<p>Somali pirates are pretty fucking badass.&nbsp; First off, they're pirates.&nbsp; With assault rifles, rocket launchers, and outboard motors.&nbsp; Secondly, they net some pretty goddamned big prizes these days.&nbsp; Sure, there aren't Spanish galleons loaded with gold doubloons floating around all over the place just asking to be pillaged and plundered, but, then again, capturing a goddamned <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7650415.stm">container ship filled with Russian tanks</a> can be more lucrative than you'd think.&nbsp; According to that article I just linked to (the one with all the blue letters up there), these pirates basically capture ships, ransom them for something on the order of $2 million a pop, and then go home to their mansions, bang their supermodel mistresses, and buy all the newest video games the day they come out.&nbsp; It's yo ho, yo ho, a pirates' life for these scurvy bastards, and business is good - they make a ton of money, terrorize the seas, and sailors pretty much everywhere fear them.</p>
<p>Well, there's one man who isn't impressed.</p>
<p>In November 2005 Michael Groves was the master-at-arms aboard the luxury cruise ship <em>Seaborne Spirit</em>, cruising about 100 miles off the coast of Africa, when all of a sudden he received a report on his radio that two speedboats were tearing ass full-speed towards the ship.&nbsp; Groves ran out onto the deck to see what the fuckballs was going on, and was promptly greeted by a hail of bullets.&nbsp; Roughly a dozen badass, murderous Somali pirates were on their way to fuck <em>Seaborne Spirit</em>'s ass up, and Groves, a British ex-cop, now found himself in <a href="http://www.badassoftheweek.com/mcclane.html">John McClane</a>'s shoes - one man, up against a small, well-organized group of balls-out motherfucking terrorists with machine guns.</p>
<p>The only difference:&nbsp; Michael Groves didn't have a gun.&nbsp; Also, this was real life.</p>
<p>The <em>Seaborne Spirit</em>, being a high-end, id="mce_marker",000-a-night luxury ship, didn't exactly leave port outfitted with depth charges, surface-to-surface torpedoes, and heavy machine guns mounted on the deck rails every hundred yards or so, and it certainly wasn't one of those crazy-ass sci-fi ships that can transform into a giant surfing robot with plasma missile launchers on its shoulders that smashes battleships into driftwood by swings Humpback Whales around like baseball bats.&nbsp; But Michael Groves knew that he was the only line of defense between these bloodthirsty buccaneers and the 300 men and women aboard his ship, so he improvised - he grabbed the first thing he could get his hands on, which just so happened to be the ship's fucking high-pressure fire hose, charged to the railing while AK-47 fire zipped around his head, and let those motherfuckers have it:</p>
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<p align="center"><img src="http://www.badassoftheweek.com/groves1.jpg" alt="" vspace="8" /><br />"You get to drink... from the FIRE HOSE!"</p>
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<p>Groves blasted the pirates' speedboat with a high-velocity stream of water so powerful that it's capable of stripping paint off a ship's hull.&nbsp; Getting nailed by a cruise ship fire hose is kind of like having your buddy pump a SuperSoaker BFG 9000 like eight million times and then shooting you in the face with it from about six inches away.&nbsp; This stream blew the shit out of the pirates, driving them back, but Groves knew this wouldn't be enough to contain the badassitude of some non-parrot-wearing nautial terrorists.&nbsp; He ran back to the ship's armory to grab another tried-and-true Anti-Pirate Device - an apparatus known as a Long-Range Acoustic Device.&nbsp; Also known by the clever acronym LRAD, this badass futuristic non-lethal weapon emits a brain-crushing wave of sound louder than roughly two thousand Ozzfests taking place inside your skull <em>at the same time</em>.</p>
<p>Well, the pirates weren't fucking around any more either.&nbsp; When the salty sea-dogs got finished peeling their faces off the sides of their motorboats, they fired a broadside of rocket-propelled grenades at the feisty cruise ship.&nbsp; An RPG smashed into the ship, knocking Groves to the deck.&nbsp; His fellow security officer, and ex-Gurkha named Som Badhur Gurung, ran up, grabbed the LRAD, set it up on the railing of the ship, and promptly got shot in the fucking face by an AK-47.</p>
<p>That was fucking it.&nbsp; Groves got ultra giga ripshit cheesed off, jumped back up to his feet, grabbed his seriously-wounded comrade, pulled the dude to safety, and immediately headed back to operate the LRAD.&nbsp; Around this time, a SECOND fucking barrage of rocket-y crunchy death cockslapped the cruise ship, sending everybody to the deck again and probably making the terrified passengers completely seasick in the process.&nbsp; Michael Groves didn't give a shit.&nbsp; He ran over to the railing, and from his completely-exposed position he blasted the pirates with a solid wall of sound -- 150 decibels of ear-splitting, hysteria-inducing screeching.&nbsp; The Somali pirates had their hair blown to the back of the auditorium pretty much immediately.&nbsp; They weren't funky enough to handle the hot beats of a constant stream of sound ranging somewhere between "Pain Begins" and "Death of Hearing Tissue" on the <a href="http://www.gcaudio.com/resources/howtos/loudness.html">decibel loudness comparison chart</a>, so they bugged out and headed home.</p>
<p>Michael Groves was a badass motherfucker who defended the innocent people of his ship from modern-day pirates by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note">brown-noting</a> their asses until they packed up their shit and fucked off.&nbsp; For his selfless heroism and insane fearlessness rescuing a wounded man and single-handedly running off two ships loaded with rocket launcher-toting African terrorists usting nothing more than a couple of improvised non-military weapons and some really foul language, Michael Groves was personally awarded the Queens Gallantry Medal at Buckingham Palace by the British monarch herself.&nbsp; He's a modern-day civilian hero of the War on Terrorism, and the most recent in a long-line of hardcore, scrotum-crushing, pirate-killing motherfuckers.</p>
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<p align="center"><img src="http://www.badassoftheweek.com/groves2.jpg" alt="" vspace="8" /><br /><span>A photo of the pirates, taken by a passenger aboard the <em>Seaborn Spirit</em>.</span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;">Links:</span><br /><br /> <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6664677.stm" target="blank">BBC Article</a><br /><br /> <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-455343/The-sailors-hosepipe-sent-pirates-packing.html" target="blank">Daily Mail Article</a><br /><br /> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seabourn_Spirit" target="blank">Wikipedia Entry on the Seaborn Spirit</a></p>