Badass of the Week

[TNRabbit]

Jacqueline Cochran



Jacqueline Cochran never shot down an enemy fighter in combat. She never engaged Luftwaffe bogies at twelve o'clock high, screamed over the treetops of North Vietnam while the tracer fire from Soviet MiGs zipped past her windshield, or told the Iceman that he could be her wingman any time. She did, however, do every other damn thing you can possibly do in an airplane, and she did it so f**king well that she's now recognized as one of the most badass women in aviation history. So, on the 58th anniversary of the date she became the first woman to break the sound barrier, here's her story.

While her later years would be spent obliterating all concepts of speed while rocking out in the cockpit of a wide variety of supersonic experimental jet aircraft, Cochran's early years were a lot less about torpedoing through the sky strapped to a rocket with wings and a lot more about chilling in the back woods living in extreme poverty. Jackie's father was a lumberjack living in rural Florida. Now, I had no idea that there were lumberjacks in the wilderness of Florida, but the only image that comes to mind when I think about that is some kind of ungodly mix between Paul Bunyan and those giant guys with tinted sunglasses who explode beer bottles on their foreheads at SEC football tailgating parties, and I can honestly say that this is the sort of man I hope I never have to encounter in an adversarial situation at any point in my life. Lumberjacking isn't really the sort of profession that requires a lot of academic background, and so, since her dad didn't really see the point, young Jackie got a total of two years of elementary school education before she was pulled out of grade school and put to work helping out around the home – a task that included stealing chickens from neighbors so that her family would have food on the table. When she was old enough (i.e. 12 years old or so), Cochran got a job working at a textile mill, doing whatever the hell women used to do in textile mills back in the early 1920s (I have a feeling it involves a shitload of hard work and is pretty light on the smoke breaks). By 14 she was married, by 15 she was a stay-at-home mother and housewife, and a few years after that her marriage inevitably fell apart and left her a single mom living on the outskirts of Pensacola, Florida.

Now, I'm certainly not going to talk shit about housewives, single moms, and/or Pensacola, but I also think most people can agree that this isn't exactly the sort of "she was abandoned in the woods and raised by wolves and then returned with a magical sword intent on slaying the evil king" origin story that you see with a lot of over-the-top badasses. Perhaps on some level, Jackie knew that. That's probably why, in 1929, with no real prospects and no education to speak of, the 23 year-old Cochran decided she wasn't going to sit around and put up with that bullshit any longer. She took her kid, moved from North Florida to New York City, changed her name from Bessie to Jacqueline, put herself through beauty school, and got a job working as a cosmetics girl in a prestigious department store on Fifth Avenue. While there, she fell in love and married a millionaire, which is a pretty awesome (if relatively easy) way to get out of a life of poverty I suppose, and just like that this unknown single mom from Florida had completely changed her entire life around in the span of like one calendar year. Immediately after seeing her first air show, Jackie went out and earned her pilot's license (a process that took her only 20 days), and started flying around the country selling a new line of cosmetics that she developed herself. Now that's a little more like it.


Jackie's husband, by the way, was the CEO of something called the Atlas Corporation.
Whenever I read that, I just keep thinking about those talking vending machines in Borderlands.

Zipping from stop to stop in a biplane selling her shit was kind of a practical matter, but Cochran quickly determined that she totally f**king loved flying, and that she wanted to be seriously awesome at it. So she just started going out and trying a bunch of crazy-ass stunts in whatever aircraft she could get her hands on, including one time when she got a crappy little open-topped bi-plane up over 30,000 feet – well above the suggested ceiling for the aircraft she was piloting – and then had to think quick where her supplemental oxygen tube burst from the mad G's she was probably pulling and she suddenly found herself without a gas mask in altitudes where human beings really aren't supposed to be able to breathe.

Not only did something like "almost asphyxiating at 30,000 feet and then plummeting to earth like Wile E. Coyote" fail to slow her down, but this near-death experience actually got her even more pumped up to do insane shit in an airplane. Eventually she started entering flying in competitions, demonstrations, air shows, and races, going up against men and women alike in displays of speed, daring, and general balls-out-ery. Now the big race in the U.S. at this time was the Bendix Cross Country Air Race – an insane race that went from Los Angeles to Cleveland at speeds of over 250 miles an hour, but around this time the race was only open to men. Forget that. Jackie went out and worked with Amelia Earhart (who I've heard she totally hated, by the way... how's that for an awesome rivalry?) and these two now-prestigious aviatrixes (aviatrices?) convinced the organizers to open the race to women. The guys weren't happy about letting the girls play in the clubhouse, but in 1936 they finally relented and allowed women pilots to participate in the Bendix race, mostly for marketing and PR purposes. Two women won it the first year. Cochran won the race two years after that. She'd only been racing professionally for three years, and had only been flying a f**king airplane for a little over five.



A few years later, some horrible shit started going down in Europe – namely, a little thing historians like to refer to as World War II. The Nazis overran Poland and France and were currently in the process of brutally hammering England with bombs, rockets, and aircraft, and even though the United States was still officially neutral in this whole business Jacqueline Cochran decided she wasn't going to just sit back like a chump and let a bunch of Fascist f**ks shit a bunch of explosives and shrapnel on the good peeps of London. Cochran crossed the Atlantic and volunteered for the British Transport Auxiliary service, who was happy to have her, and she was immediately tasked with ferrying bomber planes across the Atlantic from their manufacturing plants in America to the front-line airfields of war-battered Britain. In 1941, Jackie became the first woman to fly a warplane across the ocean, taking a US-built Lockheed Hudson V from New York to London, passing over deadly waters crawling with U-Boats and dangerous airspace that at times potentially left her vulnerable to attack from German fighter patrols. When Cochran returned back to the United States, she immediately recruited twenty-five more women pilots to help ferry these warbirds across the pond and help the RAF in its desperate struggle. The British Transport Auxiliary was so stoked about this decision that they promoted her to the rank of Wing Commander in the British military.

For the next year, Cochran and her women ferried warplanes to British airfields, and when the United States finally officially declared "Ok, now you Axis suckers are all totally gonna die," Cochran wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt and received permission from the President to help put together the Women's Pilot Training Program. Working with a badass pilot named Robert Olds (the father of an incredibly tough dude named Robin Olds, who I absolutely intend to write about in the next couple months), Cochran helped create the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) – a team of nearly 1,000 experienced women pilots who flew newly-manufactured planes from 120 bases in the United States to the front lines of World War II. The WASPs not only provided valuable reinforcements and equipment to front-line bomber units, but they also freed up more male pilots to serve in front-line air combat duty. As Director of the WASPs, Cochran flew ships, oversaw the program, and ensured the successful operation of the program throughout the duration of the war. By the time the fighting was over, Cochran had received the Distinguished Service Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the French Legion of Honor, and was a Captain in the British Transport Auxiliary and a Lieutenant-Colonel in the U.S. Army Air Force. She was also the first woman to enter Japan after the war, and she witnessed the Japanese surrender in the Philippines and the Nazi trials in Nuremburg.


WASPs

Once those insanely-dangerous missions to the front lines of enemy territory were no longer available, the woman now affectionately known as "the Speed Queen" decided that the only rational way to risk her life and tempt death inside a cockpit was to work as a hardcore military test pilot. Testing out a few fresh-out-of-the-box F-86 Sabers beside her good friend Chuck Yeager, Cochran hopped into a bunch of hopefully-safe, super-powerful experimental jet aircraft, pushed them to the limits of what they were supposed to be able to accomplish, and casually hoped they didn't completely f**king explode into a cloud of vapor in the lower ionosphere. During her time test-flying out ultra-fast, wildly-unstable prototype technology for the U.S. military, Cochran would go on to set more records than any pilot in history, male or female – including one flight in 1962 when she broke nine different records over the course of one afternoon. That's especially impressive, considering that I don't think I can probably name nine aviation records. She would become the first woman to take off and land a plane on an aircraft carrier, the first woman to become President of the Federation Aeronautique International, and on May 18, 1953 she became the first woman to break the sound barrier. She won the International League of Aviators' award for the "World's Most Outstanding Woman Pilot" every year from 1938 to 1949 (11 years!), and then again in 1953 (when she broke the sound barrier) and 1961. At the age of 57 she became the first woman to break Mach 2. On one of her last flights as a professional test pilot, she broke the air speed record by screaming 1,429 miles an hour in an F-104 Starfighter jet. Basically, if something had wings, Jacqueline Cochrane was going to hop behind the controls, crank the throttle open, and see how many G's the thing could pull in a barrel roll before imploding on itself. No wait, check that, she also flew the f**king Good Year Blimp once, so apparently wings aren't necessarily required. I'm not sure what a loop-de-loop looks like in that thing, but I can only assume the answer is "totally f**king sweet". When she wasn't exploding glass with sonic booms, she was having dinner with Presidents and Prime Ministers, playing poker with Air Force Generals, and having audiences with the Pope.

Oh yeah, this barely-educated one-time Florida housewife also owned a bunch of salons across the country, made millions of dollars off her cosmetics line, and then used the funds to finance a program designed at training female astronauts for the Mercury Program. No biggie.

Jacqueline Cochran, the most accomplished female pilot in American history, died in 1980 at the age of 74. She became the first woman pilot with a permanent display at the U.S. Air Force Academy and the first woman in the International Aviation Hall of Fame. Thanks in part to her, to this day brave female pilots are prominently serving in both combat and non-combat rolls across the U.S. Air Force.



Cochran and Yager chillin'.


Sources:

Cook, Bernard A.  Women and War.  ABC-CLIO, 2006.

Douglas, Deborah G., et al.  American Women and Flight Since 1940.  Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2004.

Duncan, Joyce.  Ahead of Their Time.  Greenwood, 2002.

Heinemann, Sue.  Timelines of American Women's History.  Penguin, 1996.

[Bill Cain]

Great story.  Thanks for posting.

Bill Cain

[TNRabbit]

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/takavesi.html

Sekonaia Takavesi

[TNRabbit]

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/vernonbaker.html

[size=200]Vernon J. Baker[/size]
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/vernonbaker.jpg
[size=85]"Vern was the finest combat leader I saw in World War II.
And I haven’t seen too many in the Korean War or my two tours in Vietnam that were any better."
[/size]
It was a cold, rainy April afternoon in 1945 when Lieutenant Vernon J. Baker of the 92nd Infantry Division led his small, 25-man weapons platoon high through the smoke and crater-swept mountainside leading to the ominous German-controlled fortress known as Castle Aghinolfi – a foreboding old-school Dracula-style castle that was kind of like Castle Wolfenstein, only real and sort-of Italian. A heavily-fortified enemy stronghold high in the Appenine Mountains of Italy, this intimidating medieval Castle overlooked one of the few major roads that led through the ferociously-defended Gothic Line – an almost impenetrable wall of machine guns and artillery that blocked the Allies from charging straight up through Italy into the soft, delicious, peanut-butter-stuffed underbelly of the German Reich. If this position were to fall, it would spell the end of German power in Italy forever.

Lieutenant Baker and his team carefully picked their way through the barbed wire and minefields that lay between themselves and the sniper-filled Mountain Fortress of Doom. Baker had already been badly wounded during a battle a few months earlier, and after seeing the rest of his Division get mowed down attempting full-frontal assaults on the this stone-walled Nazi Death Lair, he resolved to be a little more careful on his approach. It worked – using his badass stealth skills, staying low and picking his way through well-defended arias, Baker led his men deep through enemy territory, past patrols, and somehow emerged through the fortified front lines, climbing up the mountain to a position a mere 250 yards from the castle. Along the way, he found a concrete German observation post (he stuffed his rifle in the viewport and emptied the clip, smoking both Germans inside), and also stumbled into a camouflaged Italian machine gun nest (the crew were eating breakfast and he waxed them faster than they could cough up their disgusting sauerkraut and Nutella-slathered omelets). Neither presented Baker with much of a problem.



After getting his team in position, Baker ran back and linked up with his commanding officer, a total flaming douchebag Captain named Runyon who only got this far behind enemy lines by simply following along behind Baker. Runyon started issuing orders to advance on the castle when suddenly a German potato-masher grenade came flying in out of nowhere and clanked right off Runyon's helmet. Runyon ran for it and/or crapped himself (probably while crying) while Baker smoked the dude who threw the grenade, then calmly told his C.O. that the grenade was a dud. On his way back to his team, Baker stopped for a second to blow up a German bunker with a few well-placed grenades of his own (these ones didn't have any trouble blowing up), and cut a telephone wire that connected front-line weapons teams with the headquarters unit back in the castle.

With the Castle looming ominously in the distance Dark Tower-style, Baker ordered his team to move up into the olive groves at the base of the castle itself. His team moved up, careful to watch for ambush, but once they reached the orchard all of a sudden all goddamned hell broke loose – all at once a Chuck-E-Cheese animatronic jug band nightmare of machine guns, snipers, and mortars rained down on him from concealed positions in the fortress and on the mountain, and suddenly Lt. Baker found himself in the middle of an insane-as-hell killzone.

Well despite being surrounded on all sides by dudes trying to kill him, totally cut off from his own lines, and with his tiny squad taking casualties from every direction, Vernon Baker still wasn't about to go down without a fight. This was a guy who'd dealt with all the bullshit life had to throw at him and still always emerged on top – when his parents died in a car accident when he was four years old, he survived by working tough jobs like railroad porter and shoeshiner. When his family needed food, he went hunting in the woods with his grandfather Vasily Zaitsev-style, shooting everything from elk to cougars.

This wasn't a guy who was just going to give up and die.



First, Lieutenant Baker did the sane thing and radioed in for help, calling down artillery to the coordinates of the German and Italian weapons teams. His request was denied. Apparently, the dude on the other line couldn’t possibly f**king fathom the idea that Baker had reached the Nazi Castle Death Mountain by himself, especially considering that any Allied soldier who stood within ten miles of the damn thing spontaneously combusted. So, he raced over to Captain Runyon and asked him for orders. Runyon told Baker he'd bravely run the hell out of there, and that he'd send reinforcements when he got back to American lines. He lied. When Captain Runyon returned to his command post, he reported Baker's platoon had been annihilated. Awesome.

Left for dead, Baker fought on, battling the Germans for hours, deep behind enemy lines, totally oblivious to the fact that he had absolutely no hope of reinforcements or relief. Finally, after several hours of constant firing against an impossibly-gigantor, heavily-equipped enemy force, almost completely out of ammo and with 19 of his 25-man team lying dead, Baker ordered a withdrawl.

Naturally, in order to make sure his six surviving men got out of there alive, Baker stood up in full view of the enemy, screamed like a maniac, and sprayed a hail of bullets in every direction. The Germans concentrated their fire on him, letting Baker's men slip out safely.



Baker was shot a couple times during his epic diversion, but he somehow managed to achieve the Steven Segal Singularity (complete immunity to all bullets, i.e. the "IDDQD God Mode Rule") and get out of there with his life. All told, he had single-handedly killed at least nine Nazis, and destroyed six machine guns nests, two observation posts, and cleared four enemy dugouts. When he reached HQ safely, after everyone had already written him off for dead, dudes were all like, "WTF how the shitballs did this happen?" They nominated him to lead another attack the following night – despite having two bullet wounds in him, Baker complied, leading a full-strength battalion of white soldiers on a night attack through the enemy minefield and right up to the front doors of the castle. The position fell the next day. It was one of the first times in American history that a black soldier was placed in command over white troops (even though it was technically "unofficial")

For his ultra-badass deeds getting Medieval on a f**king German castle, Vernon J. Baker would receive the Distinguished Service Cross – the second-highest award for bravery offered by the United States government. He'd finish out the war, spending the later days with the army of occupation in Rome and hooking up with a smoking-hot Italian babe, and by the time he was done, he also had a Polish War Cross, a Bronze Star, and the Croci de Guerra, which kind of sounds like an appetizer at a pasta joint but is really just the Italian version of the Medal of Honor. Baker would serve with the Army until 1968 (airborne no less, jumping out of planes until he was 48 years old), return home, move to Idaho, marry a German woman, have some kids, and survive a ferocious battle with brain cancer, which, I can only assume is the only thing in the world deadlier than a life-or-death struggle with a rampaging battalion of blood-raging panzergrenadiers entrenched in a 16th century castle.



Eventually, many years after the war ended, some enterprising, moderately-observant human being suddenly noticed that while African-American soldiers received the nation's highest award for military valor – the Medal of Honor – in every single damn war since the American Civil War, out of the 433 Medals of Honor awarded for action during WWII, the nation's highest award for valor was not issued to any of the 1.2 million black soldiers who fought and risked their lives for their country in the global struggle against totalitarian Fascism. It wasn't until 1993 that the Army ran a full investigation into this ridiculous discrepancy, and decided to review many of the Medal of Honor recommendations that had been passed over during the war. So, finally, in 1997, fifty-two years after the destruction of Nazi Germany and the fall of the Japanese Empire, the U.S. Army officially upgraded the Distinguished Services Crosses of seven African-American war heroes to full-fledged Medals of Honor.

Vernon J. Baker was the only man still alive to receive the award in person.


[size=85]"Give respect before you expect it. Treat people the way you want to be treated. Remember the mission. Set the example. Keep going."[/size]

[TNRabbit]

Marie Colvin

"Be passionate and be involved in what you believe in, and do it as thoroughly and honestly and fearlessly as you can."

Marie Colvin was a badass, eyepatch-wearing American war journalist who survived more bullet-strewn battlefields in her 30-year career than even the most grizzled combat veterans history has ever produced. Catapulting from one war-torn hellhole of soul-sucking misery to another over a three-decade career evading bullets, air strikes and artillery shells, this fearless old-school newspaper correspondent survived killing fields from Tripoli to Chechnya, drank scotch with the world's most notorious dictators, sat around campfires with ferocious rebel leaders, filed dispatches from brutally-underequipped refugee camps, survived gunfights without so much as ever carrying a firearm, and had a life so friggin' over-the-top that a newspaper story about her life was once titled "Highway to the Danger Zone". Oh yeah, and as long as we're on 1980s action movie references, she did it all while looking like a female version of Snake Plisskin from Escape from New York.

Now, I don't really subscribe to the whole Pen Is Mightier than the Sword thing (the ratio of Claymore-swinging freak-out avengers to professional writers featured on the site should attest to that) but it's hard to argue with the fact that war journalism is easily the most badass writing profession that ever existed. These utterly-fearless combat-authors routinely get right up in the middle of the action, putting their lives on the line right alongside hardened soldiers despite being armed only with some specialized schooling and a laptop – two items that are about as useful in a gunfight as a broken set of iPod headphones – yet a good one doesn't back down from his job no matter how over-the-top insane things get. And Colvin was one of the best. A legend in her field, this hardcore woman was famous for being the first person in to whatever rapidly-expanding world hotspot happened to be ravaging the planet at the time, embedding herself with aid workers, military dictators, freedom fighters, terrorist leaders, grieving civilians, and whoever the hell else was going to give her an interview, and then getting the story out there so the rest of the world can get the point that, "hey, shit here is really f**ked up." Anytime seriously horrible atrocities were going down in the world, you could be damned sure that Marie effin' Colvin was sneaking across some random minefield-encrusted, barbed-wire-laden battle line, infiltrating an ultra-dangerous cesspool where journalists are known to be beheaded and/or shot on sight, and somehow finding time to write eloquent dispatches while evading snipers, government soldiers, terrorist attacks, artillery shells, and the occasional off-target NATO airstrike. It's hard to argue that this doesn't take some serious balls.


"In an age of 24/7 rolling news, blogs and Twitters, we are on constant call wherever we are. But war reporting is still essentially the same – someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can't get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you."

Coming up through the ranks as the Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday Times, Colvin made her way into Tripoli right at the height of Gadhafi's bullshit in 1986, traveling by camel into a city that was on the receiving end of the largest U.S. airstrike operation since Vietnam and somehow finding a way to make contact with the dictator himself – no small feat, considering that the goddamned SEALs were probably also looking for the dude around the same time, only without as much success. Colvin, a Long Island native who was about as far from her Yale University alma mater as possible, survived a couple run-ins with Gadhafi's personal guards, got the interview, completely eviscerated him in print for his appalling human rights violations (she was notorious for not pulling any punches in her writing – as someone who doesn't have much use for bullshit objectivism, I appreciate this tremendously), but then somehow impressed him so much during their interview that the dude actually invited her BACK for another interview at a later date. They eventually became sort-of acquaintances, occasionally drinking scotch together over the course of the next 25 years, despite the fact that she constantly called him out for his human rights abuses and basically helped tell the rest of the world was an autocratic piece of shit he was.


Colvin embedded with Libyan anti-Gadhafi rebels in 2011.

For the next 25 years, Marie Colvin would spend the vast majority of her time actively taking cover from people shooting bullets at her, desperately trying to get a story and tell the world what the f**k was going on behind the closed borders of some of Earth's most dangerous warzone. In 1987 she smuggled herself into Saddam Hussein's Basra, reporting on the Iraqi dictator's mass killings of his own people at a time when Hussein himself barred any Western journalists from his country on threat of a ridiculously-painful death. Later that same year she was in Palestine, interviewing wounded refugees while Syrian artillery launched rockets into the camp and blew shit up around her. In the early 1990s she was embedding herself on the front lines in Iraq and Kuwait during Desert Storm, avoiding brutal firefights in Eritrea, surviving a civil war in Zimbabwe, traveling around with the Kosovo Liberation Army as they fought against the Serbs, getting married three times, winning a shitload of journalism awards, and maintaining her personal residence in Jerusalem, a place that was probably one of the most ridiculously-dangerous cities in the world in the 1990s. She also once racked up a $20,000 phone bill when she forgot to shut down her satellite phone, which isn't exactly badass but is worth mentioning nonetheless.

While that was more excitement and danger than most people see in their entire lives combined, for Marie Colvin it was just the first half of the decade. The later years of the 1990s, Colvin spent some time living with the newly-installed Taliban regime in Afghanistan – a group not particularly well-known for being appreciative of Westerners, women, or freedom of the press – and when that became too tame she spent a couple months following a dangerous rebel leader around Chechnya while the Chechen guerillas fought off a full-scale attack by the entire friggin' Russian army. Her assignment in Chechnya was cut a little short when a Russian fighter jet streaked through the skies and blew up the jeep she was riding in with an air-to-ground missile. Colvin crawled out of the wreckage of the burning vehicle moments before the fighter returned to strafe the busted-to-hell vehicle with a few million 20mm cannon rounds, then she hid motionless in the snow for nine hours until the coast was clear. With the road up ahead blocked by Spetsnaz paratroopers, Colvin and the surviving Chechens fled through a 12,000 foot-high mountain pass, moving deep into the Caucasus through chest-deep snow without food or proper clothing. She survived altitude sickness and starvation, crossed into Georgia, and then got herself extracted to London by UN helicopters, which is of course totally badass.



In 1999 Colvin went to East Timor, where she spent a lot of time working in a refugee camp that housed about 1,500 wounded and displaced civilians. When the camp was surrounded by the Indonesian Army (who claimed it was housing terrorists and needed to be shelled into a f**king crater) she received orders both from the United Nations and the Indonesian government to get the f**k outta there before the entire place became a gigantic charred ruin packed with dead bodies. She refused, defying the Indonesian government to blow up a Western journalist who worked for a prominent London newspaper.

They caved. All 1,500 refugees survived.

In 2001 Colvin went to another East Asian warzone, smuggling herself through the jungles of Sri Lanka to link up with a rebel group known as the Tamil Tigers. She followed their leader around for a few months, but eventually found herself on the wrong end of a brutal firefight and ended up standing a little too close to the splash-damage radius when an RPG round exploded in her face. Colvin crawled through the battlefield bleeding from her eye and mouth, got to safety, and then filed a 3,000-word report while she was being wheeled into surgery. She lost the use of her eye, then decided to wear an awesome-looking eyepatch, presumably just because that's totally f**king badass. When the Tigers were making their last stand a few months later, the last call their leader made was to Marie Colvin. He asked her to try to personally broker a surrender with the Indonesian government.


Colvin devoted a lot of ink to the plight of civilians in East Timor.

Being shot in the face with a rocket launcher kind of made Marie briefly rethink some of her life choices, but after a short stint working a miserable brain-melting copywriting desk job that she hated, she said, "f**k this," and went back in Afghanistan, entering Taliban-occupied territory just a few months after losing her eye to a rocket-propelled grenade. Colvin pops up again in Baghdad in 2003 during the Iraq War, when she was embedded with an Iraqi Army force searching for Saddam's WMDs – when she wasn't avoiding IEDs, airstrikes, and insurgent snipers, Colvin lived in a hunt club belonging to Iraqi Army officer Ahmad Chalabi, sleeping in a concrete room that used to be an interrogation chamber, her only possessions a chair, a table, a laptop, and a half-empty bottle of scotch.

The rest of the 2000's were spent interviewing rebels in Sierra Leone, working with Palestinian hospital staff during Israel's 2009 attacks in Gaza, and running for her life through a back alley in Cairo while being chased after by an angry anti-Western mob. She was there during the 2011 Arab Spring revolt in Egypt, sailed into Libya a few months later to cover the story on the Libyan rebels, and traveled to Syria in 2012 despite a standing order from the ultra-corrupt Syrian Army to kill any journalists who set foot on their soil with ultra-extreme prejudice to the max, filing reports to her UK readers from a bombed-out hotel as the government shelled the city.


A bullet and shrapnel-strewn house in Homs, a few blocks away from where Marie was filing her reports.

Colvin had been sent to the city of Homs on a two-day mission to report on how the Syrian government were being assholes and blowing up their own people, but when she saw how goddamned insane everything was out there (and realized she was the only British newspaper journalist in the entire country), she decided it was her duty to get the world out to the rest of the world about what was going on there. The 55 year-old war journalist defiantly refused to evacuate, resolving to stay through the conflict even as artillery and rockets rained down on the city.

Unfortunately, Marie Colvin had already cheated death too many times in her life, and the danger of her job finally caught up with her in Syria. She and her photojournalist, Remi Ochlik, were killed on February 22nd, 2012, when government forces pasted their hotel with a ten-round salvo of artillery and tank shells. A tragic end, perhaps, though for a woman who lived her entire life in a constant stream of war zones, one that she was prepared for. Anything less dangerous would have been too boring for her.


"Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado? Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price."

[wkhanna]

Excellent pick, Rabbit.
She was an amazing journalist and an amazing human being.
I used to follow her work closely.

[TNRabbit]

Chris Kyle

"I signed up to protect this country. I do not choose the wars. It happens that I love to fight. But I do not choose which battles I go to. Y'all send me to them."

It should be a pretty well-established fact by now that if you go out and do something that threatens American lives, Navy SEALs will literally fall out of the sky and kill you in your sleep.

Chris Kyle is one of the men who made sure that happened. He's recently-retired SEAL who also happens to have the most confirmed sniper kills of any person in American history.

The man known who is now hatefully remembered by his enemies as "The Devil of Ramadi" grew up, ironically enough, as the son of a church deacon and a Sunday school teacher on a cattle ranch in some random rural part of Texas. Starting from age 8, Kyle hunted pheasant and quail with his father on the weekends, and worked hard on the ranch doing typical John Wayne cowboy shit like lassoing sheep, chewing rawhide, hog-tying things, and/or punching horses in the face (or, you know, whatever it is that cowboys actually do in real life). After high school he tried his hand at being a professional rodeo rider, doing that crazy shit where you desperately try to hang onto a the reins of super-pissed-as-hell bronco that wants nothing more than to hurl you teeth-first into the dirt and then trample your skull under its tremendous evil hooves of fury. When that stuff got too boring, the 24 year-old cowboy enlisted in the Navy, signing on in 1999 with the singular intent of being a badass-as-hell Navy SEAL sniper who rained death upon everything in front of him. Kyle quickly proved himself such a stone-cold marksman that he was sent off to sniper school. He almost failed out, but eventually got his shit together, passed a school with a 60-75% washout rate, and was assigned to Charlie Platoon of SEAL Team 3 – a unit so hardcore that they had the Punisher skull emblazoned on their helmets, body armor, and weapons. This is something I think we can pretty much all agree kicks ass.



As you probably noticed, things got significantly more insane on planet Earth after the United States simultaneously declared war on everyone in the world in 2001, and it wasn't long after this that Chris Kyle got orders for his first deployment -- a combat drop into Iraq in the opening hours of the 2003 Iraq War. It would be a pretty simple, straightforward mission – he was to sit in the gunner's seat of an armored truck and be dropped out of helicopter, landing behind enemy lines in the middle of the night while guys shot at him from a 360-degree field of fire, and then advance on an Iraqi-controlled oil refinery and capture it before the defenders could turn it into one of those annoying Kuwaiti oil field fires that pissed everyone off during Desert Storm. Welcome to the SEALs, buddy. Have fun out there. Don't forget to buckle your safety belt.

Well, as things tend to go when you're talking about insanely complicated military operations, it took about two minutes before everything totally went to shit. Almost immediately after the tires hit the ground, Kyle's truck got hopelessly stuck in the soft, oil-soaked sand, lodged in there like a giant million-dollar paperweight loaded up with enough ammunition to dent the Earth's crust. Since he wasn't all that interested in sitting there presenting a stationary target for the thousand or so automatic weapons currently trying to draw a bead on him, Kyle had to bail out of his relatively-protected gunnery position, hump it across the desert while assholes took potshots at him, and still somehow manage to get there before the enemy had time to pull out a matchbook and throw it in the refinery storage tanks. Kyle didn't flinch – he ripped the heavy machine gun off of his turret, ran across the field with his team, and together they somehow managed to capture the refinery intact, waxing the defenders in a short but bloody battle.



This is, of course, ridiculously hardcore, but Kyle's main claim to fame involves shooting lots of people with a sniper rifle. Kyle's first time using his signature weapon was during battle was when Team Three was tasked with helping Marines clear a small town on the road to Baghdad, when his Chief gave him a bolt-action .300 Winchester Magnum – basically a hunting rifle designed to take out North American big game, and not usually used in military service. Kyle quickly learned that he could use the weapon's massive muzzle velocity to regularly hit targets up to 1,800 yards out with insanely-deadly precision, and, since he wasn't one to fix things that ain't broken, would end up carrying that rifle through most of his career.

Kyle survived four deployments in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, fighting alongside some of the world's most hardcore elite special forces units – groups like the Polish GROM, the Special Air Service, and the US Marine Corps (not to mention his work in dedicated SEAL missions). The details of most of the stuff he saw are still mostly labeled "SUPER f**kING CLASSIFIED" by the U.S. government, but we basically get the gist of it, and it amounts to taking point on dangerous missions, single-handedly sneaking into a hardened enemy fortresses by himself, staying undetected, finding an overwatch position on a rooftop somewhere, and then radioing in intelligence while Marines or soldiers move in to clear the area. If trouble presented itself, Kyle took it out, moking out enemy soldiers with the ruthless, detached precision required by his profession. From Fallujah to Baghdad to Sadr City, this guy capped fighters in some of the most difficult fighting the country has ever seen – a war where every single person in the city can potentially be an enemy, and the difference between life and death for your friends involves identifying the potential threats, waiting for them to show themselves as armed combatants, and then taking them down before they get the chance to pull the trigger and turn your buddy's wife into a widow. Crazy shit, like the time outside Sadr City, when Kyle had an eye on a dude acting a little suspiciously – Kyle kept an eye on him, then watched as the guy pulled out an RPG and lined up a rocket-propelled grenade round towards the windshield of an unsuspecting U.S. Army Humvee convoy. The would-be ambusher was 1.2 miles away (almost 2km), but Kyle dropped him with one shot. Say what you want, but that's f**king stone-cold.


"There is so much more to being a sniper than just being a monkey on a gun. You almost feel like a secret agent, because you get onto the battlefield before your guys do, and you give them live, up-to-the-minute intel about what’s happening. That keeps your guys safe. If you’re lucky, it could save their life."

But it wasn't just all spawncamping hax0rz for Chris Kyle – he also occasionally had to (or, in some cases, volunteered to) get down in the dirt and clear rooms himself. In the Battle of Fallujah alone, Chris Kyle recorded 40 kills, many of which involved house-to-house fighting alongside US Marines, including one instance where he braved heavy machine gun and RPG fire to rescue a team of Americans who had been pinned down in the middle of a street by a horde of unseen enemies attacking from every goddamned direction. In the battle of Ramadi, he resorted to fighting with his pistol and a captured AK after the battery died on his rifle sight, and still managed to kick so much ballsack that the Iraqis put a $20,000 bounty on his head and nicknamed him "The Devil".

Chris Kyle retired in 2009 at the age of 35, wrote a book about his life, and opened his own private military contractor. During his ten year career wreaking havoc across the battle-torn Iraq countryside, the "Devil of Ramadi" recorded 160 confirmed kills in battle, with an additional 100 unconfirmed – far outstripping the former record-holder, U.S. Army sniper Adelbert Waldron, who notched 109 confirmed in Vietnam (USMC super-sniper Carlos Hathcock, who I wrote about in BADASS recorded 93 confirmed, but his actual total is believed to be well over 300 – but, honestly, any time you're talking about taking the lives of over a hundred people, the actual body count becomes kind of a moot point). He received two Silver Stars and five Bronze Stars for valor in combat – the citations of which are still classified by the Navy and thereby unpublished, but it's probably safe to assume they were for doing totally insane shit that most likely involved shooting a lot of people in the face and/or head from a long ways away, and saving American lives in the process. Kyle himself was shot twice, blown up six times by IEDs, and lost a couple good friends in battle. He also claims to have punched Jesse Ventura in the face in a Navy bar while on shore leave – Ventura denies it, and nobody's confirmed it one way or the other, but naturally any time you can be attributed to a story involving cold-cocking a former governor, SEAL, and professional wrestler in the grill, it's only going to help contribute to your legend.


"It was my duty to shoot the enemy, and I don’t regret it. My regrets are for the people I couldn’t save: Marines, soldiers, buddies. I’m not naive, and I don’t romanticize war. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. But I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job."

[TNRabbit]

Neil Armstrong


"There can be no great accomplishment without risk."

Here's a fun fact: As Neil Armstrong was descending the Lunar Module towards the surface of the Moon, hurtling 50,000 feet towards the rocky surface of an alien landscape at a little over 60 miles an hour, the entire instrumentation panel failed on him. And by "failed", I mean it didn't just die, I mean it flipped it's shit and went totally insane HAL 9000-style, screaming at the Apollo 11 mission commander with alarms and klaxons and warnings about how there was too much telemetric data coming in for the state-of-the-art Lunar Module computer to process and holy shit pork chop sandwiches oh my god WTF we're all gonna die. Undeterred by the ominous beacons of his impending fiery mutilation, Neil Armstrong did what pretty much nobody in their right minds would have done.

He turned the computer off.

So here was Neil Armstrong, harnessed into a cramped little aluminum coffin packed with all the technological computing power of a TI-85 solar-powered calculator, fighting the controls trying to manually place a two-passenger missile packed with jet fuel on the surface of an interstellar object nobody has ever attempted to land on before, and to do it delicately enough that it doesn't crash, fall over, explode, or otherwise bring about the brutally-violent deaths of everyone inside. The Lunar Module had just twenty seconds of fuel left in the tank, and only had one control – Activate Thruster – meaning Armstrong's job was like playing Atari Moon Lander on an Etch-a-Sketch while inside the trunk of a car doing 270 down the Autobahn where any slight f**k-up sends you catapulting through a steel wall and subsequently ripped apart by the vacuum of space like those guys in Event Horizon.

It was an impossible task, only marginally possible for the greatest pilots and video game enthusiasts the world has to offer. He'd have one shot at it -- and his actions would either make world history or bring about his terrible premature death.

We, of course, all know how the story ended:


Bam.

The first man to set foot on any celestial object other than Earth was born Captain Kirk style on a small farm in middle America. Born in Ohio in August 1930 and growing up during the Great Depression will teach a man some shit about himself, and Neil Armstrong learned values like the importance of hard work, busting his ass for 40 cents an hour as a stock clerk in a pharmacy before and after school. When this guy wasn't smoking Math tests like Cuban cigars or playing baritone in a presumably-awesome jazz band called the Mississippi Moonshiners, he became an Eagle Scout, helped work the farm, and got so f**king pumped about aircraft that he built a homemade wind tunnel out of shit he found around town so he could test out custom model airplane designs he made by combining multiple kits together into some badass Frankenstein aircraft shit. He earned his pilot's license on his 16th birthday, and before this kid could even legally drive he was working a day job test-flying 65-horsepower two-seater prop planes that had just been repaired – taking these formerly-busted little wooden planes out on joyrides to see if they could be piloted without falling apart and crashing back down to earth. He'd got the job by default because nobody else wanted it, and ended up logging so many hours as a teenage test pilot that the Navy offered him a scholarship to study Aeronautical Engineering at Purdue (provided he commit to spending a couple years as a naval aviator when he was done).

Neil Armstrong did two years at Purdue, then transferred to NAS Pensacola, earning his wings at the age of 20 and shipping off to the Korean War, where he was the youngest kid in his squadron. He flew 78 combat missions in a Grumman F9F Panther, an early model jet fighter, where he earned three Air Medals, evaded capture and was rescued after being shot down behind enemy lines, and survived an emergency crash-landing on the deck of the USS Essex. When all that was done, he said f**k it, I'll go back and finish my degree and marry a beauty queen sorority girl because WTF else do I have going on.


Like he owns the place.

While the military thing wasn't really doing it for him, flying was in Neil Armstrong's blood. After school he went to Edwards Air Force Base outside Los Angeles and spent the next seven years working as a research test pilot – which is basically the exact same thing he was doing when he was 16, only instead of flying rickety wooden propeller planes he was hurtling through the stratosphere at three times the speed of sound in the cockpit of an experimental test fighter that was packed with enough rocket fuel to vaporize sheet metal. As a research test pilot, this self-proclaimed "white-sock, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer" (he hated working out and once said, "I believe that every human being has a finite number of heartbeats, and I don't plan to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.") not only had the exciting/terrifying job of testing out wildly-unstable jets capable of shredding the sound barrier like a cheese grater dismembering a tomato, but then when he was done he got to write a report about what was awesome about the plane and what needed to be fixed.

Neil Armstrong logged over 3,000 hours at the controls of over 200 aircraft ranging from canvas gliders that only used a dashboard compass for navigation to supersonic experimental jet fighters with gigantic rocket engines grafted onto the fuselage, piloting anything, any time, anywhere, regardless of how likely it was to blow up in his face and kill him. When this dude wasn't ripping off hellaciously-righteous loop-de-loops in Chuck Yeager's X-1B, streaking through the stratosphere at Mach 5.7 at an altitude of 207,000 feet in the cockpit of an X-15 hypersonic rocket-powered suborbital jet fighter, or testing out aircraft that ended up being the basis for fighters like the F-14 and the F-18, he was flying as the "chase plane", following some other nutcase in a human-propelled death-missile and making notes about whether or not he thought that poor bastard in front of him was about to explode in a cloud of jet fuel and awesomeness due to some minor technical oversight in the structural design of the machine he was piloting.


Yes, that is a very interesting point.
But, in my defense, f**k you, I'm Neil Armstrong.

Armstrong's interesting skillset as both a hardcore twitch-reflex hotshot pilot and a ultimate mega-engineering nerd got him tapped in 1962 to become the first civilian to join the American astronaut program. With his fat salary of $27,000 a year, Armstrong underwent intense training to prepare him for what he was about to face.

In 1966 Neil Armstrong became the first U.S. civilian in space when he commanded the Gemini 8 mission – a mission that would attempt the first-ever spaceship-to-spaceship docking operation. Armstrong masterfully maneuvered the Gemini 8 capsule alongside some random unmanned rocket in orbit around the earth, linked the two vessels up, then almost became mildly annoyed when suddenly one of Gemini's thrusters activated, sending the two linked spaceships into an out-of-control spiraling series of endless space barrel rolls. Armstrong, never one to panic no matter how insanely the mission is going down in flames, simply flipped a switch, undocked with the space junk, turned on his re-entry controls (while still in space!), righted the roll, calmly informed Houston that the mission was coming home early, and masterfully dropped his tiny capsule from outer space into the Pacific Ocean.

He wore sunglasses while doing this. He was just that f**king cool.



You had to try really hard to throw something at Neil Armstrong that would generate any kind of emotional response. I don't really remember where I saw this, but my favorite Neil Armstrong story goes like this: One morning, Buzz Aldrin or Michael Collins (I can't remember which) came into the office to get started on work. Neil was sitting at his desk, working on some paperwork, and just looked up for a second to say "good morning" before going back to his writing. Buzz/Michael went to the NASA shift lead to ask what was going on that day, and was told by the NASA techs that the missions were scrapped today because about an hour ago Neil Armstrong was running a test flight on the Lunar Landing Module when it's equipment failed and it plummeted to the earth and exploded in a giant fireball. Neil had almost died, but had somehow managed to eject a mere 200 feet from the ground and parachuted to safety with only minor injuries. When Buzz/Michael protested that he'd just seen Neil two seconds ago, the NASA guy was like, "Oh, yeah… he's filling out the after-mission report."

So you can see why he was pretty much the perfect man to be sitting at the controls of the Lunar Module (yes, the fully-realized version of the vehicle that had almost blown him into blood vapor in the previous paragraph) as it attempted the first-ever human descent to the Moon. In July, 1969, the 38-year old Armstrong was selected as mission commander on Apollo 11, strapped to a ridiculously-gigantic Saturn V rocket, and catapulted into space by a massive controlled explosion that propelled him from 0 to 243,000 miles an hour in two seconds. He spent ten days in space, landed the Lunar Module on Manual mode, and spent two and a half hours bouncing around on the moon collecting rocks and shit while one-fifth of the world's population watched slack-jawed on their TV sets. While they were out there, Neil and Buzz Aldrin planted a U.S. flag, a plaque commemorating international peace, and a monument to dead U.S. and Soviet astronauts/cosmonauts, talked to Richard Nixon on a radiophone, and planted a reflector dish in the Sea of Tranquility that allowed some nerds in Austin Texas to shoot a laser into space and measure the exact distance from the Earth to the Moon, mostly so that people throughout the world would know that this dude traveled 232,271 miles FOR SCIENCE.

[youtube]RMINSD7MmT4[/youtube]
"The landing approach was, by far, the most difficult and challenging part of the flight. Walking on the lunar surface was very interesting, but it was something we looked on as reasonably safe and predictable… Pilots take no special joy in walking: pilots like flying. Pilots generally take pride in a good landing, not in getting out of the vehicle."

Neil and Buzz got the LM back off the ground, rejoined the Command Module, hurtled through the Earth's atmosphere at 35,000 feet per second, and returned home to a massive parade in their honor. Armstrong met the Queen, the Pope, the President, and the Shah of Iran (there's an interesting urban legend that Armstrong heard the Muslim call to prayer while in space and immediately converted to Islam, but he repeatedly denied this story), received medals of honor from 17 different countries, and also had a couple airports, streets, and even a piece of the Moon's geography named after him.

Fairly certain that he was never gonna top that, Neil Armstrong retired from astronauting a year later and bought a farm in Ohio. That was going well for a while, but in 1979 he got his wedding ring stuck in the gears of a grain tractor (Neil Armstrong was still working a farm!) and had the thing rip his entire finger off, but in true Neil Friggin' Armstrong fashion he just calmly walked over, picked up the finger, put it on ice, and drove to the hospital to get it re-attached. He went on to work as a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Cincinnati, was an administrator at NASA, ran his own aerospace tech company, and once sued his barber for selling a lock of his hair on eBay for $3,000 (Armstrong told him to either return the hair or donate the $3k to charity… the guy donated).

Any time anyone ever asked him about him being the first human to ever set foot on the Moon, Neil Armstrong would just say that it was the culmination of over a decade of hard work by over 400,000 people and leave it at that.

He died last Sunday, August 25, 2012, at the age of 82.

[TNRabbit]

Jacklyn H. Lucas



Everyone with half a functioning brain knows that diving on a live hand grenade to save your friends is one of the single most selfless, balls-out heroic acts of valor that any human being can perform. It takes a special, rare kind of person to come face-to-face with their own destruction, resist every natural impulse of self-preservation, and unhesitatingly give themselves up in a final, purely-selfless feat of bravery, trading in the most precious thing a human has to offer – their life – so that others might live. It's such a paragon of ultimate selfless human sacrifice that nowadays it's the standard go-to analogy for everything from taking all the blame for a team-wide corporate f**k-up to unselfishly talking up the homeliest girl at the bar while your buddy tries to hook up with her best friend (who is invariably about a thousand times hotter than him and wouldn’t spit on him if he were melting in a pool of Hydrochloric acid some twisted bizarro alternate universe where tan silicone-augmented vat-grown bar-hopping college chicks are irresistibly attracted to sweaty neckbeards). It's such a heroic testament to the will of the human spirit that more Medals of Honor and Victoria Crosses have been handed out for this single act than for any other deed in the history of combat.

Unfortunately, despite this being a universally-acknowledged feat of righteous heroic awesomeness, the fact that the entire action is over in three to five seconds combine with some horrifically-tragic consequences for the hero to make grenade-hopping a pretty tough subject to write a Badass of the Week article about.

Unless, of course, we're talking about Jack Lucas of the 1st Battalion, 26th Marines.

Because Jack Lucas jumped on not one but two grenades to save his friends.

And lived.


Your typical grenade explosion.

Jacklyn H. Lucas was born on Valentine's Day, 1928, in some rural town in North Carolina with a population so tiny that if everyone in the entire county showed up at UNC for a basketball game they probably couldn't sell out one section of the Dean Smith Center. Cursed with one of the most terrible first names in history, Jacklyn did the Boy Named Sue thing and spent his entire life training to be so ungodly hardcore that anyone who referred to him by any name other than Jack would end up forcibly swallowing their own genitalia, eventually enlisting as a cadet at Edwards Military Institute in Salemburg, NC.

Things were going fine for a while, but Jack's life changed pretty dramatically on December 7, 1941, when he got news that a super-secret ninja sneak-attack of Japanese fighter-bombers had just craterized the American battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor into a towering inferno of twisted metal.

He kind of took it personally.

So while Lucas' 13 year-old idiot classmates were all hanging around their school doing dipshit teenage boy stuff like slam-dunking M80s into public toilets and superglueing their friends' lockers shut, Lucas just got pissed. Like, super pissed. Like King Kong stopping by on the way home from work after a miserable day at the office only to find that the badass frozen yogurt place down the street is totally out of banana sherbet so he just snorts a line of PCP and goes Falling Down on everyone pissed. He stormed out of his military school (the first of many times he'd be listed AWOL in his professional career), went across the border to Virginia, bribed some notary public to swear he was 17, then hitched a ride to the nearest Marine Corps Recruiting Station, marched his hefty 5'8", 200-pound frame through the front door like he owned the place, forged his Mom's signature on enlistment paperwork, and shipped out to Parris Island for US Marine Corps Boot Camp.

At thirteen.

Lucas made it through the most intense basic training the United States military has to offer, was made a Marine at 14, and was subsequently assigned to work a crappy manual labor job as part of the Training Battalion on Parris Island.

Jack Lucas responded to this unsatisfactory posting by abandoning his station, hitching a ride to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, grabbing the first USMC officer he could find, and telling him there was a clerical error and he was supposed to be stationed on the front lines in a combat arms role.

They made him a truck driver at the Marine Corps base on Pearl Harbor.



Unsatisfied by his current status of "not blowing the shit out of the enemy at all corners wherever he could find them", and denied in all of his requests to transfer to a front-line infantry unit, Jack Lucas spend the next couple of years raising hell across Honolulu. He was arrested for starting a drunken bar fight. He was disciplined for going AWOL so he could head into town and meet girls. He was busted by a Military Policeman for walking through the barracks with a case of beer, then was subsequently arrested for punching that same Military Policeman in the face when that power-tripping asshole tried to take the beer away from him.

Tired of spending his nights in the brig and worried that the war was going to end without him every hoisting a rifle in battle, Lucas finally decided, f**k it, I'm going to go to war and I don't give a shit who wants to stop me. He went down to the docks, snuck aboard a military transport ship headed for the front lines, then spent a month living off crumbs hiding from the crew because he was worried if they discovered him they'd ship his ass back to Hawaii for a court-martial.

Of the 40,000 Marines who hit the beach at Iwo Jima on or around February 20th, 1945, 17-year-old Private Jack Lucas of the 1st Battalion, 26th Marines, 5th Marine Division was one of the only infantrymen who assaulted the beachhead without a weapon. He changed that pretty quickly. He grabbed one off a dead man in the surf, racked the slide, and charged into battle.



Rushing through the brutal, endless curtains of strafing machine gun and artillery fire that raked the beach, Lucas grabbed his newly-acquired weapon and charged ahead, undaunted by the explosions and bullets zipping all around. He ran ahead, reached the relative safety of the treeline, and fell in with a four-man fireteam that had already started working their way through the dense jungle, trying to clear out one of the most tenacious and ferociously-hardcore enemies the United States ever faced.

Lucas and his men were making their way through a ravine, fighting every step of the way, when suddenly some bad shit started to go down. It turned out that the Japanese had dug this ridiculously-intricate series of caverns and secret passages that ran through the entire island, so just as Lucas and his buddies thought they were going to launch their final assault on a Japanese machine gun nest, they came to the horrible realization that all 11 men in that pillbox had gone into a tunnel, crawled underneath them, and popped up directly behind the Marines.

The Marines turned to fire, and in Jack Lucas' much-awaited first moments of real battle his first round went through the helmet of an enemy soldier, killing him on the spot.

His second round jammed in the rifle. I guess that's what happens with rifles you pick up in ankle-deep water on blood-soaked sandy beaches.

It was at this point that Jack Lucas saw the live hand grenade that had just landed at his feet. He threw his body on it without hesitation, screaming for the other Marines to take cover.

When a second enemy grenade landed within arms' reach, Lucas grabbed it and jammed it under his body as well.



The Type 97 Fragmentation Grenade is a 16-ounce metal ball stuffed with 65 grams of TNT and a 5 second timed-detonation mechanism. Now, a common misconception about hand grenades is that they create some huge fiery explosion that blows people into the next area code like they were launched out of a flaming death-catapult, then they proceed to ignite everything in the general vicinity up to and including the Earth's atmosphere. But, while the explosive power unleashed by a frag grenade is certainly not the sort of thing you want to wake up to every morning, what kills the majority of people isn't the bomb but the flying bits of shrapnel. Basically, the explosion is just a catalyst that shatters the metal outside of the grenade and sends tens of thousands of tiny, razor-sharp metal splinters hurtling through the air in every direction, shredding anything in their wake, and killing or maiming anyone or anything within 100 to 150 feet. You ever wonder why some grenades look like pineapples? It's because when the bomb goes off each little section of the pineapple morphs into a bullet firing off into some random direction. It ain't pretty.

And Jack Lucas just had two of those little bastards blow up straight into his torso. Sure, his friends survived thanks to his heroism, but all that metal has to go somewhere, and where it went was straight into Lucas' body.

The rest of the Marine fire team, pumped-up by Lucas' bravery and the fact that they weren't currently all dead, proceeded to fight like demons and push the Japanese back, driving them from the position and capturing that sector.

When they came back to take the dog tags off of their fallen brother, they noticed that not only was Lucas alive, he was actually still conscious.


I don't want to go on the cart.

The true unsung heroes of Iwo Jima – the Navy Corpsmen – were called in on the spot, hauling the severely-f**ked-up Lucas out of there on a stretcher while simultaneously using their .45 pistols to fight off a Japanese banzai counter-attack. They fought through the warzone, got Lucas to a hospital ship, and it took 21 surgeries for them to remove 250 pieces of shrapnel from every major organ in his body.

Seven months later, Jack Lucas personally walked up to Harry S. Truman and received his Medal of Honor in person. He'd already made a complete recovery.

He was six days past his seventeenth birthday – the youngest Marine to ever receive the award.

After the war, Lucas went home and fulfilled his promise to his mother to finish school, attending his first day of Ninth Grade with his Medal of Honor around his neck. He finished college, went on a USO speaking tour, was married three times, survived his second wife's attempt to hire a hitman to murder him (she hadn't got the message from the Japanese that this guy was impervious to conventional weapons), and then, at age 40, decided to get over his fear of heights by enlisting in the 82nd Airborne as a paratrooper. On his first training jump, both parachutes failed to open. As his team leader astutely pointed out, "Jack was the last one out of the plane and the first one on the ground."

He fell 3,500 feet through the air without a parachute. He attempted a badass commando roll just as he was about to splat on the earth Wile E. Coyote style.

He not only lived, he walked away unscathed.

Two weeks later, he was back in the plane on his second training jump. That one went better. Four years later he finished his tour as a Captain in the 82nd Airborne Division.

His adventures in miraculously surviving death now complete, ran a successful business selling beef to people outside Washington, DC, wrote an appropriately-named autobiography titled Indestructible, met every president from Truman to Clinton, had his original Medal of Honor citation laid out in the hull of the USS Iwo Jima, and died in 2008 at the age of 80. From cancer, of all things.

[OldiesButGoodies]

Great post - thanks!

[TNRabbit]

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pritchard.html

[TNRabbit]

Carl Akeley:  http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akeley.html

[TNRabbit]

Christopher Lee:

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee.html

[BryonSilberman]

Neil Armstrong


"There can be no great accomplishment without risk."

Here's a fun fact: As Neil Armstrong was descending the Lunar Module towards the surface of the Moon, hurtling 50,000 feet towards the rocky surface of an alien landscape at a little over 60 miles an hour, the entire instrumentation panel failed on him. And by "failed", I mean it didn't just die, I mean it flipped it's shit and went totally insane HAL 9000-style, screaming at the Apollo 11 mission commander with alarms and klaxons and warnings about how there was too much telemetric data coming in for the state-of-the-art Lunar Module computer to process and holy shit pork chop sandwiches oh my god WTF we're all gonna die. Undeterred by the ominous beacons of his impending fiery mutilation, Neil Armstrong did what pretty much nobody in their right minds would have done.

He turned the computer off.

So here was Neil Armstrong, harnessed into a cramped little aluminum coffin packed with all the technological computing power of a TI-85 solar-powered calculator, fighting the controls trying to manually place a two-passenger missile packed with jet fuel on the surface of an interstellar object nobody has ever attempted to land on before, and to do it delicately enough that it doesn't crash, fall over, explode, or otherwise bring about the brutally-violent deaths of everyone inside. The Lunar Module had just twenty seconds of fuel left in the tank, and only had one control – Activate Thruster – meaning Armstrong's job was like playing Atari Moon Lander on an Etch-a-Sketch while inside the trunk of a car doing 270 down the Autobahn where any slight f**k-up sends you catapulting through a steel wall and subsequently ripped apart by the vacuum of space like those guys in Event Horizon.

It was an impossible task, only marginally possible for the greatest pilots and video game enthusiasts the world has to offer. He'd have one shot at it -- and his actions would either make world history or bring about his terrible premature death.

We, of course, all know how the story ended:


Bam.

The first man to set foot on any celestial object other than Earth was born Captain Kirk style on a small farm in middle America. Born in Ohio in August 1930 and growing up during the Great Depression will teach a man some shit about himself, and Neil Armstrong learned values like the importance of hard work, busting his ass for 40 cents an hour as a stock clerk in a pharmacy before and after school. When this guy wasn't smoking Math tests like Cuban cigars or playing baritone in a presumably-awesome jazz band called the Mississippi Moonshiners, he became an Eagle Scout, helped work the farm, and got so f**king pumped about aircraft that he built a homemade wind tunnel out of shit he found around town so he could test out custom model airplane designs he made by combining multiple kits together into some badass Frankenstein aircraft shit. He earned his pilot's license on his 16th birthday, and before this kid could even legally drive he was working a day job test-flying 65-horsepower two-seater prop planes that had just been repaired – taking these formerly-busted little wooden planes out on joyrides to see if they could be piloted without falling apart and crashing back down to earth. He'd got the job by default because nobody else wanted it, and ended up logging so many hours as a teenage test pilot that the Navy offered him a scholarship to study Aeronautical Engineering at Purdue (provided he commit to spending a couple years as a naval aviator when he was done).

Neil Armstrong did two years at Purdue, then transferred to NAS Pensacola, earning his wings at the age of 20 and shipping off to the Korean War, where he was the youngest kid in his squadron. He flew 78 combat missions in a Grumman F9F Panther, an early model jet fighter, where he earned three Air Medals, evaded capture and was rescued after being shot down behind enemy lines, and survived an emergency crash-landing on the deck of the USS Essex. When all that was done, he said f**k it, I'll go back and finish my degree and marry a beauty queen sorority girl because WTF else do I have going on.


Like he owns the place.

While the military thing wasn't really doing it for him, flying was in Neil Armstrong's blood. After school he went to Edwards Air Force Base outside Los Angeles and spent the next seven years working as a research test pilot – which is basically the exact same thing he was doing when he was 16, only instead of flying rickety wooden propeller planes he was hurtling through the stratosphere at three times the speed of sound in the cockpit of an experimental test fighter that was packed with enough rocket fuel to vaporize sheet metal. As a research test pilot, this self-proclaimed "white-sock, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer" (he hated working out and once said, "I believe that every human being has a finite number of heartbeats, and I don't plan to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.") not only had the exciting/terrifying job of testing out wildly-unstable jets capable of shredding the sound barrier like a cheese grater dismembering a tomato, but then when he was done he got to write a report about what was awesome about the plane and what needed to be fixed.

Neil Armstrong logged over 3,000 hours at the controls of over 200 aircraft ranging from canvas gliders that only used a dashboard compass for navigation to supersonic experimental jet fighters with gigantic rocket engines grafted onto the fuselage, piloting anything, any time, anywhere, regardless of how likely it was to blow up in his face and kill him. When this dude wasn't ripping off hellaciously-righteous loop-de-loops in Chuck Yeager's X-1B, streaking through the stratosphere at Mach 5.7 at an altitude of 207,000 feet in the cockpit of an X-15 hypersonic rocket-powered suborbital jet fighter, or testing out aircraft that ended up being the basis for fighters like the F-14 and the F-18, he was flying as the "chase plane", following some other nutcase in a human-propelled death-missile and making notes about whether or not he thought that poor bastard in front of him was about to explode in a cloud of jet fuel and awesomeness due to some minor technical oversight in the structural design of the machine he was piloting.


Yes, that is a very interesting point.
But, in my defense, f**k you, I'm Neil Armstrong.

Armstrong's interesting skillset as both a hardcore twitch-reflex hotshot pilot and a ultimate mega-engineering nerd got him tapped in 1962 to become the first civilian to join the American astronaut program. With his fat salary of $27,000 a year, Armstrong underwent intense training to prepare him for what he was about to face.

In 1966 Neil Armstrong became the first U.S. civilian in space when he commanded the Gemini 8 mission – a mission that would attempt the first-ever spaceship-to-spaceship docking operation. Armstrong masterfully maneuvered the Gemini 8 capsule alongside some random unmanned rocket in orbit around the earth, linked the two vessels up, then almost became mildly annoyed when suddenly one of Gemini's thrusters activated, sending the two linked spaceships into an out-of-control spiraling series of endless space barrel rolls. Armstrong, never one to panic no matter how insanely the mission is going down in flames, simply flipped a switch, undocked with the space junk, turned on his re-entry controls (while still in space!), righted the roll, calmly informed Houston that the mission was coming home early, and masterfully dropped his tiny capsule from outer space into the Pacific Ocean.

He wore sunglasses while doing this. He was just that f**king cool.



You had to try really hard to throw something at Neil Armstrong that would generate any kind of emotional response. I don't really remember where I saw this, but my favorite Neil Armstrong story goes like this: One morning, Buzz Aldrin or Michael Collins (I can't remember which) came into the office to get started on work. Neil was sitting at his desk, working on some paperwork, and just looked up for a second to say "good morning" before going back to his writing. Buzz/Michael went to the NASA shift lead to ask what was going on that day, and was told by the NASA techs that the missions were scrapped today because about an hour ago Neil Armstrong was running a test flight on the Lunar Landing Module when it's equipment failed and it plummeted to the earth and exploded in a giant fireball. Neil had almost died, but had somehow managed to eject a mere 200 feet from the ground and parachuted to safety with only minor injuries. When Buzz/Michael protested that he'd just seen Neil two seconds ago, the NASA guy was like, "Oh, yeah… he's filling out the after-mission report."

So you can see why he was pretty much the perfect man to be sitting at the controls of the Lunar Module (yes, the fully-realized version of the vehicle that had almost blown him into blood vapor in the previous paragraph) as it attempted the first-ever human descent to the Moon. In July, 1969, the 38-year old Armstrong was selected as mission commander on Apollo 11, strapped to a ridiculously-gigantic Saturn V rocket, and catapulted into space by a massive controlled explosion that propelled him from 0 to 243,000 miles an hour in two seconds. He spent ten days in space, landed the Lunar Module on Manual mode, and spent two and a half hours bouncing around on the moon collecting rocks and shit while one-fifth of the world's population watched slack-jawed on their TV sets. While they were out there, Neil and Buzz Aldrin planted a U.S. flag, a plaque commemorating international peace, and a monument to dead U.S. and Soviet astronauts/cosmonauts, talked to Richard Nixon on a radiophone, and planted a reflector dish in the Sea of Tranquility that allowed some nerds in Austin Texas to shoot a laser into space and measure the exact distance from the Earth to the Moon, mostly so that people throughout the world would know that this dude traveled 232,271 miles FOR SCIENCE.

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"The landing approach was, by far, the most difficult and challenging part of the flight. Walking on the lunar surface was very interesting, but it was something we looked on as reasonably safe and predictable… Pilots take no special joy in walking: pilots like flying. Pilots generally take pride in a good landing, not in getting out of the vehicle."

Neil and Buzz got the LM back off the ground, rejoined the Command Module, hurtled through the Earth's atmosphere at 35,000 feet per second, and returned home to a massive parade in their honor. Armstrong met the Queen, the Pope, the President, and the Shah of Iran (there's an interesting urban legend that Armstrong heard the Muslim call to prayer while in space and immediately converted to Islam, but he repeatedly denied this story), received medals of honor from 17 different countries, and also had a couple airports, streets, and even a piece of the Moon's geography named after him.

Fairly certain that he was never gonna top that, Neil Armstrong retired from astronauting a year later and bought a farm in Ohio. That was going well for a while, but in 1979 he got his wedding ring stuck in the gears of a grain tractor (Neil Armstrong was still working a farm!) and had the thing rip his entire finger off, but in true Neil Friggin' Armstrong fashion he just calmly walked over, picked up the finger, put it on ice, and drove to the hospital to get it re-attached. He went on to work as a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Cincinnati, was an administrator at NASA, ran his own aerospace tech company, and once sued his barber for selling a lock of his hair on eBay for $3,000 (Armstrong told him to either return the hair or donate the $3k to charity… the guy donated).

Any time anyone ever asked him about him being the first human to ever set foot on the Moon, Neil Armstrong would just say that it was the culmination of over a decade of hard work by over 400,000 people and leave it at that.

He died last Sunday, August 25, 2012, at the age of 82.

Thanks for sharing entire story.. True legend of American history.