[In the following review, Baldwin notes that James B. Stewart's biography Heart of a Soldier serves to highlight the many acts of heroism and personal sacrifice that marked the backdrop of violence unleashed by the attacks on September 11.]

Consider the last 18 months. It looks like The Great American Crack-up: A decade-long orgy of moneyed excess and Clintonian evasion comes to a climax in roiling capital markets and collapsing portfolios, domestic terrorism and foreign war, disgraced clerics and discovered corporate thievery. Even baseball threatened to let America down.

But—as if to restore our faith—along comes this excellent book. Heart of a Soldier is the story of a life of heroic virtue and self-sacrifice, but it is also a simple love story, the love of a big-hearted man for his adopted country, for his friends and family, and for the woman who completed him. And it is a story of this man's triumph over the soul-destroying hatred of 9/11.

James B. Stewart is both a best-selling author and a Pulitzer prize-winner; in a matter of pages one sees why. He has chosen a subject that is riveting in itself, and rendered it with glass-clear prose that leaves the reader with an intimate understanding of the story and its people.

Rick Rescorla was born in a working-class village in Cornwall, England—to a family of modest means, modest education, and modest ambition—just before World War II. Stewart deftly guides our imagination to see a small boy captivated by great dreams of “foreign places and adventure, fantasies fueled by weekly trips to the Palace Cinema.” And it is as if this small boy sitting in the dark of the Palace Cinema wills his life to conform to the heroic, romantic images that so captivated and thrilled him. Restless with the uneventful domesticity of Cornwall, Rescorla joins the British army at 17 and starts a life adventure worthy of Hollywood.

Stewart describes Rescorla's military service in Northern Rhodesia, a near-otherworldly place of “free-flowing Watney's Red Barrel ale, the gin-and-tonics before supper [and] white-jacketed servants.” In the warm receding light of the British Empire our hero meets an American, Dan Hill, who becomes his lifelong friend and comrade-in-arms. The two hunt and camp on the African plain, and Stewart's lens focuses in on Rescorla's autodidactic enthusiasm for poetry and fiction, especially for Kipling.

With the colonial order coming to an end, Hill and Rescorla decide to leave Rhodesia and agree on their life's ambition: fighting Communism. “We both want to fight Communists, and keep them from world domination,” Hill implores. “There's only one place to do that. … It's the U.S. … We can go to the States, enlist in the army. … When you get to New York, call me.”

Rescorla and Hill did enlist; they trained at Fort Benning and headed to Vietnam. Stewart's description of Rescorla's war experiences in Vietnam—blood, sweat, and terror—is gripping in its heroism as well as its horrors. “The place looked like the devil's butcher shop,” one soldier recounted. “There were people hanging out of trees. The ground was slippery with blood. Men who were my closest friends were all around me, dead.”

Despite death's steady devouring of his friends and comrades—perhaps because of it—Rescorla experienced full communion with those under his command. He could, Stewart tells us, name them all, the men who'd died under his command. He knew their names, their faces, their hometowns, their family members. He knows what wounds they had suffered and how, where and when they had died. He told Hill he had held them in his arms, their young faces stricken with pain and anxiety and fear of death. “You're going to be all right,” he had told them all, no matter how dire their condition. He would keep saying it until they died. … And then he wiped his hands in their blood. Feeling their blood, he said, helped give him a sense of closure.

Rescorla and Hill survived Vietnam, and both were awarded the highest commendations for their valor. They had a hard time making the transition into post-Vietnam America: Stewart contrasts the heroics of battle with the struggles of the veterans to grope their way through the numbing mundaneness of civilian life, of loveless marriages and strangely detached family lives. Hill seeks refuge in the strictures of the Koran—becoming a devout Muslim—and fights with the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. Rescorla pursues a career in corporate security, eventually serving as chief of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter at the World Trade Center. After a broken marriage and about with cancer, Rescorla meets and falls in love with Susan, as he approaches what will turn out to be the last chapter of his life. Stewart recreates vividly the delight of a fresh romance, the burst of joy felt by a man and woman who know what a precious gift they have been given.

Lurking eerily in the background is the other story: the mass-murder plot being painstakingly crafted by the al-Qaeda terrorists. Stewart details how Rescorla, as Morgan Stanley's security chief, worked with Hill to produce a white paper that warned of a terrorist attack remarkably similar to the actual World Trade Center bombing that would take place in 1993. The author recounts that, in 2000, Hill offered the U.S. government the services of his mujaheddin comrades for an attempt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. (The government decided it didn't need this help.) He also describes how Rescorla and Hill later predicted and warned that the World Trade Center could be taken down with hijacked aircraft. It is against this backdrop of government stupidity and incompetence that Rescorla served his country one last time.

In his security work, he had trained his people well. The regular evacuation exercises he initiated after the 1993 bombing—over protests from money brokers whose trading days had to be interrupted—paid off on September 11. Moments after the first plane hit, Rescorla—bullhorn in hand—was guiding his 3,000-plus charges down the stairs. He reassured the anxious, and filled the stairwells with song; he bellowed into his bullhorn refrains of a favorite British war song, “Men of Harlech” (made famous by the 1964 Michael Caine movie Zulu):

Men of Cornwall, stand ye ready;
It cannot be ever said ye
For the battle were not ready;
Stand and never yield!

All the while, Susan was watching the horror on television, telephone in hand, calling his number over and over, consumed by the agony of knowing what she did not want to know. Rick did finally call Susan, and spoke a handful of words—as powerful as they are spare: “Stop crying. 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.” Rescorla went back to leading his people to safety. Even as the heat grew and his breaths became shorter, he kept his suit coat on. “Today is a day to be proud to be an American,” this adopted son of America bellowed into the bullhorn as he continued up the stairwell. Minutes later, Tower Two collapsed, and Rescorla perished.

Stewart gives the reader a monument more enduring than the towers: a man's sacrifice, an act of love that saved thousands of lives and made the dark wickedness of that day a backdrop for the triumph of heroic virtue.