Stanley security director and a veteran of Vietnam and the British colonial wars in Rhodesia, who lost his life on September 11. When Rick Rescorla got home from Vietnam, he tried to put combat and death behind him, but he never could entirely. From the day he joined the British Army to fight a colonial war in Rhodesia, where he met American Special Forces' officer Dan Hill who would become his best friend, to the day he fell in love with Susan, everything in his remarkable life was preparing him for an act of generosity that would transcend all that went before. Heart of a Soldier is a story of bravery under fire, of loyalty to one's comrades, of the miracle of finding happiness late in life. Everything about Rick's life came together on September 11. In charge of security for Morgan Stanley, he successfully got all its 2, 700 men and women out of the south tower of the World Trade Center. Then, thinking perhaps of soldiers he'd held as they died, as well as the woman he loved, he went back one last time to search for stragglers. Heart of a Soldier is a story that inspires, offers hope, and helps heal even the deepest wounds.

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PEACHEY AND DRAVOT

Rick Rescorla (right) and Daniel J. Hill. In a remote outpost in Africa they found friendship and adventure. (Courtesy of Susan Rescorla)

DANIEL J. HILL crouched behind the crest of a large hill above the bridge, his MAT 49, 9 mm submachine gun aimed just past the stream. His position gave him a clear view of the only paved road leading south from Elizabethtown, the capital of Katanga province in the Congo. “They’re coming,” someone yelled. There was a flurry of activity along the hilltop, as Hill’s fellow soldiers in the Katanga police force, in reality a paramilitary force fighting for the independence of Katanga province, checked their Belgian semiautomatic rifles and took their positions.

Through the shimmering heat, Hill could see the first of the Congolese troops in the distance. They looked tired and disorganized, walking rather than marching, dragging weapons behind them. Obviously the United Nations advisers assigned to the unit hadn’t been able to instill much discipline. As the group moved closer, Hill estimated their number at about three hundred to four hundred men, the size of a small battalion. So this was the force the UN and the Congolese government of Patrice Lumumba had ordered south to subdue Katanga and capture its secessionist leader, Moïse Tshombe. Let them come, Hill thought to himself. He was ready, his adrenaline pumping.

Hill, a blond, blue-eyed American, had arrived in the Congo just two months before, in the summer of 1960. He had flown from New York to Berne, Switzerland, then to Cairo, and on to Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast. From there he had traveled by train to Nairobi, then hired a driver to take him to Elizabethtown, in the far southeastern corner of the newly independent Congo. When he arrived, he discovered a faded but still charming city that looked like a corner of the French colonial empire. Palm and banana trees shaded buildings with iron balconies that surrounded a central square. Restaurants served French and Belgian cuisine.

The Congo, granted independence by the Belgians in June 1960, just a year earlier, had rapidly become a hotbed of cold war intrigue and tribal factionalism. Lumumba had requested and accepted Soviet military assistance, leading the United States to conclude that he threatened America’s vital interests in central Africa. The CIA launched an assassination plot to poison his toothbrush. An American was still something of an anomaly in Elizabethtown, but Hill didn’t attract much attention. There were already plenty of white visitors and residents, including French, Belgians, and Germans. Many of them were connected to the giant Belgian mining concern, Union Minière de Haut Katanga. They had stayed behind when most Belgians fled the rest of the country, after Tshombe declared Katanga’s independence and called for international support and recognition. They knew that Tshombe’s independence movement was in reality supported and largely financed by Union Minière, which feared nationalization under Lumumba.

Union Minière had promised Tshombe a fighting force that would make him president for life, and the company had advertised in London, Brussels, and Paris for experienced combat veterans. They were ostensibly being hired to train members of the Katanga civilian police force, the Gendarmerie, but the men who responded and were hired knew they were mercenaries in a war for Katangan independence. They formed a formidable military unit. Many of them were ex-Wehrmacht troops forced to surrender at the end of World War II. The French had offered them a way out of prisoner-of-war camps by recruiting them for the French Foreign Legion, then shipped the German soldiers to Indochina. They fought there until the French defeat in 1954, and then many had been sent to Algeria, where they fought in the brutal Algerian war for independence. They were hardened soldiers, paid directly by Union Minière in U.S. dollars, Swiss francs, or British pounds.

Hill reported to the company headquarters in Elizabethville and said he wanted to join the new Katanga military force. He produced his American passport, his recent discharge as a paratrooper in the U.S.Army, and a certificate showing his completion of the elite Ranger school at Fort Benning, Georgia. As an added bonus, he also spoke German. The recruiting officer immediately escorted Hill to Elizabethville’s leading hotel, where he enjoyed a bath, clean sheets, and excellent cuisine. If anyone at Union Minière raised any questions or suspicions about Hill’s qualifications, wondering, for example, what an American with Hill’s credentials was doing in a remote, strife-torn corner of Africa, no one approached Hill about it. Given the job description, the company rarely asked many questions. Two days later, he was hired and reported for training. In eight weeks, he was an officer in the Katanga Gendarmerie, with the rank of lieutenant.

At age twenty-two Hill was younger than most of his fellow soldiers, who seemed even older than their years. Many of them had been in almost continuous combat since 1939. When Hill saw them naked in the barracks’ showers, he was shocked by the visible scars on their bodies. So many had lost an eye that they jokingly called the unit the “one-eyed command.” Though they were working for Tshombe, they showed no real loyalty to anyone or any cause, except one another. They were utterly indifferent to the politics of colonial Africa. They were experts in survival, and their mission was to kill before being killed. Hill knew they would kill him in an instant if they suspected betrayal.

For Hill was not what he purported to be, which was an American adventurer looking for mercenary pay. He could allow nothing to reveal the fact that he was actually still working for the U.S. as an undercover agent to monitor military activity in the Congo. Periodically he compiled a detailed written report, then carefully placed it in a designated dead-letter drop. Or he would participate in a so-called live-letter drop. He would place the report in one of his pockets, then follow a prescribed itinerary: to the market, to the post office, to the crowded central square. Somewhere along the route, the report would be skillfully lifted from his pocket by someone whose identity Hill never knew.

Dan Hill had been a U.S. Army Ranger instructor at Fort Benning when his commanding officer had summoned him. The U.S. government had seen the Union Minière ads for mercenary troops and wanted to know more. Hill had already proven himself in undercover operations. Born in Chicago in 1938, Hill had altered a birth certificate so he could leave home and enlist in the army at age fifteen. As a paratrooper in Germany in 1956, he had been infiltrated into Hungary to provide logistical support for the short-lived Hungarian revolution. He had posed as a German, with all traces of his American identity expunged. He had a German passport, spoke German, wore German-made clothing, even German eyeglasses. If captured, he was never to reveal his real nationality. He successfully organized some weapons deliveries and, when the revolution was crushed by the Soviets, made his way out.

In this regard, Hill was hardly alone in the sprawling, resource-rich, but nearly lawless Congo of 1961. The place was teeming with spies and double agents. Many of the Europeans and most of the Americans Hill met he suspected of intelligence connections. In September 1961, United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld left Léopoldville, in the Congo, for a flight to Ndola, just across the border from Katanga in Northern Rhodesia, for a meeting with Tshombe, hoping to broker a truce and an end to Tshombe’s secessionist ambitions. Just before the scheduled night landing, witnesses saw an explosion and the plane disappeared from radar screens. The wreckage was found the next day in a forest nine miles from Ndola. There were no survivors. A Rhodesian inquiry ruled the crash an accident, but Hill suspected a bomb, as did many others. But so many factions were arrayed against the growing UN presence in the Congo that it was anyone’s guess who might have done it.

With the death of Hammarskjöld, the remaining hopes for a peaceful solution to Katanga’s secession were dashed. Hill and his troops hadn’t seen any action, but rumors kept circulating in the restaurants and bars of Elizabethville that Lumumba was organizing troops in the north to crush the Tshombe-led independence movement in Katanga. Then reports had arrived that an armed force was moving south on the only paved road into Elizabethville. Hill’s commander had ordered him to ambush the troops and defeat them before they could occupy the provincial capital.

Hill had identified the bridge crossing at the Luguga River as a particularly vulnerable point for the advancing troops. It was the only bridge over the river, which was sure to be an impassable torrent at that time of year. Just past the bridge were a series of hills on one side and a deep ravine on the other, formed by a small tributary. If the enemy troops could be confined between the hills and the ravine, they would be easy targets for Hill’s forces firing on them from the higher vantage point of the hilltop.

So Hill and his men mined the bridge with tetrotal, a potent explosive. They laced the deep ravine with mines, booby traps, and trip wires. Once the enemy was in the ravine, Hill doubted anyone would come out alive. They also mined several large trees along the road just past the ambush point. He and his men took up positions atop the hill and waited. They were armed with grenades, rifles, bazookas, machine guns, and semiautomatic rifles. Hill ordered that no one was to fire or make any movement until all the Congolese troops had finished crossing the bridge. He didn’t want anyone to escape.

The first ranks of the Congolese troops arrived at the bridge and paused, waiting for the others to catch up. But they didn’t seem alert or suspicious. Once the battalion had reformed, they began the crossing. A few men seemed to be Indians or Pakistanis, members of the UN forces, but most were dressed in the olive shirts of the Congolese army. Hill’s men watched, motionless. Finally the last group finished the crossing. Hill gave the signal, and a huge explosion rocked the hillside. The bridge shattered and plunged into the river, cutting off any retreat. The trees fell across the road, blocking the troops’ forward progress. Then Hill and his men opened fire on the stunned troops below.

The Congolese forces scattered for cover. As Hill had anticipated, most of them ran for the ravine, which was a death trap. Mines and booby traps detonated, sending bodies flying. Seeing the carnage, some soldiers abruptly reversed course but were easily mowed down by grenades and blasts of fugas, a flaming chemical similar to napalm. No one attacked uphill, toward Hill’s positions. The rest of the Congolese battalion scattered in panic, managing only a few aimless bursts of gunfire. The entire exchange lasted less than five minutes. On Hill’s order, his men vanished, running along a predetermined path to waiting Land Rovers, which roared back to their headquarters. Though badly outnumbered, Hill hadn’t lost any men. On their first foray into Katanga, the Congolese had suffered a humiliating defeat.

A week later, Hill was invited to dinner at the copper miners club by his intelligence contact, a Belgian mining engineer working for the Americans. Hill filled the Belgian in on the ambush and the rout of the Congolese troops. “What were you doing there?” the Belgian asked.

“Commanding it,” Hill replied.

Several days later he was again dining with the Belgian, who suggested they take a stroll on the club’s grounds. An American materialized out of the darkness.

“Goddammit,” said the unidentified American. “What the hell were you doing out there? You don’t need to do that good a job,” he said, referring to the defeat of the Congolese force. “There have been terrible repercussions. The Congolese will never cross that river again.”

A United Nations force was going to have to be deployed, the man said. Both the American and British governments were now backing a unified Congo and were pressuring Belgium to stop its support for Union Minière. The threat of Lumumba had been removed, not by poisoned toothpaste, but by a CIA-backed coup led by Joseph Mobutu.

Hill was unapologetic; he was only carrying out the role assigned to him. He pointed out that he was dealing with hard-core, battle-hardened mercenaries who knew exactly what they were doing. Hill argued that if he’d pulled any punches, he would have aroused the suspicion of his men. “If that’s the way you feel,” he told the American, “then get me the hell out of here.”

Even without a new assignment, Hill knew it was time to go. Without at least tacit support from the Americans and Europeans, the Tshombe-led independence movement was doomed. Not long after his dinner at the miners club, Union Minière missed a payroll, failing to pay the mercenary troops. Though payment was promised, it was effectively the end of the Katanga military. His fellow soldiers asked Hill to join them in a daring attack on the Elizabethville and Bukavu banks to seize the money they contended was their due. Then they had a plan to escape over the border into Uganda, where the mercurial dictator Idi Amin, in return for lavish bribes, had promised them the use of an airstrip.

Hill wasn’t about to rob a bank with a bunch of ex-Nazis. But he couldn’t stay in Katanga. He loaded his few belongings into a tiny four-cylinder Morris Minor automobile that cost him $300 in U.S. currency. Then he set out on the only road to the southeast. The pavement quickly gave way to a dirt path as he headed across the dry landscape of the African bush. Four hours later he reached the border of Northern Rhodesia and showed his passport. After crossing the border, he stopped in the first town he reached of any size. It was Kitwe, a copper-mining town of several thousand people just thirty miles or so from the Katanga border.

COMPARED TO THE CONGO, Northern Rhodesia was a haven of British-imposed order and tranquillity. One of the last frontiers of colonial Africa, it was a mostly self-governing territory still loosely tied to the wealthier and more populous Southern Rhodesia. Even as whites were pouring over its border in panic from the Congo, the British Queen Mother had made a state visit to the colony and toured the copper district, including Kitwe. In the capital of Lusaka, she hosted a garden party and unveiled a statue commemorating Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist mining magnate whose British South Africa Company had brought British rule to most of southern Africa, including both Rhodesias. But tensions and unrest were rapidly building between the white-dominated federal government led by Prime Minister Roy Welensky and the two largest factions supporting independence and black majority rule. A British commission concluded late in 1960 that the existing federal government was not viable due to the “strength of African opposition in the Northern Territories,” causing shock and dismay among white settlers. At the time there were approximately twenty thousand white residents in Northern Rhodesia and an estimated four million native Africans.

None of this, however, was immediately apparent to Hill as he made his way through the unfamiliar streets of Kitwe, located in the heart of Northern Rhodesia’s copper belt. Kitwe had little of the tropical charm of Elizabethville. As in many African mining towns, its roughly five thousand white settlers lived in tin-roofed, stucco-walled bungalows with wide verandahs in the center of town, while the African mine workers lived in small wattle- or thatch-roofed, mud-walled houses in a segregated adjacent community called N’Kana. A few of the white mine-owning families had become quite wealthy. They lived on large estates outside of town with swimming pools and tennis courts. They favored late-model American cars with enormous tail fins. A newstand incongruously featured an issue of the Saturday Evening Post with a Norman Rockwell cover.

Hill made his way into the center of town and discovered what looked like an English pub. He parked, then went in and ordered a beer. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and the place quickly filled up. People seemed excited, in a festive mood. Hill asked what was going on and learned that a big rugby match was being played later that afternoon between the Northern Rhodesia national rugby team and South Africa. Hill had never seen a rugby game, so he joined the throng heading toward the stadium.

Hill was fascinated by the game. It didn’t take him long to focus on the Northern Rhodesia player at left wing forward. He dominated the offense with great speed and accuracy. Other players clearly looked to him for leadership. He looked a little over six feet tall, with dark blond, curly hair above his suntanned face. He obviously had great stamina, and his leg muscles under his rugby shorts were lean and taut. He seemed to love every minute of the game. Hill was dazzled by him.

To the crowd’s delight, Northern Rhodesia decisively beat the archrival South Africans. Hill followed the revelers back to the pub for a few more beers, and soon after, the rugby team players arrived, still wearing their uniforms. The player he had admired was the center of attention, accepting congratulations and waving to friends and admirers. When he reached the bar, Hill intercepted him. “Hey,” he said. “Let me buy you a beer.”

The rugby player drew back slightly. “Who the hell are you?” he asked in a soft British accent.

“Daniel J. Hill, late of the U.S. Army Airborne Rangers and Special Forces,” Hill replied.

The rugby player paused for a moment. Hill had clearly gotten his attention. “Rick Rescorla,” he said, extending his hand.

As they shook hands and looked at each other closely for the first time, Hill felt something profound pass between the two of them. He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but it was a feeling he’d never before experienced. The two fell immediately into animated conversation. Rescorla, too, was a military man. He was from Cornwall, the southwestern tip of England whose people are fiercely proud of their Celtic ancestry. That explained his distinctive accent. He’d served in the British army in Cyprus, but after returning to England, he had opted for the colonial police force. The pay was better, and so were opportunities for advancement. Rescorla was now an assistant inspector in the Northern Rhodesia Police Force, which served as both a paramilitary force for the increasingly besieged British colonial administration and more traditional police functions.

Rescorla was fascinated to learn that Hill had been in the middle of the uprising in Katanga. Rescorla and his fellow police officers had heard about the fighting and one weekend had piled into a car and driven to Elizabethville to see for themselves. They took Scotch whiskey, which they traded for weapons and camouflage gear. Elizabethville was now being patrolled by UN tr...