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INSERT INTO `alltags` VALUES ('16th century'),('17th Century'),('18th century'),('19th century'),('20th century'),('21st century'),('Admiral'),('Adventurer'),('Afghanistan'),('African-American'),('Albania'),('Alien'),('American Civil War'),('American Revolution'),('Ancient'),('Angola'),('Animal'),('Arab'),('Argentina'),('Artist'),('Assyiria'),('Astronaut/Cosmonaut'),('Athlete'),('Australia'),('Austria'),('Aviation/Pilots'),('Battle Rage / Berserker'),('Belgium'),('Belize'),('Benin'),('Bhutan'),('Biblical'),('Boer War'),('Bolivia'),('Brazil'),('British Army'),('British SAS'),('Buddhist'),('Bulgaria'),('Cambodia'),('Canada'),('Catholic'),('Cavalry'),('Chief'),('Chile'),('China'),('Colombia'),('Confederate'),('Conqueror'),('Conquistador'),('Crimefighter'),('Croatia'),('Crusader'),('Cuba'),('Czech'),('Denmark'),('Desert Storm'),('Dinosaur'),('Doctor/Medic'),('Egypt'),('El Salvador'),('Emperor'),('England'),('Entertainer'),('Estonia'),('Ethiopia'),('Etruria'),('Explorer'),('Falklands War'),('Fictional'),('Fighter Ace'),('Fiji'),('Finland'),('Firefighter'),('France'),('Future'),('Georgia'),('Germany'),('Gladiator'),('God'),('Greece'),('Greenland'),('Guadeloupe'),('Guatemala'),('Guerilla'),('Gunslinger'),('Gurkha'),('Haiti'),('Head of State'),('Headhunter'),('Hero'),('Hero of the Soviet Union'),('Hindu'),('Holland'),('Honduras'),('Humanitarian'),('Hundred Years War'),('Hungary'),('Iceland'),('India'),('Indonesia'),('Iran'),('Iraq'),('Ireland'),('Israel'),('Italy'),('Japan'),('Jewish'),('Jordan'),('Kenya'),('Knight'),('Korea'),('Korean War'),('Kyrgyzstan'),('Last Stand'),('Lawman'),('Libya'),('Lithuania'),('Luxembourg'),('Macedonia'),('Madagascar'),('Malaysia'),('Mali'),('Malta'),('Maori'),('Martial Arts'),('Medal of Honor'),('Medal of Valor'),('Medieval'),('Mercenary'),('Mexican-American War'),('Mexico'),('Military Commander'),('Military Unit'),('Mongol'),('Mongolia'),('Monster'),('Montenegro'),('Muslim'),('Mythological'),('Napoleonic Wars'),('Native American'),('Naval/Maritime'),('Nepal'),('New Zealand'),('Nigeria'),('Ninja'),('Nobel Prize'),('Norway'),('Old West'),('Oman'),('Orthodox'),('Outlaw'),('Pakistan'),('Panama'),('Persia'),('Peru'),('Philippines'),('Pirate'),('Poland'),('Politician'),('Portugal'),('Postal Employee'),('Prehistoric'),('Queen'),('Rescue'),('Romania'),('Rome'),('Royal Air Force'),('Royal Navy'),('Russia'),('Rwanda'),('Saint'),('Samurai'),('Scientist'),('Scotland'),('Serbia'),('Sikh'),('Sniper'),('Soldier'),('Somalia'),('South Africa'),('Spain'),('Spartan'),('Special Forces'),('Spy'),('Sri Lanka'),('Submariner'),('Sudan'),('Supervillain'),('Survivalist'),('Sweden'),('Switzerland'),('Syria'),('Tank/Armor'),('Tanzania'),('Thailand'),('Tibet'),('Tunisia'),('Turkey'),('Turkmenistan'),('Ukraine'),('United States'),('Uruguay'),('US Air Force'),('US Army'),('US Army Delta Force'),('US Coast Guard'),('US Marine Corps'),('US Navy'),('US Navy SEAL'),('Uzbekistan'),('Venezuela'),('Victoria Cross'),('Vietnam'),('Vietnam War'),('Vigilante'),('Viking'),('Wales'),('War Hero'),('War of 1812'),('War on Terror'),('Warrior'),('Weapon'),('Women'),('World War I'),('Writer'),('WWII'),('Yemen'),('Zulu');

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INSERT INTO `comics` VALUES ('BACC_002.png','Simple Misunderstanding','2012-12-27','187263019291'),('BACC_003.png','I am so SMRT','2013-01-02','62595034821'),('BACC_001.png','Original Gangsta\'','2012-12-20','584008316446'),('BACC_004.png','We are the Eight Percent','2013-01-09','8796125568'),('BACC_005.png','I got the Fever','2013-01-16','451431219575'),('BACC_006.png','Manifest Destiny','2013-01-23','65640405961'),('BACC_007.png','No Reservations','2013-01-30','78751676463'),('BACC_008.png','Try the Horsey Sauce','2013-02-06','856462423137'),('BACC_009.png','Forbitten Love','2013-02-13','448244525470'),('BACC_010.png','#TeslaDoesDC','2013-02-20','5384005552'),('BACC_011.png','Alternating Current Events','2013-02-27','836733619093'),('BACC_012.png','Powered by The Man','2013-03-06','945385419271'),('BACC_013.png','Racially Charged!','2013-03-13','906766411390'),('BACC_014.png','Jackson Shot Second','2013-03-20','856868822872'),('BACC_015.png','Just Like Old Times','2013-03-27','59823714492'),('BACC_016.png','Feel My Wrath','2013-04-03','80317618822'),('BACC_017.png','ALT Text','2013-04-12','676103623147'),('BACC_018.png','She\'s A Cheeky Bird','2013-04-17','71620146216'),('BACC_019.png','My Giraffe is Bigger','2013-04-24','255782015242'),('BACC_020.png','Love Hate Relationship','2013-05-02','520418622452'),('BACC_021.png','Cathartic Impalement','2013-05-08','268679916115'),('BACC_022.png','Management Material','2013-05-15','539035823238'),('BACC_023.png','Totally Boned','2013-05-22','547974113379'),('BACC_024.png','Ivar the Homeless','2013-05-30','54615332394'),('BACC_025.png','All the President\'s Men','2013-06-05','91796530627'),('BACC_026.png','The Red Bedding','2013-06-12','53300349557'),('BACC_027.png','True Story Bro','2013-06-19','965750719137'),('BACC_028.png','Not For Sitting','2013-06-27','841613424863'),('BACC_029.png','The Blood Countess','2013-07-03','425306415179'),('BACC_032.png','Thank You!','2013-07-24','181873711041'),('BACC_030.png','Somebody I Used to Know','2013-07-10','238456331232'),('BACC_031.png','^^CLICK^^CLICK^^','2013-07-17','974495220058'),('BACC_033.png','Maximinus Thrax','2013-07-31','800531018549'),('BACC_034.png','Everyone\'s a Comedian','2013-08-07','5331656092'),('BACC_035.png','The Space Cowboy','2013-08-14','4543064549'),('BACC_036.png','Impale just means Impale','2013-08-21','753758731936'),('BACC_037.png','Totally Goth','2013-08-28','152880426533'),('BACC_038.png','Not As Useful','2013-09-04','378781411119'),('BACC_039.png','It Wasn\'t That Great','2013-09-11','659860924449'),('BACC_040.png','There Can Be Only One','2013-09-18','527555520837'),('BACC_041.png','Knockin on Heaven\'s Door','2013-09-25','24382116562'),('BACC_042.png','21st Century Vikings','2013-10-02','981304614280'),('BACC_043.png','Some Assembly Required','2013-10-09','518056812943'),('BACC_044.png','99 Theses','2013-10-16','11064945244'),('BACC_045.png','No Reservations','2013-10-23','27099087635'),('BACC_046.png','BReaking Vlad','2013-10-31','985466425732'),('BACC_047.png','And You Won\'t Ever Die','2013-11-06','151500411966'),('BACC_048.png','Impaling Loop Holes','2013-11-13','916230429988'),('BACC_049.png','Adopt-a-Badass','2013-11-20','25748577824'),('001_Ovcharenko.png','#001112713 - Dmitry Ovcharenko','2013-11-27','683791510647'),('002_Reckless.png','#002120413 - Sergeant Reckless','2013-12-04','6555443411'),('003_KarolyTakacs.png','#003121113 - Karoly Takacs','2013-12-11','674113616992'),('004_Diogenes.png','#004121813 - Diogenes','2013-12-18','692921028654'),('005_OdinClaus.png','#005122513 - ODIN','2013-12-24','415540220429'),('006_MaryRead.png','#006010114 - Mary Read','2014-01-01','34675799714'),('007_ThomasMalory_anim.gif','#007010814 - Thomas Malory','2014-01-08','246747532322'),('008_Hatshepsut.png','#008011514 - Hatshepsut','2014-01-15','86447531046'),('008_Tsutomu.png','#009012214 - Tsutomo Yamaguchi','2014-01-22','80851077454'),('009_BuffaloHump.png','#010012914 - Buffalo Hump','2014-01-29','454766629057'),('011_Jaguarina.png','#011020514 - La Jaguarina','2014-02-05','805873518169'),('012_Tibbles.png','#012021214 - Tibbles','2014-02-12','31011935878'),('013_IanForbes.png','#013021914 - Ian Forbes','2014-02-19','657058123252'),('014_BigJake.png','#014022614 - Big Jake Mandusic','2014-02-26','789245911996'),('015_JimmyDoohan.png','#0015030514 - Jimmy ','2014-03-05','73906622944'),('016_GreatSeppuku.png','#0016031214 - Great Seppukus I','2014-03-12','636571112681'),('017_NievesFern.png','#017031914 - Nieves Fernandez','2014-03-19','801952725631'),('018_FalseDmitry.png','#018032614 - False Dmitry','2014-03-26','28004551016'),('019_JohnBurns.png','#019040214 - John Burns','2014-04-02','304897432349'),('20_TenYears.png','#020040914 - Ten Badass Years','2014-04-09','532384410986'),('021_HarryTracy.png','#021041614 - Harry Tracy','2014-04-16','3980232805'),('022_SeanPenn.png','#022042314 - Sean Penn','2014-04-23','112255531948'),('023_ShaineThrower.png','#023043014 - Shaine Thrower','2014-04-30','90013374214'),('000_TechDifficulties-01.png','Tune in Next Week','2014-05-07','465532914456'),('024_Defenestration.png','#024051414 - Defenestration','2014-05-14','423609630513'),('025_AsaroMudmen.png','#025052814 - Asaro Mudmen','2014-05-28','694947019051'),('026_Pythagoras.png','#026060414 - Pythagoras','2014-06-04','881529611173'),('027_DDay.png','#027061114 - Dday 70th Anniversary','2014-06-11','667662719740'),('028_MikeGongol.png','#028061814 - Mike Gongol','2014-06-18','122686326990'),('029_AdamWarwick.png','#029090314 - Adam Warwick','2014-09-03','105783315925'),('030_JeanThurel.png','#030091014 - Jean Thurel','2014-09-10','54776576135'),('031_CatoYounger.png','#031091714 - Cato the Younger','2014-09-17','25371216560'),('032_Galileo.png','#032100114 - Galileo Galilei','2014-10-01','689731724737'),('033_MoeBerg.png','#033100814 - Moe Berg','2014-10-08','90756109599'),('034_Isokelekel.png','#034101514 - Isokelekel','2014-10-15','199628927582'),('035_ColossusRhodes.png','#035102214 - Colossus of Rhodes','2014-10-22','619634711234'),('036_Tardigrade.png','#036102914 - Tardigrade','2014-10-29','43905127601'),('037_ReTardigrade.png','#036110514 - Re:Tardigrade','2014-11-05','94188614811'),('038_IvanPavlovich-01.png','#038121714 - Ivan Pavlovich','2014-12-17','628373814927'),('039_DanCullen.png','#039011415 - Dan Cullen','2015-01-14','40783914946'),('040_AussieLion.png','#040012815 - Marsupial Lion','2015-01-28','79476638170'),('041_AsboSwan-01.png','#041021115 - Mister Asbo','2015-02-11','552478526'),('042_MikeMalloy-01.png','#042031715 - Mike Malloy','2015-03-17','2384125628');

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INSERT INTO `home` VALUES ('<p>You\'ve reached the Badass of the Week. &nbsp;Your one-stop shop for all things badassery-related. &nbsp;I update the page every Friday, so if you give a crap feel free to check in next week to satisfy your insatiable desire to read about grown people punching in the mouth or beating each other about the head and neck in a most furious matter.</p>\r\n<table style=\"margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; width: 339px; height: 299px;\" border=\"0\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td>\r\n<div style=\"width: 160px; text-align: center;\"><img src=\"/images/home/badass1.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" />&nbsp;<a style=\"font-size: 9pt; color: #000; font-family: arial;\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061749443?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=badofthewee-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0061749443\">Amazon</a> | <a style=\"font-size: 9pt; color: #000; font-family: arial;\" href=\"http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/badass-ben-thompson/1100718479?ean=9780061749445\">Barnes &amp; Noble</a> | <a style=\"font-size: 9pt; color: #000; font-family: arial;\" href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780061749445\">Indiebound</a></div>\r\n</td>\r\n<td>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<span style=\"font-size: large;\"><strong><span style=\"font-family: \'courier new\', courier; color: #ff6600;\">buy my books</span></strong></span></p>\r\n<script src=\"strips/count.js\"></script>\r\n<div style=\"width: 160px; text-align: center;\"><img src=\"/images/home/deathmatch21.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" />&nbsp;<a style=\"font-size: 9pt; color: #000; font-family: arial;\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062112341/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0062112341&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=badofthewee-20\">Amazon</a> | <a style=\"font-size: 9pt; color: #000; font-family: arial;\" href=\"http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/badass-ben-thompson/1111397902?ean=9780062112347\">Barnes &amp; Noble</a> | <a style=\"font-size: 9pt; color: #000; font-family: arial;\" href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062112347\">Indiebound</a></div>\r\n</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>','<p><span style=\"font-size: medium;\">You\'ve reached the&nbsp;<strong>Badass of the Week</strong>, your one-stop shop for all things badassery-related.&nbsp;You should probably be aware that this site features an unnecessarily copious amount of profanity, so if you are easily offended by that sort of thing, then this would be a good time to turn off your computer and join a convent.</span></p>\r\n<div style=\"visibility:hidden\"><p class=\"art-page-footer\"></p></div>\r\n<div style=\"position: absolute; bottom: 0px; left: -4000px;\"><a href=\"http://qwinsla.com/\">qwinsla.com</a></div>\r\n<div style=\"position: absolute; bottom: 0px; left: -4000px;\"><a href=\"http://ciacpr.com/\">ciacpr.com/</a></div>\r\n<div style=\"position: absolute; bottom: 0px; left: -4000px;\"><a href=\"http://60second-binaryoption.com/\">60second-binaryoption.com</a></div>\r\n<div style=\"position: absolute; bottom: 0px; left: -4000px;\"><a href=\"http://binoption.online\">binoption.online</a></div>\r\n');

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CREATE TABLE `post` (
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  `title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
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INSERT INTO `post` VALUES ('Ben','HOLY SHIT EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT.','2012-12-20','<p>OMGWTF</p>\r\n<p>You are looking at the second complete redesign of Badass of the Week, and the first that doesn\'t involve me sitting around hand-coding Notepad files using the same bullshit HTML tags I was using when I made \"Ben\'s Home Page\" on Geocities in 1994. It might take a second to get used to the new layout, but take deep breaths and we\'ll all get through this together.</p>\r\n<p>I do want to draw your attention to two new things &ndash; first, I\'ve started a comic strip called Badass Con Carne, drawn by my friend Manny Vega, that will be updated every Wednesday. It\'s basically a webcomic about Andrew Jackson, Nikola Tesla, and Vlad the Impaler living in an apartment together and working at the mall. It\'s going to be very weird but I\'ve seen a handful of finished strips and I\'m really proud of the way it\'s coming together. I hope you\'ll like it.</p>\r\n<p>The second thing is that every article in the site has been indexed with Tags to make it easier to browse for what you\'re looking for. The Tags will be at the bottom of every article, and you\'ll be able to sort through them using drop-down menus on the Archive page. I have no doubt that in the last six months of manually copy-pasting stories from my website into this new Wordpress format and hand-entering tags, I fucked some stuff up, so if you see something awry or have any cool ideas you want to share, <a href=\"mailto:benthompson@badassoftheweek.com\">send them to me here</a>.</p>\r\n<p>Now, since I\'d always said that it would take the end of human civilization to get me to stop using Notepad to update my website, here\'s a Badass that\'s tangentially related to today\'s Mayan Apocalypse.</p>','6899759668','Home Page'),('Manny','Original Gangsta\'','2012-12-20','<div>Welcome to the&nbsp;inaugural&nbsp;strip of Badass Con Carne, a weekly comic starring some of the most badass motherfuckers from history, living together, with internet access and some actual history thrown in for flavor. This bat-shit crazy idea was concocted one night by Ben and myself while we were several beers deep at a mall microbrew. We wanted to do a comic about badasses, but we wanted to hit on current events as well, and it had to be funny. At the time we were just throwing ideas back and forth, making connections with past and present, and misquoting both Tupac and Andrew Jackson through bouts of&nbsp;hysterical&nbsp;laughter. Ben was furiously writing all the ideas down as we jumped through history and his books looking for more ridiculous mash-ups we could use.&nbsp;</div>\r\n<div>&nbsp;</div>\r\n<div>The next day Ben sent me a typed version of what he could read from his OWN FUCKING notes, and it was a scattered mess. Honestly, we didn\'t even know what half of the notes meant and it wasn\'t funny. Just placing these people in awkward situations wasn\'t going to be enough, we needed to really get in there and shit all over preconceptions and make this ours. So he went back in and started making them into real characters, and I started doing some sketches, and it just started to fall into place. A bunch of other shit happened between then and now, but I am really excited to show you all what beer, sarcasm and two assholes can do when they put their minds to it.</div>\r\n<div>&nbsp;</div>\r\n<div>In the coming weeks we will be introducing the characters and their new lives, sprinkling in some real information where we can and hopefully making you chuckle along the way. If not, go have a six pack and read it again. I guarantee you will be saying, \"Fuck bitches, get money!\" all night.</div>\r\n<div>&nbsp;</div>','23194393352','Con Carne'),('Manny','Simple Misunderstanding','2012-12-27','<p>Vlad the Impaler was a fringe character at best when Ben and I started talking about this comic. We thought he would be a great one-shot guy who would come in, impale everyone and move on... like a murderous Santa Claus. As Ben and I started coming up with different ideas, Vlad kept popping up as a good foil for the other characters. He would jump in with a sarcastic quip instead of a sharp stick (and sometimes the stick too) and just make the jokes work. Maybe it was the sarcasm or the bloodlust, but Ben and I really latched on to Vlad so we made room for him in this insane badass fictional apartment.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Once we knew he was one of the main characters I started doing some concept sketches, but that hair gave me fucking nightmares. No matter what I did, he looked like the love child of <a href=\"http://www.kennyg.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Kenny G</a> and <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/bassreeves.html\" target=\"_blank\">Bass Reeves</a>&nbsp;(see what I did there, Ben). So I looked in my mirror and saw my bald shining head staring back at me. I remembered the day I realized that my hair wasn\'t gonna come back, and the reactions I got from everyone after I shaved it clean. No matter how nice I actually was, people just automatically assumed I was a mean sumnabitch... and that\'s exactly what I wanted for Vlad.</p>\r\n<p>I honestly don\'t know when exactly it happened, but between the bald head and brutal sarcasm Vlad became our favorite character. We look forward to revealing all the crazy things that we love about Vlad the Impaler, and all the creative ways he will impale things.</p>','146825421034','Con Carne'),('Manny','Technical Difficulties','2013-01-03','<p>I apologize for the quirks we are experiencing on the site, you are going to have to give us a few weeks to get our shit together. It seems that while it was funny to unveil the new web site on the Mayan Apocalypse, we did not completely think through the repercussions. Apparently <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukulkan\" target=\"_blank\">Kukulkan</a>&nbsp;was not pleased with our jest and has consumed our IT department... which is really just one guy (who was on vacation for the holidays). Rest assured we have made the appropriate sacrifices and things should be operating smoothly soon. If that does not work, please see our latest job posting:</p>\r\n<p>Wanted for immediate employment - Virgin. Must be willing to fetch and wash several vases and urns, sharpen knives, and lay perfectly still on altar during rhythmic chanting sessions. No prior experience required. Spanish a plus!</p>','139761822261','Con Carne'),('Manny','We are the Eight Percent','2013-01-09','<p>I kinda skipped the blog post last week as we were trying to run down some issues, so let me make up for it now.</p>\r\n<p>Tesla was one of our must have characters simply because his life was so tragic, yet his mind was so mind-numbingly badass. If he was born today, he would be in a reality show about who could make the most bat shit crazy invention in order to date some skank... and Edison would be there to take the credit, the skank and probably some immunity idol. In researching the images for Edison, I came across one pic of him as a <a href=\"http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm6susIL9d1qeu6ilo1_500.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">young man</a>&nbsp;which just put everything about the guy come into perspective. He was a good looking, smooth talking, arrogant prick and Telsa had to fill the opposite role. I wanted Nik to be the everyman, the nice guy geek on the verge of greatness if only he could get contact lenses and a sense of style. My wife would argue that I modeled him after myself, and I would have to agree on style, but I am totally a dick.</p>\r\n<p>How can there be a Badass comic strip without Genghis Khan, or at least on descendant of his? When thinking about his role I suggested that he was responsible for every Mongolian restaurant you had ever been to in his quest to conquer capitalism, and continue to make his foes and followers crap their pants. We liked the idea so much, his restaurant eventually inspired the name of the strip; <strong>Genghis Khan Carne</strong>, look for it at your local mall.</p>\r\n<p>Introductions are over, let us know your thoughts.</p>','684339611823','Con Carne'),('Manny','@TeslaIsEdisonHo','2013-02-20','<p>Nikola is eagerly awaiting your tweets so don\'t let the poor guy down, he doesn\'t have many friends as it is. It really is unfortunate that Twitter only allows 15 characters for your account name, cause Vlad had a ton of good ideas that just didn\'t fit within the limit. Granted, they all involved Tesla performing some \"Urban Dictionary\" terms on Mr. Edison, but now the world will never know his evil genius. Or maybe he will share them with you on his twitter account @Vladsucks, go on, ask him ;)</p>','11505822645','Con Carne'),('Manny','Racially Charged!','2013-03-13','<p>I have seen Epic Rap Battle of History before, and a few of them are hilarious and some fall flat, but they never fail to impress me with the amount of rhyming knowledge they throw down. I really have to give them props for doing the research and stringing together the dopest lines (am I dating myself with that sentence?).</p>\r\n<p>Anyways, if you want a taste of what an Edison vs. Tesla rap battle might have sounded like, I reccommend checking this out: <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ1Mz7kGVf0&amp;list=PL96675BDF95286773\" target=\"_blank\">TESLA vs. EDISON</a>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I got goosebumps near the end when Tesla raps about what Edison really did to he world. The sads.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>','475678614250','Con Carne'),('Manny','Alt Text','2013-04-12','<p>Sorry about being tardy this week, it\'s been a bitch of a few months at \"real\" work. The stupid thing is I did the strip, I just completely forgot to post it until 12am Friday EST. I just wrapped up the strip due out two weeks from now, and I thought, \"what the fuck is wrong with me?\" Anyways...</p>\r\n<p>We are trying something new this week, a strip outside the main character timeline. Ben wrote a bunch of one-shots as we went fleshing out the strip, and some are too good to let slide so we thought we should interject them here and there to keep you on your toes. Let us know what you think.</p>','279046724700','Con Carne'),('Manny','My Giraffe is Bigger','2013-04-24','<p>This strip was inspired by this amazing video -&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7HCIGFdBt8\">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7HCIGFdBt8</a>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The script is almost a direct transcript of a conversation between Ben and myself after watching that video. Honestly, I can no longer look at a giraffe in quite the same way. I guess it\'s not the size of your horns that matter, but how ridiculous you look using them. I hope this has been educational for you all, I certainly learned something about myself when drawing that last panel... I have short fingers.</p>','655068218575','Con Carne'),('Manny','Love Hate Relationship','2013-05-02','<p>I\'m probably going to miss next week\'s strip. I\'ve spent the last week moving to a new place and things are just all over the fucking place. I was lucky to have two strips stored up until now, but it seems like I\'ll be playing catch up every week from here on out. I will do my best to get a new strip every week from here until San Diego Comic Con in July... where Ben and I will be in attendance so I will likely miss a strip because I am a lazy bastard. See you in then!</p>','724225223572','Con Carne'),('Manny','Cathartic Impalement','2013-05-08','<p>OK, so maybe I was just a bit histrionic when I thought I\'d miss this weeks deadline. It was not easy, but I got it done... just for you guys. Many keyboards were impaled upon spikes in order to get you this strip.</p>','443002516490','Con Carne'),('Manny','Ivar the Homeless','2013-05-30','<p>Sorry guys, Memorial Day kinda threw the whole week into a confused hangover-like scenario. I always feel like something is off, and somehow I was positive I already posted this strip. Luckily I have other people looking out for me.</p>\r\n<p>I think Ivar will become a regularly recurring character and will return any time I see a homeless guy holding a clever sign. I gotta give props (and some cash) to people who put some effort into their pan handling. If they can make me laugh, it\'s totally worth a few bucks. You never know when you will run into a group of Vikings so every day could be your last, enjoy a good laugh when you can.</p>','7158660760','Con Carne'),('Manny','Titty Sprinkles','2013-06-06','<p>Just in case anyone does not get the reference, this video of a Morgan Freeman impersonator is amazing.</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZbK2JQ_cR4\">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZbK2JQ_cR4</a></p>\r\n<p>From now on, you will always read Andrew Jackson\'s lines of text in a Morgan Freeman voice... you\'re welcome.</p>','891575312219','Con Carne'),('Manny','The Red Bedding','2013-06-12','<p>If you are not watching Game of Thrones, then you are missing out on some good beheadings and throat slitting. Also, some of the horn doggiest scenes since Lady Chatterly was on Skinemax. If that is what you are in to, Vlad might have some DVDs for sale.</p>\r\n<p>The acting isn\'t half bad either.</p>','602977413534','Con Carne'),('Manny','True Story Bro','2013-06-19','<p>So Edison actually set something like this shit up to prove that AC power was dangerous in order to tank his chief opponent named Westinghouse. The idea was to equate AC power with death by executing a dude using Westinghouse\'s equipment. Evil fucking genius. Not surprisingly, Tesla get\'s no fucking credit for any of this shit.</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.snopes.com/science/edison.asp\">http://www.snopes.com/science/edison.asp</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YOIyNUefcg\">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YOIyNUefcg</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>','195499121673','Con Carne'),('Manny','SanDiago, the Whale\'s Vagina','2013-07-10','<p>Next week is Saniego ComicCon, and both Ben and myself will be in attendance. Hopefully we get to meet a few of you guys and shoot the shit. This is also the time that me and Ben will get together and drink until we come up with new strips for the next few months. If all goes according to plan, we will have some hilarious dick jokes ready for your approval. On the flip side, I\'m probably gonna miss a week or two of strips cause I will be intoxicated and hunting Furries.</p>\r\n<p>Also, there will be a cool announcement coming soon. Check back next week to see some awesome shit.</p>','76741622260','Con Carne'),('Manny','Kickstart my Heart','2013-07-17','<p>If you haven\'t already seen it, Ben and I have started a Kickstarter campaign to produce &nbsp;the BADASS: Spades &amp; Grenades deck - playing cards with balls!</p>\r\n<p>We are super excited for this project and the possibility to play any card game with 52 Badasses from history in all their glory. The details are on the <a href=\"http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2146143533/badass-spades-and-grenades-playing-cards-with-ball\" target=\"_blank\">Kickstarter page</a>, so pop on over there if you\'ve got the stones.</p>\r\n<p>Help us, help you, help us. Tell your friends, your co-workers, your mom (we all know she likes Badasses). Spread the word because this deck must be made so that future generations won\'t turn soft due to lack of awesome. Do it for the children.</p>','302371121850','Con Carne'),('Manny','Thank You!','2013-07-24','<p>I had some high hopes for the <a href=\"http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2146143533/badass-spades-and-grenades-playing-cards-with-ball\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>BADASSS: Spades &amp; Grenades</strong> </a>Kickstarter, but I could not have even dreamed that we would reach our funding goal in under a week! I had no doubt that if we got together with some amazing artists and collected the biggest Badasses that the resulting deck of cards would be impossible to resist, but this shit is like catnip for the Badass&nbsp;connoisseur.</p>\r\n<p>Lot\'s of the limited rewards are going fast, so if you are on the fence, get in there and secure your place in Badass history and grab a deck or twelve. Do it for Vlad, he\'s been working out just for his <a href=\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/739/652/ef05bdc14825c12bc854d6922429d8e1_large.jpg?1373579315\" target=\"_blank\">photo shoot</a>.</p>\r\n<p>Go forth and plunder!</p>','528783014777','Con Carne'),('Manny','Everyone\'s a Comedian','2013-08-07','<p>I\'ve been holding off on doing this comic for about 2 months because I wanted to get it right. Three new characters is basically a whole new comic strip cast (actually Ben had another guy in there that I had to veto for space)... hmmm, Badass in Chief has a nice ring to it. Anyways, I wanted to make them cool, and I think we have a good thing here. Aaron Burr is a nice stone cold addition to Jackson and Abroham Lincoln. I also thought for a bit about Hamilton, and why someone needs to shoot him in the face repeatedly, and it led me to the New York Jets. I\'m a Dolphins fan, so hating the Jets is easy, but lately I can\'t imagine that even the Jet\'s fans are happy with the way their team is being handled. So just pretend Hamilton is Mark Sanchez and the bullet is his <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0DqVKIUhxQ\" target=\"_blank\">offensive lineman\'s ass</a>.</p>\r\n<p>BADASS: Spades &amp; Grenades is in the final week, so if you haven\'t had a chance to check it out and grab a deck or two, do it NOW! We currently have a stretch goal set at $25K where Ben will be writing some snippets of Badass history and we are collecting all the card art for a BADASS Handbook. It\'s a nice addition to the Badass book series and something you can give to family and friends so they can understand a bit more about the kind of person you are.</p>','29480228978','Con Carne'),('Ben','The Space Cowboy','2013-08-14','<p>This is what Vlad is referring to.</p>\r\n<p><span>Thanks to a major bump from Mr. Matt \"</span><strong>The Oatmeal</strong><span>\" Oatmeal and his voraciously-rabid fan base, we received over 150% of our Requested Funding amount in&nbsp;</span><strong>under 24 hours</strong><span>.&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><span>We weren\'t really prepared to deal with something quite like that, but we are certainly&nbsp;</span><strong>not complaining</strong><span>.&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><span>With&nbsp;</span><strong>under 24 hours to go</strong><span>, there\'s not a ton of time to come up with new stretch goals, talk to vendors, etc., so at this point it\'s basically now about you guys just getting what you want.&nbsp; At the moment, with all our stretch goals obliterated, $22 gets you two decks, the \"Caution: Badass\" beer coaster, the mini-booklet with art and character descriptions, and free shipping.&nbsp; Which ain\'t bad.</span><br /><br /><strong>You guys are awesome.</strong><span>&nbsp; I don\'t really know what else to say.</span></p>\r\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2146143533/badass-spades-and-grenades-playing-cards-with-ball\" target=\"_blank\">BADASS: Spades &amp; Grenades</a></strong></p>','3806843997','Con Carne');

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--
-- Table structure for table `weekly`
--

CREATE TABLE `weekly` (
  `name` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  `birth` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
  `death` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
  `birthplace` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  `badassery` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `info` text NOT NULL,
  `fecha` date NOT NULL,
  `id` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
  `mainphoto` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  `fcphoto` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  `baname` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  `blurb` text NOT NULL,
  `quote` text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`baname`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

--
-- Dumping data for table `weekly`
--

INSERT INTO `weekly` VALUES ('Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Karelin','September 19, 1967','N/A','Siberia, USSR','20th-century Russian Athlete','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Alexander Karelin is the real-life equivalent of what you would get if you mixed Ivan Drago with Fedor Emelianenko and Zangief from <em>Street Fighter II</em>.&nbsp; He\'s the single most dominant Greco-Roman wrestler of all time, and, if the picture above is any indication, one of the most goddamned frightening human beings of all time.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Karelin\'s life story reads like a Greek myth.&nbsp; He was born on the frozen wastes of Soviet Siberia in 1967, a 15-pound baby so ridiculously massive that this dude\'s 5\'6\" mother probably also deserves her own article on this website just for somehow popping him out.&nbsp; His father was a truck driver / amateur boxer who encouraged Karelin to do two things &ndash; be a man, and cut his hair short &ndash; and from an early age, the harsh, -50 degree snow-covered wilderness of the Siberian forests made Karelin strong as hell.&nbsp; As a kid, this dude hunted fox and sable while hurtling through Siberia on skis, which is pretty over-the-top by itself, and he spent the rest of his time eating entire pizzas in one sitting, drinking a half-gallon of milk a day, and trying to become the world\'s ultimate killing machine.&nbsp; Karelin started wrestling at the age of 13, and his budding career as a Greco-Roman asskicker was going pretty damn well until two years later, when he broke his leg in half in a tournament (I can only imagine that he continued on and won the match anyways). Karelin\'s mom, freaked out about this horrific injury, burned Alexander\'s wrestling outfit and forbade him from ever competing again, but the Russian behemoth\'s first response wasn\'t to punk out like a wussbag just because his femur was exploded in the middle of a competition &ndash; instead, this guy decided he \"couldn\'t leave the sport to which I\'d given my leg.\"&nbsp; He rehabbed by running through the Siberian woods and rowing a wooden rowboat until his hands bled, and eventually became the most dominant Greco-Roman wrestler since Hercules.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Uh, that\'s fucking insane.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/karelin1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">To most people, Karelin is known simply as \"The Experiment\", mostly because this guy is a freak of nature so over-the-top hardcore that everyone living west of the Iron Curtain figured he must have been grown in a vat as part of some Soviet supersoldier experiment designed to create an unstoppable crop of genetically-enhanced warriors capable of dismantling Abrams tanks with their fists and killing the entire crew by bodyslamming them into the ground with enough force to crack concrete.&nbsp; Karelin, being a total badass who doesn\'t for a single second want anyone to think he didn\'t earn every fucking award he ever received, simply says people consider him a freak only because, \"I train every day of my life and they have never trained a day in theirs.\"</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It\'s worth noting that he had a strict policy of immediately submitting to every drug test ever requested of him.&nbsp; He never tested positive for those weapons-grade mega-horse steroids everyone seemed to think he was taking.&nbsp; He also bench presses 450 pounds as part of his daily workout routine.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/karelin2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Dubbed, \"the strongest man in the world,\" this is a dude who can crush your fist into dust simply by shaking your hand.&nbsp; When TIME Magazine asked him who his toughest opponent was, his response was, \"My refrigerator,\" which sounds weird as hell, but apparently this dude once bought a fridge, put that shit in a bear hug, and carried it up eight fucking flights of stairs by himself to get it into his apartment.&nbsp; That\'s usually the sort of insane thing I use for over-the-top hyperbole when I\'m writing one of these articles, but the fact that it actually happened kind of makes me want to crap my pants a little bit.&nbsp; Competing in an event where brute strength is the sole requirement (unlike MMA or other forms of wrestling, in Greco-Roman wrestling you aren\'t allowed to attack the legs &ndash; it\'s all upper body strength), this guy dominated the sport so hard he probably should have bought it dinner first.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Karelin\'s record speaks for itself.&nbsp; Competing in the heaviest weight class in the sport, this guy spent 13 years mercilessly kicking the shit out of every single person on Earth who was unlucky enough to weigh over 286 pounds (130kg).&nbsp; He\'s the only three-time Olympic champion in Greco-Roman Wrestling,, a 9-time World Champion, a 12-time European Champion, and he also won the only MMA match he ever participated in. Shit, for six full years this guy never lost <em>a single point</em> in international competition, to anyone, and won most of his fights in less than three minutes.&nbsp; The guy\'s such a fucking legend that he\'s officially been declared a Hero of the Russian Federation, which is the highest award for bravery and heroism the country has to offer, and has been made an honorary Colonel in the Russian customs police for some reason.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/karelin3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But it\'s not just the fact that this guy won enough metal to armor-plate a T-80 Battle Tank that makes him harder than an Adamantium boner &ndash; it\'s the way he completely fucking annihilated everyone in his path without mercy in a one-man quest to take every poor chump stupid enough to stare across the ring at him and pound him into a crimson smear on the mat.&nbsp; For instance, Karelin is famous for a move known as the \"Karelin Lift\". Basically, the way this works is that Alexander Karelin would kick the shit out of people so hard that their first reaction was to curl up in the fetal position on the mat, clutching their imploded ribcages and sobbing uncontrollably in the desperate hope that giving this guy the deadweight would prevent him from hurling them out of the ring like a live grenade, and then Karelin would respond to this nonsense by grabbing this 300-pound man, prying him up off the mat, hoisting him above his head, and then viciously slamming the guy back down again.&nbsp; That\'s right, folks, this guy invented a fucking suplex, and then used it routinely in real-life, non-WWE situations to hurl grown-ass men around like they were giant spandex-clad stuffed animals.&nbsp; Karelin, for his part, calls the move the \"Reverse Body Lift\", presumably because he\'s not a gigantic raging egomaniac, but in reality it more or less resembled a live-action re-enactment of Zangief\'s jump-spinning 360-degree piledriver (in fact, while I wasn\'t able to find any evidence to support this in my research, I had always heard that Zangief was actually based on Karelin... it makes sense to me).</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The fact that this guy could pick up 300-pounds of man meat and fling it around at will was so fucking terrifying that a lot of wrestlers eventually started rolling on their backs to try to avoid the maneuver &ndash; a tactic that allowed Karelin to easily pin them.&nbsp; I\'m not even kidding, this guy\'s competition &ndash; the toughest wrestlers in the word &ndash; were so freaked out by his human-tossing abilities that they would rather concede the match than get chucked across the gym like bitches.&nbsp; That\'s probably part of the reason why Karelin won the 1990 World Championships by pinning his opponents in 1:35, 1:07, 1:21, 0:26, 2:58, and 2:50. When you\'re taking down the planet\'s toughest men in 26 seconds, you\'re pretty much a total fucking beast.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><br /><br /></p>\r\n<center>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/SfDDXpjFtP0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"345\"></iframe></span><br /><br /></p>\r\n</center>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent him from lifting me off the mat.&nbsp; I weighed 265 pounds.&nbsp; I was in good shape.&nbsp; I was scared -- intense fear.&nbsp; I don\'t like flying through the air like that.&nbsp; I kept thinking, \'Don\'t get hurt.&nbsp; Don\'t get hurt.\'&nbsp; With him, it\'s almost a victory if you don\'t get thrown.\"<br /><br /></span><center><span style=\"font-size: small;\">- Jeff Blatnick, former Olympic Gold Medalist in Greco-Roman Wrestling</span></center></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">That\'s how Karelin rolled.&nbsp; Everywhere he went, the Experiment left a trail of bodies crumpled in his wake.&nbsp; Then, just to fuck with everyones\' heads, after dismantling people in a sport that essentially amounts to hand-to-hand combat, Alexander would go back to his wife and kids in a private helicopter (which, by the way, was constantly staffed with a team of two massage therapists who would rub him down whenever he wanted) , write poetry, read Solzhenitsyn, and spend his weekends attending opera and ballet shows.&nbsp; I guess anything less chill would have resulted in this guy freaking out Incredible Hulk-style.&nbsp; Oh, and he also has a law degree and a Ph.D and can do the splits, which is a combination you don\'t see all that often when you\'re talking about 6\'4\" tall guys who weigh over 280 pounds.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Karelin suffered the only defeat in his 13-year career (and gave up his first point in 6 years) in the Gold Medal match of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, when a relatively-unknown American dude named Rulon Gardner pulled a miracle out of his ass and somehow managed to bring down The Experiment.&nbsp; Karelin decided that if he couldn\'t be absolutely invincible all the time, there was no point, and he immediately retired, leaving his shoes in the ring as he left (this is the international sign of retiring from wrestling).&nbsp; He returned home, ran for elected office, and now, awesomely-enough, represents his Siberian district in the Russian Parliament.&nbsp; Obviously, he is a member of Vladimir Putin\'s political party, which makes sense because Putin is probably the most badass world leader on the planet right now (the only reason I haven\'t written an article about the guy for this website yet is that every time I think he\'s done doing badass shit he goes out and kills a grizzly with his teeth while shirtless), though, I have to admit that if Alexander Karelin ever becomes President of Russia (and there is some talk about this being a possibility), I might have to revisit my thoughts on the subject.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/karelin4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"I do not like to seem immodest, but if I am asked, I must be truthful.&nbsp; Yes, I see fear in the eyes of most of my opponents.&nbsp; In the match, Johansson tried hard to resist it, and when he couldn\'t, he allowed himself to be pinned rather than submit to the lift.&nbsp; This move not only involves losing points, it involves losing face.&nbsp; Tomas, he did not want to fly.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.karelin.ru/1indexe.html\">Official Website</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,997892,00.html\">TIME Magazine</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://english.ruvr.ru/2009/03/25/250001.html\">The Voice of Russia</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1139844/index.htm\">Sports Illustrated</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Karelin\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>','2011-08-19','153417613810','karelin1.gif','karelin2.gif','Alexander Karelin','Ivan Drago meets Zangief.  Only real.','\"The loser is usually the one who is ready to lose.  Fight, overcome difficulties, control your emotions – and you will win.\"'),('Y\'hoshua, Son of Nun','1550 BC','1450 BC','Egypt','Biblical Israeli General','<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td>&nbsp;</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Back before religion was all about turning the other cheek, donating canned goods to the needy, forgiving everyone\'s sins with a pat on the head and a dozen Hail Marys, and not grabbing your enemies by their ankles and using them as clubs with which to batter your other enemies into submission, there was Yahweh &ndash; the take-no-prisoners, don\'t-make-me-come-down-there, ultra-badass God of the Old Testament.&nbsp; The God of Righteously Smiting the ever-loving crapballs out of his enemies and leaving behind a smoking crater of failure and false idols.&nbsp; The God of choke-slamming entire cities with thermonuclear mushroom clouds of fire and brimstone, exploding disobedient disciples into windswept pillars of Kosher salt, and laying waste to entire civilizations with a fiery sword forged from fermented Unicorn tears and the unclean blood of Israel\'s idol-worshipping enemies.&nbsp; This was a God of giving unfathomably badass rewards to those chosen people wise enough to do his bidding, and of justly avenging the slightest transgressions by busting out a nice heaping swath of non-believer devastation.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">And for a couple decades during a particularly critical moment in Israel\'s long history, the hard-as-ferroconcrete military commander Joshua was the instrument of that devastation.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joshua1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Joshua was born back in the days when Charlton Heston was all \"<a href=\"http://youtu.be/u1kqqMXWEFs\">Let my people go</a>,\" and had come of age while the Israelites were doing their wandering around in the desert thing during the Exodus.&nbsp; During the 40 year journey through the wilderness Joshua served as Moses\' second-in-command, led the Hebrews in their first military victory since the destruction of Ramses\' army (a battle against the Amelekites), escorted the Big M halfway up Mount Sinai on the fateful day when God dropped the Ten Commandments on the world.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now Moses had been the guy to lead the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt and bring them to the land of Abraham, but unfortunately when the Israelites finally reached their destination after 40 years in the desert Moses immediately keeled over and died.&nbsp; Joshua took over as the leader of his people, and God came down and was all like, \"Ok, chief, now it\'s up to you to turn this wandering band of nomads into a mighty army, seize control of the lands of Canaan, and establish a civilization that will last for thousands of years.&nbsp; But no pressure or anything, dude.&nbsp; You\'re just the successor to one of the greatest prophets in the history of your religion, tasked by God Himself to go forth and conquer/destroy everything in sight, with nothing less than the fate of your entire people hanging in the balance.&nbsp; Better get cracking.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joshua2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Joshua\'s reaction to being called up by God was kind of like <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/speirs.html\">Ronald Speirs</a> being ordered to take the 101st Airborne into Foy.&nbsp; This guy immediately grabbed his sword, jumped through a fiery explosion that randomly appeared out of nowhere, parted the Jordan River with the Ark of the Covenant, ran into the Promised Land, and then made a knife out of flint and circumcised all the Israelites on the Hill of Foreskins.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Once that apparently-important business was taken care of, Joshua marched his troops straight to the city of Jericho &ndash; a massive city known for its towering, impenetrable walls.&nbsp; But impenetrable walls are no match for God\'s almighty Curse of Destruction.&nbsp; God ordered that everyone inside be killed and their possessions plundered, and told Joshua that the best way to accomplish this was by marching his troops around the city every day for seven days while priests blew trumpets made out of rams\' horns.&nbsp; On the seventh day, Joshua led the men around the city seven times, then everybody stopped and shouted real loud Pee-Wee\'s Playhouse style and the sonic boom caused by the cacophonous shouting brought the walls down like they\'d been nailed by a <em>Horn of Blasting</em>.&nbsp; With the once-proud stone walls of Jericho now little more than a giant ring of useless rubble, Joshua charged into the town and massacred every man, woman, child, and farm animal in the city &ndash; with the exception of one prostitute who had helped some Israelite spies when they reconned the city (this was back when God was still cool with prostitutes... if the campus preacher was any indication, he\'s less tolerant of them these days).&nbsp; Then the Israelites burned what was left of the city, sacked everything they could find, and forbade anyone to ever build there again.&nbsp; That would teach those bastards to build a city in the Promised Land.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joshua3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span style=\"font-size: small;\">When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city.&nbsp; They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it&mdash;men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.<br /><br /></span><center><span style=\"font-size: small;\">- Joshua 6:20-21</span></center></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Everything that was taken from Jericho was supposed to be given to the Jewish priests as an offering to God, but unfortunately some random jackass soldier bogarted some Babylonian robes for himself, which totally pissed God off for realz and jacked-up Joshua\'s kill-mojo.&nbsp; Thanks to this transgression, when Joshua led his troops against the Amorites from the city of Ai he was defeated for the first (and only) time in his career.&nbsp; Joshua got mega pissed, stormed back to camp, found the guy who had stolen the goods, and had that guy and his family (and their animals) all stoned to death.&nbsp; Once those jackasses were beaten to death with large rocks (no, \"stoned to death\" doesn\'t involve smoking a ton of weapons-grade hashish), Joshua re-formed his troops and marched on Ai once again.&nbsp; When the Amorites came out to give Joshua another beating, Josh led a fake retreat; running back into the hills will the Amorite army chased him.&nbsp; While that was going on, a super-secret group of Israelites emerged from an ambush site near the city walls and snuck into the unguarded metropolis, where they started setting everything on fire and massacring the populace.&nbsp; The Amorite warriors turned around to see they\'d just been sucker-punched with a fist full of fiery destruction, and as soon as they were distracted by the annihilation of their homes Joshua about-faced his retreating forces around and started shanking some Amorite fools in the kidneys.&nbsp; At the end of the day, the entire population of Ai was wiped out and their king was impaled on a pole outside the smoldering rubble of his former castle.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">I suppose I should probably take a second here and mention that Joshua\'s story is what some wise religious scholars like to refer to as \"Deuteronomistic\" history, which is really just a super-fancy six-syllable way of saying, \"It\'s so utterly over-the-top mecha-violent that it\'s probably just an allegory rather than a legit retelling of historical events.\"&nbsp; So, according to some folks, the whole \"some heathen jerks pissed off God so Joshua went Keyser Soze on them, turned their livestock into ground chuck, and set their houses on fire,\" business is just an insanely bloody <em>Aesop\'s Fables</em> way of saying, \"Hey dudes, if you follow the Torah, God will provide for you, but if you don\'t, he\'ll be somewhat unhappy and/or disappointed by your actions.\"&nbsp; Since there\'s not a ton of primary source material or archaeological research to corroborate the Bible\'s version of events one way or the other, we can\'t really be sure what the truth is.&nbsp; Since this site is Badass of the Week and not Allegorical Religious Study Time Fun Land of the Week, I\'ve of course chosen to elaborate more on the massacring/killing/dismemberment/ImpalingPeopleOnSpikes aspects of the story.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joshua4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">At this point, the civilizations living in Canaan were starting to get a little paranoid, and probably with good reason &ndash; Joshua was an unstoppable steamroller of man-slaughtering Biblical vengeance, and it was pretty obvious that the Jewish Genghis Khan wasn\'t going to stop wiping cities off the face of the map with his (circumcised) boner until he\'d carved out a sizeable empire for himself.&nbsp; The only fools in Canaan wise enough to figure this out for themselves were the Gibeonites &ndash; these guys used deception to trick Joshua into signing a peace treaty with them, and since the Hebrew leader was an honorable man, he knew he couldn\'t go back on his word and decapitate these people into submission after he\'d signed a peace treaty with them.&nbsp; So he just enslaved them and conquered their city and called it a day, and the Gibeonites figured that even though carrying water jugs around all day sucks balls it\'s still better than having a dude ram a spear so far up your ass that your head pops off.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">After this, the Five Kings of the Amorites were all like WTF.&nbsp; They joined up in an alliance against the conquering armies of Joshua and put together a mega-huge military force the likes of which this region had never seen, but Josh wasn\'t impressed.&nbsp; He led his army through the desert in the middle of the night, ambushed the enemy at the first sign of light, and then got his Manifest Destiny on by laying waste to them with large instruments of pointy destruction.&nbsp; When he got tired of manually stabbing people to death, Joshua called on God, who popped out of heaven and rained gigantic boulder-sized hail down on the Amorite army, pounding them like the Ice Storm spell in <em>Warcraft 2</em>.&nbsp; This still didn\'t kill everyone, however, and since it was already getting dark and there was still a lot of stabbing left to do, Joshua called on God to stop the sun in the sky and give him a little more time to complete the massacre.&nbsp; God of course did this without hesitation, because he and Josh were homedogs, and also because he didn\'t have anything better to do.&nbsp; With the sun frozen in place \"for at least a day\" (isn\'t that the definition of \"day\"?), Joshua had all the time he needed to wipe out all five armies, capture their kings, have his commanders put their feet on the necks of the Amorite rulers, and then chop the kings\' heads off and hang their decapitated corpses from some nearby trees.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joshua5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But this guy STILL wasn\'t done.&nbsp; After this bloodbath, the King of Hazor formed a coalition comprised of the 22 surviving city-states in the land of Canaan, but at this point the whole \"battle\" thing was little more than a formality for Joshua.&nbsp; The Sword of Yahweh surprised them with an ambush near the Waters of Merom, wiped their armies out, conquered their cities, laid waste to the entire land of Canaan, and then divided the now-desolate land up among the Twelve Tribes of Israel.&nbsp; Once his work was complete, Joshua renewed the Covenant with God, gave a bunch of wild warnings to his people about how if they ever showed mercy to anyone or gave less than 110% then God would strike them down with great vengeance and furious anger.&nbsp; When he was done with all that, he died.&nbsp; He was 110, which is fitting.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Joshua\'s death set the stage for the <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/samson.html\">Judges</a>, who in turn were the predecessors to the Kings of Israel.&nbsp; Nowadays he\'s remembered as one of the greatest military commanders in Jewish history, a holy warrior in Islam, and his name (which comes from the root for Salvation) has some Christians to believing his story is an allegory for Jesus\' future (less-violent) journeys through the Middle East.&nbsp; Dante has him in the Heaven of Mars with other Warriors of the Faith, and in medieval culture he was one of the Nine Worthies (the Medieval equivalent of the Justice League of America), where he stood next to asskickers like <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kingdavid.html\">King David</a>, Julius Caesar, and <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hector.html\">Hector of Troy</a>.&nbsp; The Mormons / U2 also named the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_tree\">Joshua Tree</a> after him, probably because Joshua trees look like they\'re covered in spikes and that\'s the sort of thing Joshua would likely have approved of.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joshua6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span style=\"font-size: small;\">So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors.&nbsp; He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.&nbsp; Joshua subdued them from Kadesh Barnea to Gaza and from the whole region of Goshen to Gibeon&nbsp;. All these kings and their lands Joshua conquered in one campaign, because the LORD, the God of Israel, fought for Israel.<br /><br /></span><center><span style=\"font-size: small;\">- Joshua 10:40-42</span></center></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua+1&amp;version=NIV\">The Book of Joshua</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.thebricktestament.com/joshua/\">The Brick Testament: Joshua</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://biblescripture.net/Joshua.html\">BibleScripture.net</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>','2011-08-12','618192623560','joshua1.jpg','joshua2.jpg','Joshua','Moses\' successor brought the Israelites into the land of Canaan and immediately proceeded to depopulate it of all human life in a series of ultra-hardcore wars against rival kings.',''),('Richard D. Winters','January 21, 1918','January 2, 2011','Ephrata, PA, USA','WWII American Soldier','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">I haven\'t really <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/speirs.html\">been</a> super <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/funk.html\">subtle</a> about the fact that stumbling across the <em>Band of Brothers</em> miniseries on TV arouses an emotion on me that is probably not too dissimilar from the feeling an eight year-old girl might get while riding a pink fluffy unicorn under a double rainbow and eating a Rocky Road ice cream cone with sprinkles made from magical dolphin tears.&nbsp; The epic tale of hardass American paratroopers doing stuff in Europe goes right up there with <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/starshiptroopers.html\">Starship Troopers</a> and <em>Dirty Harry</em> on the list of towering cinematic masterpieces of awesomeness that I could watch on an endless loop every waking moment for the rest of my life and still die a happy man and totally not bored at all, and it\'s one of those things that I compulsively watch any time I see it on television.&nbsp; (The book is incredibly powerful as well, of course, but since they don\'t run back-to-back book marathons on the History channel at three in the morning I don\'t usually delve into it as often as I do the miniseries.)</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">However, despite my intense love of all things Easy (heh heh), I\'ve yet to do a write-up on the hero of the story, Major Richard \"Dick\" Winters &ndash; a man so unequivocally, ass-crushingly hard-as-fuck that mentioning him on a website about badasses seemed more like an inevitable formality than some wild, startling revelation uncovering the unsung heroes of American military history.&nbsp; However, with the good Major\'s passing two weeks ago &ndash; and the subsequent electronic landslide of mail that coated my inbox shortly thereafter &ndash; I realize that I cannot in good conscience leave this man off the list any longer.&nbsp; Major Dick Winters was an incredible war hero, and while I might not be able to do his story the same kind of justice that Stephen Ambrose did, I can at least make damn sure that he\'s included on a list of badass military skull-crushers.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/winters1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Dick Winters was born on January 21, 1918, in a small town outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In 1941, after it became pretty obvious to everybody on this side of the pond that we were going to need to take a little boat ride across the Atlantic and regulate on some Germans Nate Dogg style, Winters enlisted in the Army in 1941. As a man who never half-assed anything in his life, Winters asked to be put into the Airborne service &ndash; the most elite and hardcore troops the Army had &ndash; and after passing through jump school went immediately to Officer Candidate School, busted his ass, and took over as a Second Lieutenant in E Company of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. He immediately proved himself as a natural leader to the men &ndash; he had the perfect blend of skills that meant he could be totally awesome without also putting up with any of their bullshit. Before this guy had even shipped out to the battlefield, Winters was promoted to First Lieutenant, and he was so beloved by the troops that when his dickhead commanding officer started shit with him the sergeants in the unit told the battalion commander that they would rather hand in their stripes than see Winters get dicked around by some incompetent douchebag company commander who was barely qualified to identify the difference between enfilade fire and a Jeep Wrangler full of drunk Utahraptors with sunglasses on their heads and Hawaiian leis around their necks. The battalion commander was happy to take the Sergeants\' stripes away from them, surs, but he also booted Winters\' CO out of the company as well. It was kind of a minor victory for everybody, except of course the deposed commander, but don\'t feel too badly for the guy &ndash; he was such a douchebag that they had to get David Schwimmer to play him in the movie of his life, and that should probably tell you all you need to know.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Easy Company\'s first combat operation was a pretty serious little skirmish called Operation Overlord, where a little over a million men from a dozen different countries stormed the beaches of Normandy and ran full-speed in the direction of an army of heavily-entrenched German machine gun nests manned my men with nothing better to do than rake the entire ocean with one continuous stream of heavy weapons fire. The night before the invasion, Winters\' unit was flown over the beach head under the cover of darkness, where they got to jump out of the side of a cargo plane while enemy artillery launched as much shrapnel as possible into the sky. The operation didn\'t start out great for Lieutenant Winters. After getting pelted with flak for 10 miles and slowly floating down through a hail of pointy metal on a parachute, Winters landed in hostile territory to discover that he\'d lost his gun during the drop and could only track down 13 men from his unit. Oh, and the company commander\'s plane had crashed, killing everyone on board, so Winters was now the new commander of the unit. Good luck with that, buddy.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/winters2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"Captain Clarence Hester turns to me and says:&nbsp; \'There\'s fire along that hedgerow there. Take care of it.\'&nbsp; That was it&nbsp;. There was no elaborate plan or briefing.&nbsp; I didn\'t even know what was on the other side of the hedgerow.&nbsp; All I had were my instructions, and I had to quickly develop a plan from there.&nbsp; And as it turns out, I did.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">No problem. Winters relied on his training and his instincts, and somehow managed to keep his cool, survive through the night, organize his men into a cohesive fighting force, battle a few patrols of Germans, and regroup with the main force of paratroopers. But there was no rest for the weary &ndash; upon reaching paratrooper command was immediately ordered to assault a group of artillery beyond a nearby hedgerow &ndash; four 150mm heavy guns that were causing quite a bit of trouble with all of their annoying \"hey let\'s lob a ton of exploding shells half a foot in length onto the guys who are storming the beaches\" business, and someone arbitrarily decided that Winters was just the guy to put those bastards out of everyone\'s misery. Despite still having only 13 men to attack 50 Germans in entrenched positions, Winters didn\'t even flinch. He had one squad lay down covering fire with machine guns while he and a second squad ran from trench to trench capping fuckers apart and punching people in the face with brass knuckles. Despite getting shot in the leg while leading the charge, Winters barely even slowed down in his mad rampage of German-dismantling carnage, pretty much tearing the guns apart with his bare hands and then using the bend-to-shit howtizer barrels to club Nazis until their heads popped off, rolled down a hill, and knocked down a series of bowling pins Winters had strategically placed at the bottom of the hill. Winters not only successfully took the guns with just 13 men (losing only one man in the process) and ended the artillery bombardment on Utah Beach, but his first coordinated military action against the enemy was so fucking mind-blowing that to this day the cadets at West Point study it as the perfect example of how to assault fixed point defenses. Oh, and he also captured a detailed map of the German defenses surrounding the beach, which was kind of a useful thing for the American commanders to have. Not a lot of officers out there are awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and a place in American military lore for actions performed during their first combat maneuver, but then again Dick Winters wasn\'t like a lot of officers out there.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">After helping capture the Nazi-infested town of Carentan during the Normandy Campaign, Winters returned to England and was re-deployed during Operation Market Garden in September 1944. Parachuting deep behind enemy lines, surrounded on all sides, and spread out over a ridiculous area still wasn\'t enough to make Winters feel anything remotely resembling fear or hesitation, and it was while he was re-decorating the windmills of Holland with the insides of Fascist infantrymen Dick Winters accomplished yet another towering act of military awesomeness. One day, while he was out doing some recon and assaulting a bunch of entrenched German machine gun nests, Winters accidentally came across a huge unit of battle-hardened SS infantry hiding behind a dike waiting to ambush the Allied flank. Despite only having 35 men with him and staring down over 300 of Germany\'s most elite soldiers, Winters once again set aside the numbers game and went completely balls-out &ndash; he got pumped up out of his fucking mind, charged on foot across a huge open field (at the head of his formation), got around beside the Germans, and opened fire on them from the flank, pinning them up against the dike and giving them no chance to escape. When he got bored of watching his men gun down the SS, Winters radioed in some artillery and blasted everything out of existence. He lost one man dead, 22 wounded (a 66% casualty rate for his platoon). He destroyed two full companies of German infantry &ndash; over 300 guys.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/winters3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"As I leap off and begin the charge I am pretty pumped up... I ran faster across the field separating us from the Germans than I have ever run in my life... When I got up to the road where the Germans were, there was a German in front of me, so I shot him.&nbsp; I then turn to my right, and there I see a whole company of Germans.&nbsp; I began firing into them... We had caught two companies of SS soldiers pinned to the dike, and as they retreated we poured fire into them, and then I called in artillery fire.&nbsp; We destroyed those two companies.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Winters went on to serve as the battalion\'s executive officer during the Battle of the Bulge in December, where he dug in to the town of Bastogne (a crucial key point blocking the Germans from breaking through Allied lines) and helped inspire the badass men of the 101stAirborne to basically single-handedly withstand a coordinated attack from 15 German SS divisions during over a week of non-stop fighting in the freezing cold winter. After that, he led his men to capture Hitler\'s summer home &ndash; the Eagle\'s Nest, and it was kind of fitting that after he helped stick a fork in Hitler he went to Hitler\'s house and stole some of his silver forks. The war ended a few days later. During nearly a year of almost incessant combat, Easy Company sustained 150% casualties, but Dick Winters had managed to lead them from beginning to end.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">After the war, Winters went back to PA, married his girlfriend, trained Army Rangers at Fort Dix during the Korean Conflict, and continued being awesome. When he wasn\'t running his own company or having his life story turned into an Emmy Award-winning miniseries, he gave guest lecturers at West Point during their bi-annually offered \"How to Be Fucking Hardcore 101\" class. He died on 2 January 2011 at the age of 93.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/winters4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"How do you get the respect of the men?&nbsp; By living with them, being a part of it, being able to understand what they are going through and not to separate yourself from them.&nbsp; You have to know your men.&nbsp; You have to gain their confidence.&nbsp; And the way to gain the confidence of anybody, whether it\'s in war or civilian life or whatever, you must be honest.&nbsp; Be honest, be fair and be consistent.&nbsp; You can\'t be honest and fair one day, and the next give your people the short end of the stick.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/12/local/la-me-dick-winters-20110112\">LA Times</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/us/11winters.html\">New York Times</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/8253502/Major-Dick-Winters.html%3EThe%20Telegraph%3C/a%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Ca%20href=\">HistoryNet Interview with Major Winters</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.majordickwinters.com/\">Major Dick Winters CMOH Website</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Winters\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Ambrose, Stephen.&nbsp; <em>Band of Brothers</em>.&nbsp; Simon &amp; Schuster, 2002.<br /><br /> Winters, Richard D., and Cole C. Kingseed.&amp;nbps; <em>Beyond Band of Brothers</em>.&nbsp; Penguin, 2008. </span></p>','2011-01-14','444283426711','winters2.jpg','winters0.jpeg','Dick Winters','Hero of Band of Brothers.','\"When he said \'Let\'s go,\' he was right in the front.  He was never in the back.  A leader personified.\"\r\n\r\n- Sgt. William \"Wild Bill\" Guarnere'),('Abram A. Heller','1985','N/A','Unknown','21st-century American Sailor','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">At 2:30am on the morning of March 23, 2008, a desperate distress signal rippled through the darkness, frantically triggered from a position 125 miles off the coast of Dutch Harbor, Alaska.&nbsp; A massive, 192-foot fishing trawler, the <em>F/V Alaskan Ranger</em> had suffered catastrophic rudder failure, and suddenly the ship went from the business of harvesting delicious Alaskan King Crabs to the business of royally getting the crap kicked out of it by one of the most inhospitable aquatic shitstorms on the planet Earth.&nbsp; Stranded out in the middle of the Bering Sea, without any propulsion, and taking on huge amounts of water while simultaneously being gangbanged by twenty-foot waves, fifteen mile an hour winds, and whipping rain so intense it made the already-miserable visibility even shittier.&nbsp; As the deck was rocked like that scene at the beginning of <em>Last Crusade</em>, and water pouring in through the bilge tank engine rudder room (I don\'t know anything about boats), it was rapidly becoming blatantly obvious that the <em>Alaskan Ranger</em> wasn\'t going to be sailing home under her own power any time soon, and that the 47 crewmen on board were going to have to figure out alternate transportation back to shore if they ever wanted to live long enough to catch crabs again.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now, the United States Coast Guard catches a lot of shit from people who crack a ton of HILARIOUS jokes about their viability as a branch of the American armed forces and their propensity to refer to navy beans as \"Coast Guard Beans\" (they seriously do this), but I\'ll tell you one thing &ndash; when you\'re doggy-paddling through sub-freezing Arctic waters clinging to a broken-off piece of flotsam without a coastline or a lifeboat anywhere in sight, you learn to appreciate the men and women of the Guard pretty fucking quickly.&nbsp; And when the searchlights of a pair of USCG rescue choppers began to appear through the darkness, scanning the rain-swept wreckage of <em>Alaskan Ranger</em>, you can bet your <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaseolus_vulgaris#White_beans\">phaseolus vulgaris</a> that the helpless fishermen bobbing around in the water gained a whole new respect for the dudes rolling in to bail their asses out out.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/heller1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">A boat getting rocked by 15-foot seas in the Bering Sea.<br />I need a Dramamine just to look at this nonsense.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">As 23 year-old Aviation Survival Technician (second class) Abram A. Heller arrived on site, the young Petty Officer looked out from the deck of his HH-60 helicopter to see nothing but total goddamned anarchy below him.&nbsp; The <em>Alaskan Ranger</em> had gone bow-up in the water, <em>Titanic</em>-style, and although it was slowly disappearing below the waves, you could still see wreckage and debris strewn about the entire crash site in every direction.&nbsp; As searchlights probed the black waters, Heller could see dozens of sailors flailing around in the sea &ndash; 25 of the 47 men on board <em>Alaskan Ranger</em> were unable to get to life rafts in time, and had been forced to jump from the deck into freezing-cold water &ndash; and those men lucky enough to survive the system shock associated with plunging into what is essentially a gigantic bucket of ice were now desperately clinging to whatever crap just so happened to be floating around near them.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Petty Officer Abe Heller knew what he had to do.&nbsp; This guy was a balls-out Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer, sworn to save lives at all costs, and his borderline-insane job was to voluntarily leap out of a hovering helicopter armed only with a snorkel and a life vest, fall twenty feet through the air, splash down into pitch-dark, ice-cold water loaded with dangerous debris and sharp objects, and manually extract as many men as he could out of the water before they (or he) died of hypothermia and exhaustion.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Oh yeah, and it was only this guy\'s second non-training rescue jump.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/heller2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Out you go.&nbsp; Have fun, buddy.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">That\'s not to say Heller was just some asshole jumping out of a helicopter for funsies or something. The Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer program is not a fucking joke &ndash; of the 100 or so guys who take the 18-week training course each year, roughly 80% of candidates wash out, and the 20 guys who pass it usually only do so after they\'ve somehow survived a couple occasions where they nearly drowned during a training exercise.&nbsp; This is a program designed to train you to become part merman, part airborne infantry, part combat medic, and part Sean Connery from <em>Thunderball</em>.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But there\'s also undoubtedly a big fucking difference between training for a rescue jump and navigating the ultra-dangerous wreckage of an Alaska fishing trawler while a couple dozen peoples\' lives hang in the balance.&nbsp; Yet here Abe Heller was, freestyling his way through the goddamned Arctic Circle, braving 15-mile an hour winds with a wind chill of -24 degrees Fahrenheit (-33 Celsius / 240.38 Kelvin for you Europeans/scientists out there), fifteen-foot waves, dangerous fishing hooks and shit floating around just below the pitch-black surface of the water, and whipping precipitation that alternated between freezing rain and snow flurries.&nbsp; Do you have any idea how much it sucks to be getting fucking snowed on while you\'re swimming in the ocean, and then hammered with a friggin\' wave the size of Optimus Prime?&nbsp; I have no frame of reference here, but I can only imagine it bites a giant ass.&nbsp; It\'s like being waterboarded by God.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Abe Heller\'s job was to get as many people out of this miserable vortex of nautical ass-sucking as possible, and he wasn\'t going to let something like \"not being able to feel anything below his waist\", \"getting bitch-slapped by <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/poseidon.html\">Poseidon</a>\" or \"constant threat of hypothermia\" stop this guy on his mission.&nbsp; Within minutes of hitting the water, Heller had already made his way to a stranded swimmer (who, by the way, hilariously responded to Heller\'s question, \"how are you doing?\" with the phrase, \"I\'m fucking freezing!\") and dragged the dude over to the helicopter winch for extraction.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/heller7.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now, the crazy shit about rescuing dudes on the winch is that first you strap them into the mechanism, and then you hold on for dear sweet life as the two of you are lifted up out of the water together by a crane attached to a helicopter.&nbsp; Then, once the dude is safely en route to GET TO DA CHOPPA, the rescue swimmer <em>lets go of the shit</em> and drops back down to the water to look for more people.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">This insanity alone sounds like it should qualify as some kind of extreme sports or something, but for Abe Heller, it was standard operating procedure &ndash; he went through this not only after he rescued the first guy, but then he did it again after he went back, braved 15 foot waves and navigated the near-pitch darkness two more times, and pulled another pair of guys out of the water to safety.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But saving the first three lives was the easy part.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/heller4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">19th century painting of an equally-miserable Arctic storm.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">When Heller got a little closer to the disintegrating remains of <em>Alaskan Ranger</em>\'s hull, he encountered two more hapless sailors in desperate need of his immediate awesomeness &ndash; both these poor suckers had gotten themselves entangled in the fishing nets when they abandoned ship, and now were slowly being sucked down with the ship &ndash; all while being punched in the face with a few thousand gallons of salt water.&nbsp; Heller knew if didn\'t get over there and do something fast these guys were going to be spending the latter part of their morning eating breakfast with the <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kraken.html\">Kraken</a>.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">So Heller hauled ass over there, careful to avoid dangerous flotsam along the way, and managed to cut the first guy out of the ropes and haul him back to safety.&nbsp; Then he quickly sprinted back (this is the fifth time he\'s done this, for those keeping score at home), and grabbed hold of the next guy &ndash; this dude was only partially entangled, but he had an ice-cold death grip on the rigging and Heller had to freaking pry the guy\'s frozen fingers open until he let go of the ropes and allowed Heller to haul this guy all the way back to the chopper.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But this time, there was a problem.&nbsp; The HH-60 helicopter only has room for five passengers, and Heller had just saved five men from horrible, ice-cold drowning deaths.&nbsp; So, not wanting to take a seat from a half-dead, mostly-hypothermic dude, Abe Heller made the sort of decision that undoubtedly qualifies him as an unquestionable badass &ndash; he told the pilot to go back without him.&nbsp; He\'ll just chill at the crash site for a while</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">That\'s right &ndash; the guy who had just spent the last hour or so swimming full-speed through ungodly choppy, sub-freezing waters (usually while dragging another human being behind him) decided he\'d stay behind for an hour and brave the -27 wind chill and 15-foot waves in a fucking inflatable rubber life raft while his buddies dropped off the recently-rescued survivors.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/heller5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">So long guys.&nbsp; Hurry back.</span></p>\r\n<p><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Abe Heller didn\'t just sit out there for a full hour, soaking wet, in miserable weather conditions that had just sunk a full-sized Alaskan fishing trawler.&nbsp; He found a way to stay busy.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">When the USCG helicopter returned to pull Heller from the wreckage, they found him sitting in the life raft with three more men he\'d just pulled from the debris &ndash; including a 300-pound unconscious Samoan guy it took Heller ten minutes to hoist into the raft.&nbsp; While he was waiting for the rescue helo to return, Heller had been also kept himself occupied by providing first aid to the wounded (all rescue jumpers are trained EMTs) and doing everything in his power to keep the hypothermic survivors alive and conscious.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">All told, 42 of the 47 men on board <em>Alaskan Ranger</em> were rescued by the Coast Guard in a daring operation that took roughly two hours.&nbsp; Rescue Jumper Abe Heller, in only his second \"live-fire\" mission, put his own life on the line and personally saved the lives of eight men by himself.&nbsp; For his heroism, he was awarded the 2009 International Bravery at Sea Award, and got a certificate for \"Exceptional Service Rendered to Mankind,\" which, admittedly, is a pretty badass certificate to have hanging in a frame on your wall.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/heller6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Kind of like this, but with less Kevin Costner.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.uscg.mil/ANNOUNCEMENTS/alcoast/506-09_alcoast.txt\">USCG Award Citation</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.imo.org/Newsroom/mainframe.asp?topic_id=1773&amp;doc_id=12107\">IMO Award for Bravery at Sea</a> <a href=\"http://coastguard.dodlive.mil/2011/01/alaska-ranger-lessons-from-coast-guards-most-challenging-rescue/\">Alaska Ranger</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FV_Alaska_Ranger\">FV Alaska Ranger</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Thompson, Kalee.&nbsp; <em>Deadliest Sea</em>.&nbsp; HarperCollins, 2010. </span></p>','2011-08-05','437710623716','heller2.jpg','heller3.jpg','Abram A. Heller','USCG rescue swimmer who went head-first into a brutal storm on the Bering Sea and saved 8 men from a deadly shipwreck.',''),('Gjergjj Kastrioti Skenderbeu','May 6, 1405','January 17, 1468','Sine, Albania','Medieval Albanian General','<p><span>That old dude carving people in half with a gigantic sword is Skanderbeg.&nbsp; Skanderbeg is the national hero of Albania. He\'s a hardcore, skull-crushing Albanian hardass who fought for 20 years on the side of the Ottoman Empire, then got bored of that, flipped his shit, and spent the next 25 years leading an Albanian revolution that kicked the Turks in the balls every time they tried to fuck with him.&nbsp; Now, surviving for 40 years of constant warfare in the 15th century is a big enough deal by itself, but this guy went above and beyond &ndash; his biographer credits him with personally killing 3,000 men on the battlefield during his career.&nbsp; That number might be a load of crap (then again, it might not) but the truth is that this dude is such an all-important hero to his people that his medieval battle standard is the present-day <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Albania.svg\">Albanian Flag</a>, and all elementary school kids in Albania are required to memorize a song talking about how badass he was. It\'s like their pledge of allegiance.&nbsp; Or the lyrics to \"Ice Ice Baby\".</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But this guy didn\'t start his life shirtless with six-pack abs and a two-handed falchion.&nbsp; No, the origin story for the Dragon of Albania is much weirder.&nbsp; Gjergjj Kastrioti was born in 1405, the son of the Prince of a small Albanian district headquartered in the fortress city of Kruje.&nbsp; Gjergjj, whose name is mercifully Anglicized to George (because how in the holy living hell are you supposed to pronounce a man\'s name when the last three letters are <em>g, j</em> and <em>j</em>?), grew up in the shadow of the mighty Ottoman Turkish Empire &ndash; an ever-expanding Muslim world power that was brutally crushing all before it in a tremendous, unstoppable scimitar-laden stampede of blood, fire, and <a href=\"http://www.turkishcookbook.com/2005/03/turkish-pastry-recipes.php\">delicious pastries</a>.&nbsp; By the time Georgejgjj (pronounced \"GEORGE-guh-jay-jay\") was eighteen, the armies of the mighty Sultan had crossed the Bosporus, conquered every Byzantine city except for Constantinople, and was already flooding the Christian cities of Eastern Europe with hundreds of thousands of horsemen, infantry, and artillery &ndash; all hardened by years of battle and equipped with some of the most advanced and badass weaponry in the world.&nbsp; Stuff like gunpowder cannons and rifles &ndash; which nobody else in the world really had at the time, and which just so happened to be pretty fucking useful in medieval combat.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">So when the Turks came knocking on the gates of Kruje with a sheet of notebook paper that said, \"Tribute or Death? Pls circle 1\", it probably shouldn\'t be too surprising that George\'s dad ran up the white flag, handed over his four kids as hostages, and agreed to pay an annual fee to his new Ottoman overlords. What this means for our homey George is that he and his three bros were forcibly circumcised (which probably isn\'t much fun when you\'re 18 years old), converted to Islam, and shipped out to war college to train as Ottoman Janissary warriors.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/skanderbeg1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Janissaries.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now, the Janissaries were pretty fucking awesome.&nbsp; I\'m not going to get into it in too much detail here (it\'s probably a story for another time), but basically the premise was that the Ottoman Sultan would take the children of Eastern European families, force them to convert to Islam, indoctrinate them in military tactics and religious fanaticism, and then send them back out to attack their former countrymen.&nbsp; Here\'s a fun fact: &nbsp; Many of the troops who comprised the first wave of soldiers assaulting the walls during the fall of Constantinople were ethnic Greeks, some of whom had been born to Greek nobility that at the time of the battle were still living in Constantinople.&nbsp; This is amazingly diabolical and awesome &ndash; through the use of these soldiers you simultaneously build an army of fiercely loyal professional warriors, break the morale of your enemy, and win battles without sacrificing your own countrymen. Goddamn genius.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">George was really only supposed to remain in the Sultan\'s Janissary Corps for a period of three winters, but when his dad bit the dust the Sultan cancelled his contract, and the legitimate heir to the Princedom of Kruje remained a slave-soldier of the Ottoman Empire for a little more like twenty years.&nbsp; Oh, and his three brothers were all poisoned to death for reasons (and by persons) nobody has really ever been able to figure out.&nbsp; Regardless of this giant shit buffet life had served George Kastrioti, however, this guy persevered and lived to kick ass whenever it was presented to him, and to do so with whatever objects were made available to him at the time.&nbsp; He quickly proved himself as one of the toughest men in the entire Corps, shredding his enemies across Asia and Europe, and when this shit-kicker wasn\'t eating shards of broken glass or jamming cinders in his eyes, George commanded a cavalry regiment, governed over nine provinces, and once personally beat the snot out of a Mongol and two Persians in the Throne Room of the Ottoman Court after they were being disrespectful to the Sultan.&nbsp; On account of his ultimate bad-motherfucker-dom, the Sultan bestowed George with an appropriately badass title &ndash; Arnavuthu Iskender Bey, meaning \"Lord Alexander the Albanian\".&nbsp; Sure, Alexander wasn\'t this guy\'s given name or anything (as you\'ll remember, his Albanian name had significantly more consonants), but it was a pretty bitchin\' reference to Alexander the Great, so George was pretty much down with it &ndash; although he preferred to go by Scenderbeu, because that was a little more Albanian-sounding (Western historians changed that to Skanderbeg, and since that\'s the one version of his name that doesn\'t make Spell Check freak out and die, that\'s the one I\'m rolling with for the rest of the article.)</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/skanderbeg2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Skanderbeg sawing through a guy\'s head while the Sultan looks on like the Emperor from <em>Return of the Jedi</em>.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Despite being a high-ranking Turkish official with all the wealth, women, and power he could shake a scimitar at (wow, that sounds a lot dirtier than I intended it to), the whole \"Building an empire on the backs of my former countrymen\" thing really started to get to Skanderbeg after a while.&nbsp; (Note:&nbsp; While his admittedly-biased biographer claims that Skanderbeg only killed Muslims in combat and never attacked Christians on the battlefield, it seems a little hard to believe that you become a Janissary Commander without skewering an infidel or two.)&nbsp; So, somewhat abruptly, at the age of 38, Skanderbeg made a decision that would impact his life forever &ndash; he took a company of 300 Albanian Janissaries and deserted the Turkish army in the middle of their battle against the badass Hungarian Crusader John Hunyadi.&nbsp; Skanderbeg marched his AWOL army through Albania, straight to the gates of Kruje (his ancestral castle, which was now under Ottoman rule), presented a forged document to the governor claiming that Skanderbeg had been appointed Turkish Governor of the region.&nbsp; As soon as the legitimate Turkish governor of Kruje hit the road, Skanderbeg tore down the Ottoman flag and flew his own battle-standard from the parapets.&nbsp; So yeah, there\'s more than one badass way to occupy a city, motherfuckers, and they don\'t all involve catapults.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Skanderbeg immediately proceeded to rally the Albanian lords and declare open rebellion against the Turkish Sultan.&nbsp; He re-converted back to Christianity again, declared himself the Avenger of the Albanian People, and went to work kicking the crap out of everyone around him.&nbsp; Reacting quickly before the Ottoman forces could mobilize, Skanderbeg\'s rebels captured a number of cities and towns throughout Albania &ndash; and in each fortress he took he gave the Turkish defenders two options &ndash; Baptism or Martyrdom.&nbsp; Neither was particularly appealing to them.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/skanderbeg3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Murad II quickly figured out what was going on, got ripshit pissed, and came after Skanderbeg with 100,000 of his former friends, who at this point were eager to repay the Albanian for his loyalty.&nbsp; Skanderbeg, who never commanded an army larger than 15,000 at any point during his 25 year slugfest with Turkey, ordered a scorched-earth retreat &ndash; burning everything around his capital in an effort to deny the Turks food. When Murad reached the walls of Kruje and layed siege to Skanderbeg\'s castle, the Albanian hero personally commanded 1,500 men in the defense of the citadel while ordering the rest of his men to fan out and hammer the Turkish supply caravans with hit-and-run guerilla attacks.&nbsp; With Murad deprived of ammunition, reinforcements, and food, and his force suffering from widespread disease and being turned back every time they assaulted the walls, he was forced to call off the attack.&nbsp; Sultan Murad returned a little later with another force, but Skanderbeg was ready for that too &ndash; he hid his men in some trees, drew the Turkish army into a trap, and then launched an ambush that annihilated the invading army and captured their supply train.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">For the next 23 years, Skanderbeg would personally lead his troops into battle on dozens of occasions.&nbsp; As one of the last Eastern European bastions of Jesus-ness, he was constantly surrounded, fighting the enemy from every direction, and outnumbered by 10-to-1 odds, but he seriously didn\'t give a shit that Albania was basically just a little circle completely surrounded by the Turkish Empire.&nbsp; The Roman Catholic Popes were obviously pretty ridiculously super-psyched about Skanderbeg\'s insane powers of being both alive and Christian, and they sent him a bunch of pump-up words of encouragement.&nbsp; For instance, Pope Nicholas V called him the \"Champion of Christendom\" (though this is sometimes awesomely translated into \"The Athlete of Christendom\").&nbsp; Pope Pious II called him the \"Christian Gideon\", and Pope Calixtus III appointed him Captain-General of the Holy See in his ongoing Crusade against the invading infidels. I suppose that, above all, it\'s a testament to his longevity that he survived long enough to have three Popes give him sweet nicknames while basically being involved in a never-ending war with a significantly more-powerful adversary.&nbsp; To his peeps, Skanderbeg was simply the Dragon of Albania, which is kind of an interesting choice for a nickname considering that his battle-standard was a badass two-headed Eagle and didn\'t really involve dragons at all.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/skanderbeg4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">An appropriately-epic sculpture of the man.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">When the Sultan Murad died, his son, Mehmet the Conqueror, gave the Albanians a slight reprieve &ndash; mostly because Mehmet wanted to go off and conquer Constantinople, and he didn\'t need Skanderbeg stabbing him in the ass the second he turned his back.&nbsp; Skanderbeg used this time to rebuild his fortresses, assemble his Crusaders, and get ready to once again assume the role of being the last bulwark between Ottoman Imperial expansion and European Christendom.&nbsp; Once Mehmet turned his attention back to those wacky Albanians, Skanderbeg was ready to cram some Catholicism into their chest cavities with a two-handed sword.&nbsp; Mehmet launched two more full-scale invasions of Albania, twice besieging Skanderbeg\'s castle, but both times the cagey warrior used guerilla attacks, mountain warfare, and hack-and-slashing to fight them back &ndash; and he did it all while wheeling and dealing with rival factions in Hungary, Serbia, and Venice, and putting down a rebellion instigated by his own nephew.&nbsp; He also somehow found time in his busy schedule of fighting for his life to lead 800 horse on an amphibious assault across the Adriatic Sea and break apart the Siege of Naples &ndash; a deed of heroism that would get him appointed to a Dukedom in the Neapolitan Kingdom (a position his son would inherit &ndash; even though Albania would fall, Skanderbeg\'s line would survive to be Dukes of Naples for the next few centuries).</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Since no conventional weapons seemed to be able to kill him, Skanderbeg eventually died in 1468 of malaria while organizing the defense of Albania against yet another obnoxious horde of Turkish invaders.&nbsp; At the time of his death, his biographer credited him with personally killing over 3,000 men on the battlefield.&nbsp; While that might be something of an exaggeration, it is true that when Albania finally fell to the Turks (an event that happened a good 10 years after Skanderbeg\'s death), the Turks dug his body up, dismembered him, and made bracelets out of his bones.&nbsp; I\'ve heard two reasons for this &ndash; they either really hated his ass and wanted to destroy his corpse beyond all recognition, or they thought his bravery would rub off on them if they wore part of his skeleton around on his wrist.&nbsp; Either interpretation is pretty badass.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/skanderbeg5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<center><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"At last Europe and Asia are mine!&nbsp; Woe to Christendom!&nbsp; It has lost its sword and its shield.\" <br /><br />- Mehmed the Conqueror, on hearing news of Skanderbeg\'s death</span></center>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://albaniainbrief.com/Famous%20Albanians/Skenderbeu.htm\">Famous Albanians</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/people_skanderbeg.html\">History of War</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skanderbeg\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Babinger, Franz.&nbsp; <em>Mehmet the Conqueror and His Time</em>.&nbsp; Princeton Univ. Press, 1992.<br /><br /> Butterworth, John.&nbsp; <em>God\'s Secret Listener</em>.&nbsp; Monarch, 2011.<br /><br /> Gibbon, Edward.&nbsp; <em>The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</em>.&nbsp; Penguin, 1996.<br /><br /> Schwander-Sievers, Stephanie.&nbsp; <em>Albanian Identities</em>.&nbsp; Indiana Univ. Press, 2002. </span></p>','2011-07-29','207768323945','skanderbeg1.jpg','skanderbeg2.jpg','Skanderbeg','Albania\'s national hero is personally credited with killing over 3,000 men in combat.','\"It wasn\'t me who brought you freedom. I found it here among you.\"'),('Don Alejo Garza Tamez','1933','November 12, 2010','Mexico','21st-century Mexican Vigilante','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The crime situation in rural Mexico these days is sort of fucked up. Sure, this may be something of an overly-harsh characterization of what\'s actually going on out there, but with all the killing, maiming and general anarchy being perpetuated by a seemingly-endless horde of frothing-at-the-mouth, completely non-scrupulous drug cartels, assassins, and other <em>Walker, Texas Ranger</em>-grade villainy, I really don\'t think it would be out of line to characterize the conditions south of the border as being \"problematic\" or perhaps even \"whack\" &ndash; much in the same way a person might define the warlord-infested mountains of southeast Afghanistan as \"marginally unruly\" or \"slightly dangerous\". It seems like every day there are new reports of bandits and drug cartels massacring innocent people, and fear and bullying have become a way of life for some particularly-oppressed regions, and the police and military are having a tough time containing these modern-day warlords simply because they\'re completely outnumbered, outmatched, and outgunned, and have a nasty habit of murdering any government officials they can\'t buy off with dirty drug money. I don\'t have a criminal justice degree or anything, but it\'s a pretty bad sign for your country\'s stability when the fucking cops are outmatched by the superior firepower of a bunch of guys who are basically a cross between fedora-deficient 1920s Chicago bootleggers with face-tattoos and the bad guys in <em>Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome</em>.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The worst tragedy of this gigantic shit-vortex of a situation is that there\'s not a whole hell of a lot the average Mexican citizen can do to improve their situation in life. Any non-corrupt police or politicians they elect to office immediately become either corrupted or dead, and it\'s usually not a great idea for your every-day average Joe (average Jose?) to go out there and start fucking with an irritable roided-up horde of conscience-less gangsters who have access to high-powered assault weapons and who have no compunction about beheading nuns using shanks they fashioned from the bones of murdered orphan kittens. Of course, if everyone in the world backed down and suck on oppression every time they faced off against overwhelming odds and ultimate evil, there wouldn\'t be a whole lot of content for me to post on this website &ndash; mostly because there wouldn\'t be guys like Don Alejo Garza Tamez. Guys who looked the arch-enemies of humanity in the face and instinctively ripped off a no-look rabbit punch uppercut to the sack.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/donalejo1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Captured Mexican cartel soldiers standing in front of a<br />cache of weaponry the police recovered from a cartel safehouse.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It\'s fitting that the only real picture of Don Alejo Garza Tamez is a grainy sepia-toned photo that may as well have been an FBI pic of Carlos the Jackal, because this guy is mysterious, deadly with a rifle, and incredibly hardcore. A man who had worked his entire life, starting with a manual labor job in his father\'s sawmill as a child, to become the owner of a successful farm and ranch in Victoria, Mexico, the 77 year-old Don Alejo was an old-school badass from back in the days where any time anybody wanted to go somewhere they had to walk uphill both ways in the snow while Cyclopes lobbed boulders at them.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Don Alejo had owned his quiet ranch for a few decades (give or take), having bought it with money he earned himself through hard work, dedication, ambition, and a strict policy not killing every single person who disagreed with him and building it into a viable business, so you can probably imagine what was going through this dude\'s head on the morning of Friday, November 12th, when a truckload of cartel gangsters rolled up to his front door and told him he had twenty-four hours to get the fuck out of town and hand his property over to them. I\'ll spell it out for you &ndash; he wasn\'t happy. When he expressed his unwillingness to fork over his life\'s work just because some <em>ese</em> was waving a Beretta in his face in a semi-threatening manner, the gangsters told him they were coming back that night, and that if he was still hanging around, he was a dead man.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">He told them he\'d be waiting for them.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/donalejo2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">These are sort of guys who managed to fail epically in their efforts<br />to intimidate a 77 year-old man with balls of granite.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">No sooner had the unmarked pick-up trucks sped out of sight down the dusty road when Don Alejo went into action. He quietly called over his employees (there were several laborers who worked on his ranch during the days) and told them to leave early and take the weekend off. Then, without saying a word, he opened his cellar door and went down to his secret what-the-fuck <em>Terminator 2</em> subterranean weapons bunker loaded with enough weaponry and ammo to make Vault system from <em>Fallout</em> look like the frozen food isle at the grocery store, grabbed as many weapons and bullets as he could carry, and started turning his home into an impenetrable fortress of destruction. Every window and door in the hacienda was stocked with a hunting rifle and a stack of ammunition. So when the trucks and cars of the cartel showed up at his ranch at 4am the next morning, Don Alejo was there waiting for them.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Unfortunately for the douchebag thugs of this particular jerkburger cartel, Don Alejo was big into MMA &ndash; which, according to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/El_Danny_Trejo\">Fake Danny Trejo\'s Twitter feed</a>, stands for \"Massive Mexican Asskicking\" &ndash; and he wasn\'t shy about dishing out a little vigilante justice to these fucks who were trying to confiscate his hard-earned property. When the guys in the trucks started honking their horns, flashing their bright headlights on the house, shouting profanity into their megaphones, and shooting their guns wildly in the air, Don Alejo simply started shooting his guns directly at them, and in a manner significantly more controlled, busting caps in their punk asses and reminding these tough-guy cartel thugs that they really aren\'t as invincible as they think they are.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/donalejo3.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It didn\'t take long for the cartel to return fire on the ranch, but Don Alejo had taken great pains in the hours before to make his home a fucking ridiculous hardened battle station. In order to avoid drawing too much fire from something on the order or thirty or forty full-auto assault rifles, He would run to a window, take aim, shoot a guy, then run to another window or door when the bad guys started firing in the direction of his most recent shot. This 77 year-old man was running from station to station like the Assault event in <em>American Gladiators</em>, busting one well-aimed shot and then quickly moving out of sight, single-handedly defending his home against these motherfuckers with nothing more than an intense hatred for douchebags and drug dealers. I imagine that it was like the end of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wales.html\">The Outlaw Josey Wales</a>, only if Clint Eastwood were the age then that he was in <em>Gran Torino</em>, and if instead of Kansas Redlegs he was being mauled by a couple dozen AK-47s.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Four thugs were killed in Don Alejo\'s initial rampage, but they quickly regrouped and started moving towards the house, running from cover to cover to avoid his deadly accurate fire. Two over-ambitious gangsters actually succeeded in reaching the house, only to find that Don Alejo wasn\'t even a little bit surprised by them &ndash; the second they stepped into the doorway he greeted them <em>Scarface</em>-style:</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/donalejo4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Only instead of an M16 with a grenade launcher he was firing a hunting rifle in each hand, which is even more inescapably badass somehow. Don Alejo capped both men, sending them spinning to the ground, alive but unconscious. However, much like the brave-yet-doomed defenders of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/travis.html\">the Alamo</a>, Don Alejo\'s last stand also had a tragic end at the receiving end of overwhelming firepower. Completely unable to bust through the force field of lead destruction spewing forth from the general vicinity of the Don of Destruction\'s raging adamantium nutsack, the horde of bandito douchebags perhaps-unsurprisingly opted for a significantly more cowardly tactic than an unrelenting face-to-face steel-cage death match &ndash; they ran back to their trucks, got some fucking <em>grenade launchers</em> (did I already mention that the police have a tough time matching the firepower of these cartel leaders?), and peppered Don Alejo\'s ranch with a flurry of hail the size of high-explosive hand grenades until everything within fifty yards was blown into crushed-out cinders. The entire battle lasted little more than five minutes. When a response team of Mexican Marines arrived the next morning, they found Don Alejo\'s body amid the rubble, still clutching a hunting rifle in each hand. They also found four dead drug dealers, two other thugs lying unconscious in pools of their own blood, and bloody patches outside indicating that there were other wounded gangsters who had left with the posse.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Don Alejo\'s brave-bordering-on-insane actions defending his home probably won\'t do much to dry down the acid bath of sulfuric suckass that seems to be encompassing much of rural Mexico these days, but it\'s a hell of a thing to see a guy like that take a stand against hopeless odds to fight for what he believes in. He was given a hero\'s burial in Monterrey at the end of November.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/donalejo5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p><br /><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\"> Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/11/mexican-marines-reconstruct-death-of.html\">Borderland Beat</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/high_noon_at_not_ok_corral_95TSj4qIZSQuVHRTWDVvzN\">NY Post</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/world-mainmenu-26/north-america-mainmenu-36/5334-don-alejo-garza-tamez-true-grit\">True Grit</a></span></p>','2011-01-07','369674427455','donalejo01.jpg','donalejo0.jpg','Don Alejo Garza Tamez','Mexican rancher who single-handedly fought the entire gang with his stash of automatic weapons.',''),('Max Hardberger','November 19, 1948','N/A','Baton Rouge, LA, USA','21st-century American Mercenary','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Max Hardberger is a trained professional whose job routinely involves going to hellacious third-world countries, breaking into heavily-fortified ports in the middle of the night, stealing full-sized cargo ships from hardened pirates, brutal mob bosses, and other organized criminals/bastards, and then sneaking the cruise ship-sized boats out from under the noses of the local port authorities, the coast guard, and that country\'s navy.&nbsp; In terms of safe working conditions, this guy\'s 9-to-5 job ganking $10 million ships from violent gangsters is somewhere between \"amateur fire-sword swallower\" and \"guy who disarms IEDs by tap-dancing on them\" on the OSHA Safety List, and this borderline-suicidal occupation is only made that much more risky considering that his work is pretty much completely illegal in every country in which he practices it.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Oh, and his name also contains the words Max, Hard, and Burger, which is fucking tremendous in and of itself.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hardberger1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">To the untrained eye, it looks like Hardberger is just standing there looking badass.<br />In reality, he\'s actually in the process of stealing this ship out from right in front of you.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Maximum Overdrive Hardberger (I assume this is his full given name, though I wasn\'t able to confirm this at the time this story went to press) didn\'t exactly start off his career of death-defying awesomeness quite in the manner you might expect.&nbsp; Before the nautical Sam Fisher was Rock Punchgroin-ing criminal douchebags in the cockparts and stealing their ships under cover of darkness, Hardberger was kicking back in a hammock reading Joyce, penning sonnets, and receiving an MFA in Fiction and Poetry from the University of Iowa (?!).&nbsp; A native of New Orleans, Hardberger\'s early post-graduate years were spent teaching world history and English to high school kids, but when discussing the subtle intricacies of Iambic Pentameter finally became too soul-crushing to bear this guy quit his teaching gig and took a job flying medical research cadavers around the United States in a single-seat prop plane.&nbsp; While I guess there\'s not much of a difference between a dead body and a high school student sitting in a classroom where he\'s being taught about the rhythm of the verses in the winter of our discontent, I think most folks would agree that this is a pretty strange job transition nonetheless.&nbsp; At least you don\'t have to grade research papers, I guess.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Well dressing a dead body up and pretending he\'s your co-pilot gets boring after a while, so eventually Hardberger decided to quit his part-time cropdusting, part-time cadaver transport work and get involved in the maritime shipping business.&nbsp; Max Hard had worked on oil rig supply ships in the Gulf as a kid, but once he got full-on into freighter shipping, he immediately realized that this was the most badass shit he\'d ever done in his life.&nbsp; And it didn\'t hurt that he was good at it &ndash; before long, this guy went from a lowly Greenhorn to the salty, grizzled Captain of multi-million dollar freighters delivering hundreds of tons of cargo to ports across the world.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hardberger2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Like a boss.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But everything changed one fateful day in 1987.&nbsp; It was immediately after Hardberger had dropped off his cargo in an obscure Haitian port when shit suddenly got fucked in a hurry.&nbsp; No sooner had the last crane pulled the shipping container off the deck then out of nowhere a buttload of guys with pistols and submachine guns came up the boarding ramp holding bullshit, court-approved papers claiming the Hardberger\'s vessel hadn\'t paid its debts &ndash; papers claiming that Max was ordered by the government of Haiti to get his crew off the boat so that these nice dudes with the automatic weapons could assume control of it until the situation could be resolved.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">This was fucked.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Apparently, this sort of thing is pretty routine in backwater Mos Eisley seaports across the darkest and most lawless corners of the world &ndash; some wealthy scumbag \"businessman\" sees a totally sweet cargo ship roll into the harbor, so he bribes a judge a couple hundred bucks to write up a Search &amp; Seize order.&nbsp; Once the papers are in hand, this guy sends his henchmen to take possession of the boat on behalf of the court. Once they have the boat, these criminal jerkwads kick off the crew, and then immediately sell the ship at auction, usually for a profit of somewhere between half a million and twenty million dollars.&nbsp; What\'s worse is that according to maritime law, once a boat is sold at auction, its history is completely erased &ndash; so even if the thing was seized via heinous douchebaggery, the only thing you can do about it is whine like a punk bitch and cry into your beer.&nbsp; It\'s like modern-day piracy, only without all the parrots or the eyepatches or anything else that makes pirates cool and not total dickheads.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Well, fuck this &ndash; guys sweet \'staches and names like MAXIMUM HARDBERGER do not back down just because a dozen heavily-armed thugs are waving guns in their faces.&nbsp; Hardberger, knowing that his time was short, immediately proceeded to do something daring.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">He gave them booze.&nbsp; Like, a shitload of booze.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">When the guards passed out from their epic rum party (pirates will be pirates, you know...), Hardberger had his engineer lock them into their quarters, and then he and his crew immediately hauled ass for international waters.&nbsp; Once they were clear of Haitian jurisdiction (where the illicitly-attained judge\'s order was nonetheless legally binding), he tossed the pirates out on a lifeboat and made them row back home.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hardberger3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Max became something of a hero among the shipping community almost immediately, and before long he started offering his \"get the fuck out of dodge before your ten-million-dollar ship gets sold out from under you\" services to anyone with id=\"mce_marker\"00,000 and a ship locked down by corrupt officials.&nbsp; Nowadays, all you need to do is call Max, and regardless of what backwater hellhole your ship is stuck at, he\'ll go into these lawless ports with a team of specialists and steal the boat back.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Hardberger doesn\'t like to use straight-up violence.&nbsp; It\'s too messy.&nbsp; In fact, he claims that in a quarter-century of Robin Hooding ships, he\'s never killed a single person.&nbsp; Instead, he prefers to show up at the port, blend in, recon the area, and put together a clever, precise, airtight plan for getting the boat and himself out in one piece.&nbsp; Usually he likes to play the part of the drunk, grizzled, salty old out-of-work American ship captain (which is a badass archetype in and of itself), and while it looks to outsiders like he\'s just doing shots of whiskey and talking about \"the good old days of the one that got away from the Old Man and the Sea\", he\'s actually doping out the surroundings and preparing a badass Oceans 11 style aquatic ship heist.&nbsp; Then, when the timing is right, he goes in, takes control of the ship, and hauls out of there before the cops and the feds arrive.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hardberger4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">In 25 years as the world\'s only professional cargo ship repo man, Max Hardberger has never failed to recover a boat &ndash; something you can easily determine based on the fact that he\'s not rotting in a South American jail somewhere or feeding fishes at the bottom of a harbor in the Caribbean.&nbsp; As you can imagine, the stories he has to tell will rock your face off. Rather than try to discuss them in a narrative fashion, I\'m just going to list them here.&nbsp; Be warned:&nbsp; The next couple of paragraphs might kick you in the solarplexus like a mule, so be prepared to take some breaks so you can catch your breath.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Hardberger once repoed a freighter from the Russian Mafiya in the ice-covered Baltic port of Vladivostok, Russia.&nbsp; One time he captured a ship in Central America by hiring a prostitute to flirt with the guards and give them shots of booze lined with Hardberger\'s-homemade handy-dandy insta-sedatives.&nbsp; During the Haitian Revolution of 2004, Hardberger sailed into the battle-torn hive of destruction in the middle of a warzone, boarded a ship pretending to be a potential buyer, and got his men to distract the guards while he snuck off, repaired a damaged engine, and cut the anchor chains with a blowtorch.&nbsp; Another time in Haiti, he used a Voodoo witch doctor to freak out a crew of AK-47 slinging pirates and send them running from the ship.&nbsp; In Venezuela he straight-up convinced the guards that the fucking ship was sinking, and he did such a good job of it that the entire crew of bad guys all ran to the life boats and rowed back to shore, leaving Max and his buddies plenty of time to leisurely pull the ship out of dock.&nbsp; He also snuck a boat out of Greece by buying the Coast Guard a case of Ouzo on Greek Easter and sailing out right under their noses.&nbsp; More recently, he\'s hired a team of ex-Special Forces operatives to help him extract ships from Somali pirates armed with assault rifles and RPGs, but by this point it was about as routine as filing a TPS report.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">During his adventures, Hardberger has been chased by pirates, shot at by Mafia bosses, accosted by Coast Guard officials, and pursued by god-knows-who-else.&nbsp; He once eluded fucking INTERPOL agents by grinding the ship\'s name and serial number of its hull mid-transit and painting a fake new name over top of it.&nbsp; In the Dominican Republic he was being pursued by a goddamned naval cruiser, but even a friggin\' warship couldn\'t slow this moustachioed madman down &ndash; during his recon, Hardberger had noticed that the Dominican navy was using outdated radar gear, so he sailed his ship <em>right into the middle of a horrible thunderstorm</em> because he knew it would fuck with their detection equipment.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hardberger5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Oh yeah, and on one mission that was not in any way at all related to any of this, Max Hardberger hired a crew of German pilots and led a sortie of 47 single-seat aircraft that flew out of Berlin and traveled under the radar across Soviet-controlled Europe before landing at Rostock, disassembling the planes, loading them into cargo containers, and shipping them to Venezuela aboard his boat.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">At the age of 62, Max Hardberger continues to do more badass shit in one weekend that most of us will do in our entire lives.&nbsp; He received his JD in maritime law, makes a fucking assload of money, and wrote a bunch of action-packed adventures books that are all sort-of related to his actual real life work.&nbsp; I really have nothing more to add to this.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hardberger6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links/Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/14/max-hardberger-sea-captain-pirates-seized\">The Guardian</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2001062,00.html\">TIME Magazine</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/01/local/me-repoman1\">LA Times</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.maxhardberger.com/about/about_max.htm\">MaxHardberger.com</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.vesselextractions.com/hardberger.htm\">VessEx Bio</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Hardberger\">Wikipedia</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Hardberger, Max. <em>Seized</em>. Random House, 2010.</span></p>','2011-07-15','721060724786','hardberger2.jpg','hardberger1.jpg','Max Hardberger','This guy steals $10 million cargo ships from pirates. Professionally.',''),('Gráinne Ní Mháille','1530','1603','Connaught, Ireland','16th-century Irish Pirate','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Grace O\'Malley was a tough-ass 16th century Irish warrior chick who led a horde of broadsword-swinging Vikings, Celts, and Scottish Highlanders in naval operations that would dominate the coast of Ireland for a couple of decades. Known to her contemporaries as \"The Pirate Queen of Connaught,\" this estrogenocidal ginger gunslinger raided shipping vessels, battled English armies, conquered castles from rival Irish clans, and once traveled to London just so she could talk shit to Queen Elizabeth in person.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">She pretty much rocks ass.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The future Pirate Queen\'s life began innocently enough. She was born in Ireland in 1530, a time when the crazy horn-bag King Henry the Eighth was beheading half the female population of England and nobody really gave a crap what the Irish were doing as long as they didn\'t screw with the English territories in Ulster. Her actual name was Gr&aacute;inne N&iacute; Mh&aacute;ille, but nowadays we of course Anglicize it to Grace O\'Malley because that\'s much easier to say, it uses fewer accent marked-characters when we type it, and because I think there\'s some kind of rule about how we have to change pretty much all Irish peoples\' crazy unpronounceable names so that they start with either O\' or Mc.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Grace came from a wealthy seafaring family that lived on the Western coast of Ireland. Her Dad, the leader of Clan O\'Malley, made most of his money sailing around trading shit to Spain, England, France and Portugal, and also by collecting a fee from fishermen who used his waters. As a girl, Grace quickly realized that she didn\'t want to sit around the house boiling potatoes all day with her boring mom, so it wasn\'t long before she was begging her father to take her out to sea on his trading expeditions. Dad understandably wasn\'t all that pumped about taking his teenage daughter out into pirate-infested waters, so he made up some bullshit story and told Gracie she couldn\'t come because her hair was too long and it would get stuck in the rigging on the ship or whatever. Grace, as you will soon learn, wasn\'t the sort of chick who flinched when it came to make a decision between pussying out and doing badass shit, however, and the next day Dad went out to the docks and saw that his daughter had cut off all of her hair with a knife and was ready to rock out on the high seas.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">He couldn\'t exactly say no.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/omalley1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The Cock\'s Castle, so named because the guy who lived there was a cock.</span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">(Also because it looks vaguely phallic.)</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Grace quickly proved herself not only as an able seawoman capable of pulling her own weight aboard a merchant vessel, but her ability to work ship, lead men, and spot storms on the horizon before anyone else quickly led to her being promoted to serve as her father\'s second-in-command (even above some of her older brothers!) on trading expeditions. Known to the crew as \"Grace the Bald\" because of her short hair, one story claims that when her ship was overtaken and boarded by pirates, she personally saved the lives of one of her crew members by leaping off the rigging in the middle of a melee and dive-bombing a pirate death from above-style. I picture this going down like a luchador busting out a top-rope moonsault to the outside of the ring, but I think that\'s probably just me.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Once her sea legs were firmly established and she\'d made quite a life for herself tearing ass around the high seas for fun and profit and badassery, the 16-year old Grace was married off in 1546 to a guy named Donal of the Battle (or, alternately, as Donal \"of the Battle\" O\'Flaherty). Donal was a tough, easily-irritable Irish hothead who lived in a place awesomely called \"The Cock\'s Castle\" and spent most of his time being an asshole to people from neighboring clans. Donal the Cock was eventually killed in battle after he pissed off Clan Joyce for some reason that is never really explicitly defined (except to say that he was asking for it), and they charged Cock Castle and captured it (Grace immediately raised an army, personally stormed the walls at the head of an army, and re-took her dead husband\'s castle by force &ndash; the Joyces renamed it \"The Hen\'s Castle,\" the name by which it is still known today). Later, she\'d marry a guy named \"Iron Richard\" Burke who had a real affinity for chainmail, foundries, and accomplishing nothing of any importance. Iron Dick was fine, I guess, but she\'d basically married him for political reasons and after a year of betrothal she locked him out of his own castle and threw all his shit on the lawn. When Dick came home and was all like \"WTF?\", she leaned out the window and yelled, \"Richard, I dismiss you!\" So he left without an argument and she spent the rest of her life cougaring it up with guys she found shipwrecked on the shore (presumably immediately after her pirate army had sunk their ships).</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/omalley2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But marriage isn\'t what defined the Pirate Queen. Upon the deaths of her father and husband, Grace O\'Malley inherited big swaths of coastal land and castles, and using her own ingenuity, ruthlessness, and badassery she turned that territory into a criminal empire of piratical stabbing awesomeness that would make the shipping and fishing industries its bitch for the remainder of O\'Malley\'s long, ultra-grizzled life.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The Pirate Kingdom of Grace O\'Malley started off innocuously enough, I suppose. Grace\'s father had implemented a tax on fishing and merchant ships that moved through his waters &ndash; a nominal fee akin to how many nobles put tolls on roads through their land. Well Grace took this operation over and immediately cranked that organized racketeering shit up to 12, building a small navy of scurvy Irishmen and sending out her fleet to collect taxes and tolls from an ever-increasing area of the western coast. If people refused to pay the toll or looked like they might possibly refuse to pay the toll, Grace\'s henchmen would board the ship pirate-style, kick the shit out of everyone on board, take whatever the hell they wanted, and bring the loot back to the Sea Queen for distribution among her servants. Eventually Grace stopped even calling it a tax, and the toll-collecting business became a full-scale piracy operation that would make the modern-day Somali warlords proud.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/omalley3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Like all famous Irish people,</span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Grace has a bunch of pubs named after her.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Before long, Grace began to augment her already-touch pirate force by recruiting warriors known as the Gallowglass &ndash; an elite, tough-as-fuck group of claymore-swinging face-crushers who obliterated everyone in their path in an explosion of blood spray and flying dismembered appendages. The Gallowglass, in a nutshell, are the result of what happened when the Vikings landed in Scotland, set up villages, and intermarried with the Scottish Highlanders. So they\'re like Viking Highlanders. I can think of little that is more terrifying.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">With these guys at the vanguard of her forces (augmented by tough whisky-swilling Irishmen), Grace not only hit shipping and fishing traffic, but soon started pummeling coastal fortresses and capturing large swaths of territory from any Clans unfortunate enough to be positioned in her zone of authority. She also build up merchant trade with England, Ulster, Spain, France and Portugal, accumulating huge quantities of cash from those wealthy countries, but that\'s marginally less interesting than the Scots-Irish Vikings storming fortresses with cannons and battle axes.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/omalley.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Grace taking a smoke break and thinking about axes.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">While ruling an empire of Viking Highlander Pirates is sweet and all, O\'Malley was a tough lady herself as well, more than happy to wade into combat herself, and this was definitely not the sort of chick you wanted to cross swords with on the smoke-swept deck of a burning merchantman. One story claims that she gave birth to her third child on the high seas during a trading expedition to the Mediterranean. As she was popping the kid out, word came down that the vessel was under attack by Turkish pirates, so she finished giving birth, grabbed her gun, then <em>immediately ran out</em> to bust caps in pirates and command the defense of her ship. Another time one of her boyfriends was captured and executed by a rival clan, so she waited until the leaders of the Clan landed on an island for vacation, attacked the island, burned their ships, and killed everyone she could find. After wiping out the leadership of the Clan, she then led her soldiers to assault the Clan fortress, capturing it and reappropriating it for her own use. On yet another occasion a local English Earl refused to let Grace in when she stopped by for dinner, so she kidnapped the Earl\'s son and held him for ransom, only returning him when the Earl decided he\'d cook her some bacon and leave an extra place setting out for the rest of his life, <em>just in case</em> she ever decided to show up again (this is a tradition that the family maintains to this day).</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">As a pretty bitchin\' side note, when the Spanish Armada came to attack England in 1588, one of the warships of the Armada got lost in a storm and ended up getting stuck in waters controlled by the Sea Queen of Connaught. Grace O\'Malley personally led the attack that captured the war galleon. She was 50 years old at the time.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/omalley5.jpeg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Grace meeting Queen Elizabeth.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Eventually the English decided they\'d heard enough stories of their people getting their asses kicked by the Sea Queen, so they sent an expedition to attack Hen\'s Castle and put O\'Malley in her place once and for all. Grace held off the attack by pouring hot oil from the roof of the castle onto the attackers, and then by melting down captured armor and plunder and molding it into bullets to fight the English. Their asses thoroughly wrecked medieval-style, the English force retreated back to their ships and hauled ass back towards London.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">They didn\'t make it. The moment the attack was called off, Grace lit a signal fire on the roof of her castle, and as the English pulled away they came face-to-face with a fleet of O\'Malley\'s pirate ships.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The English would have their revenge, however. In 1593, the man who had sent the attacking force &ndash; the English Governor of Connaught &ndash; led a raid that captured Grace\'s brother and sons, and he held them for ransom in his prison, demanding that Grace surrender herself. Grace responded by traveling to fucking London and requesting an audience with another tough-ass British woman ruler with an affinity for high seas privateering &ndash; Queen Elizabeth of England. O\'Malley brought a dagger with her into the royal chamber (it was confiscated), accidentally offended a courtier by throwing his handkerchief into a fireplace, and spoke Latin to the Queen because she didn\'t want to speak English to her. Despite being a Pirate Queen talking to an Actual Queen, Grace refused to bow, stood tall, and demanded the release of her family. Elizabeth, who was a reasonable enough woman when it came to shit like this, agreed to fire the jackass Governor, recall him to England, and release the prisoners of O\'Malley agreed to stop destabilizing the countryside and supporting the rebellions of petty Irish nobles. That was cool with Grace, and the deal was done. That\'s one way to get rid of your enemies.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Grace O\'Malley dominated the shipping lanes and accumulated tons of wealth during her lifetime. She was never conquered, never defeated, and died an old woman living in a giant fucking castle on top of piles of gold coins and 25 year-old studs with rock-hard abs. Her son went on to be the Viscount of Mayo, which sounds like a cartoon character for a fast-food restaurant, and nowadays she\'s memorialized in plenty of Irish folks songs. I guess she\'s notable because Joyce wrote about her in <em>Finnegan\'s Wake</em>, but nobody ever knows what the fuck Joyce is ever talking about so it\'s barely worth mentioning.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/omalley6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/%7Enwa/grace.html\">RootsWeb</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/gangsters_outlaws/outlaws/grace_o,malley/1_index.html\">TruTV</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.thepirateking.com/bios/omalley_grace.htm\">The Pirate King</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_O%27Malley\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Broderick, Marian. <em>Wild Irish Women</em>. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2004.</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Chambers, Anne. <em>Ireland\'s Pirate Queen</em>. MJF, 2003.</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Chambers, Anne. <em>Ganuaile</em>. Macmillan, 2009.</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Cook, Judith. <em>Pirate Queen</em>. Tuckwell, 2004.</span></p>','2011-07-08','329819625394','omalley46.jpg','omalley2.jpg','Grace O\'Malley','The Pirate Queen of Connaught. ',''),('Thomas Prince','October 25, 1915','November 25, 1977','Scanterbury, MB, Canada','WWII Canadian Soldier','<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The national holidays of two North American countries are taking place this weekend, and, since it\'s not every day that 2/3rds of a continent gets involved in the whole fireworks/flag waving/beer chugging extravaganza of drunkenly patriotic awesomeness, I am personally planning to celebrate in the sort of universalist manner my unique geographic location allows me to &ndash; by driving to Vancouver tonight and celebrating Canada Day by slamming poutine gravy-cheese fries, sucker-punching a grizzly in the taint, and pretending I might somehow know any of the words to \"God Save the Queen\" (or whatever the hell they sing up there when they\'re pumped up about Canada), and then coming back to Seattle Monday to grill cheeseburgers, talk shit about the British Crown, and shotgun cans of Bud while sitting in an above-ground swimming pool on the 4th of July. And, since I can\'t adequately represent the sublime combination of cheap gunpowder, fermented barley, and deep-fried animal by-products through the medium of the Internet, I\'ll attempt to represent this badass duality of holidays in another way &ndash; by telling the story of an insane, over-the-top hero from the most hardcore joint military operation ever undertaken by the Canadian and American governments: Sergeant Tommy Prince of the 1st Special Service Brigade (aka \"The Devil\'s Brigade\").</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Tommy Prince was born 25 October 1914 in the Canadian province of Manitoba. A member of the Brokenhead band of the Ojibwe Indian tribe, Prince was one in a long line of hardcore Native American badasses dating back to a time when most white guys thought that if they sailed their ships too far off the coast of Spain they\'d fall into a bottomless pit and be devoured by Satan. As a young man, Prince dropped out of elementary school to help feed his family but hunting and tracking wildlife on the Reservation, gunning down buffalo and bringing home heaping armfuls of beef. Now, I really don\'t know shit about rural Manitoba, but when you go to <a href=\"http://www.gov.mb.ca/\">the official website for the province</a> the first two things you see are a cartoon buffalo and a giant fucking polar bear, so I think it\'s safe to assume this place is pretty hardcore, and that any twelve year-old who can go out in the woods there by himself for long stretches of time armed only with a rifle and a combat knife has to be seriously fucking intense. Prince was. According to his biography, this guy could move almost completely silently through any terrain, crawl on his belly through thick underbrush faster than most regular schmucks could walk upright through it, and could put five bullets through a playing card at 100 meters without blinking. He was also an expert in wilderness survival, tracking, and traveling long distances without food or rest. Oh, and he was also kind of a player &ndash; one time he got 60 stitches when some woman at a bar slashed him in the face with a broken beer bottle (presumably because he was already going home with five other hot babes and didn\'t feel like bringing her along).</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/prince1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">In 1940, the 24 year-old Prince enlisted in the Canadian military, and his natural aptitude for doing badass shit in the middle of the fucking wilderness made him a prime candidate for some crazy new Weapon X-style program the mad scientists of the North American militaries were working on &ndash; specifically, the creation of a new unit of badass motherfuckers who could take on the most insane suicide missions Allied command could think of. Hardcore commandos ready for any mission, anywhere, anytime, in any part of the world, and ready to massacre totalitarian dickbags with any weapon larger than a thumbtack. Tommy was hand-selected for this joint Canadian and American unit, innocuously named the 1st Special Service Force, and was sent (along with the toughest wilderness experts in the Canadian and American armies) through intense training in the frozen tundras of rural Montana. Over the next couple months, these soon-to-be-elite commandos were trained in parachute assault tactics, hand-to-hand combat, knife fighting, stealth operations, reconnaissance, demolitions, and alpine warfare. Eventually known among the Germans and Italians as \"The Black Devils\" (because these guys would paint their faces black with shoe polish before going on night operations and garroting Fascists), the 1st SSF would go on to be one of the most hardcore military units of World War II &ndash; performing commando ops throughout Italy and France, sneaking into seemingly-impenetrable enemy bases and killing everyone out of hand with knives or icepicks or what the fuck ever else they felt like carrying. This unit was so tough that when it was disbanded it eventually morphed into the 1st United States Army Special Forces (better known as the Green Berets) and the Canadian counter-terrorist Joint Task Force 2. Tarantino\'s <em>Inglorious Basterds</em> is (very loosely) based on the unit, and when the folks at Marvel went through and retconned a bunch of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wolverine.html\">Wolverine</a>\'s backstory they had him fighting Nazis as part of the SSF in WWII.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">So saying that Tommy Prince was the most decorated warrior from this unit is kind of a big deal.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/prince2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Note: The Black Devil\'s Brigade should not be confused with the Black Taint Brigade.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Early on in the Italian Campaign of 1943, the Devil\'s Brigade\'s primary objective was simple &ndash; get behind enemy lines and fuck shit up. Attack impenetrable mountain fortresses at night and kill everyone inside. Get into their base, kill their d00ds, then get as many of your guys out as you could. At the Battle of Monte La Difensa, the Devil\'s Brigade attacked a mountain base that had been unsuccessfully assaulted three times by full-scale attacks &ndash; the SSF climbed up the steepest part of the mountain in the middle of the night, broke into the fort, and destroyed EVERYTHING. The detachment assigned to the battle suffered a 77% casualty rate in the process, but the next morning the Allies were able to walk right up the hill into the installation like they were out on a weekend hike.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">If Tommy Prince were a G.I. Joe, he would have been a cross between <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/snakeeyes.html\">Snake Eyes</a> and Tracker, and the big Native American quickly became the stuff of legends once stories of his balls-out attacks on enemy strongholds started getting around the unit. For instance, near the village of Majo, Prince single-handedly snuck up to the enemy front lines in the middle of the night, slipped into all of their fortified steel machine gun bunkers one-by-one, and killed everyone inside with a fucking Bowie knife. His mission was completely silent &ndash; the next morning, when the Germans at the top of the hill saw the Canadian and American infantry advancing across the field, they couldn\'t figure out why the hell the MG-42s weren\'t shooting at them. It was only after the battle that they\'d realized it\'s because every single machine gun nest was ankle-deep in the blood of Tommy Prince\'s enemies.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/prince3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Sometimes Prince would fuck with the Axis troops just for the hell of it &ndash; badass PSY-OPS Sam Fisher shit. Like, he\'d sneak into an Italian town at night, break into the infantry barracks, and steal everyone\'s shoes off their feet while they were sleeping. Or he\'d go into the SS Officers\' quarters and kill every third guy while he slept in his bed &ndash; the rest of the guys would wake up the next morning to find the dude next to him was dead from a knife wound to the throat, and they\'d be appropriately freaked the fuck out of their minds.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Another pretty badass event went down outside Anzio in 1944. Prince was scouting enemy positions, and he\'d somehow found a way to run a 1500-meter telegraph wire all the way from Allied lines to a farmhouse 200 meters from the German artillery without being detected. The next morning, he used the telegraph to start calling in positions of German tanks and guns to American artillery, who proceeded to make it rain fireballs and shrapnel. Things were going great, people were getting gibbed apart all over the place, etc., but then all of a sudden the shelling abruptly stopped. Prince realized that a stray bomb had cut the telegraph wire, and now the Allied artillery wasn\'t getting his fire coordinates. While most people would have called it a day and gone home to collect his fucking medal of bravery, Prince decided, \"Fuck it, I totally haven\'t killed enough Fascists for one afternoon, so let\'s try to keep this thing rolling\". This madman immediately went through the old farmhouse where he was hiding, found some clothes, changed his clothes so he looked like an Italian farmer, and then walked out into the field carrying a hoe and a rake. Calmly, unarmed, and in full view of the German patrols, Prince walked right to the break in the telegraph line, bent over to pretend to tie his shoes, and rejoined the wires right in front of the enemy soldiers. Then he stood up, shook his fist at the guards, make some veiled pun involving hoes, walked right back to the farmhouse, and went back to bombing the shit out of their Panzers.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/prince4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Wolverine fighting Nazis with the Devil\'s Brigade.<br />I\'m fairly confident that Prince\'s life was exactly like this in real life.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Prince once again performed amazing feats of badass in the Summer of 1944, when he was sent to southern France to scout enemy positions and troop locations. A few hours into his mission, Prince found some French resistance guys fighting the Germans, so he picked off the Nazis with a sniper rifle until they all got freaked out and ran for it. When Prince came down to talk to the French dudes, they told him that the fire was so intense that they\'d thought they were being rescued by a company of at least 50 men, and they couldn\'t believe it was just this dude with his standard-issue rifle (Prince would later be nominated for the Croix de Guerre for this action). After almost accidentally winning the French government\'s highest award for bravery in combat, Prince went on to locate the German base, return to Allied lines, and then lead an all-out assault on the fortress that would result in the capture of 1,000 enemy Prisoners of War. Oh, and he did it all while crossing 50 miles (70km) into enemy territory, twice, on foot, without sleep or food or rest, over the course of one 72-hour session. For his actions he\'d receive the Military Medal (the third-highest award for bravery offered by the British Army) and the Silver Star (the third-highest award for bravery offered by the American Army). He\'s one of only three people in history to get both those medals.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">World War II ended, but life in Canada wasn\'t all that great for Native Americans in the 1940s, so when the Korean War broke out in 1950 Prince immediately re-enlisted as a Sergeant in the Canadian infantry and served two tours of duty even though he was already suffering from extremely painful arthritis in both his knees. Fighting with the Princess Patricia\'s Canadian Light Infantry, Prince led commando raids into North Korean and Chinese camps &ndash; including one attack where he personally took 8 prisoners and stole two heavy machine guns. His regiment earned the United States Presidential Unit Citation for their defense of Kapyong (when they fought their way out after being completely surrounded by a full division of Chinese infantry), he was shot in the leg while defending The Hook, and he once got in trouble when he found a Canadian sentry asleep at his post and threw the guy in a fucking brutal sleeper hold to teach him a lesson about why you shouldn\'t pass out when you\'re on fucking guard duty unless you want to get your windpipe crushed.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Tommy Prince retired after the war, got married, had 5 kids, and in 1955 he jumped in a freezing river and single-handedly saved a man from drowning (proving that he could save lives just as spectacularly as he could take them). He is now remembered as the most decorated aboriginal war veteran in Canadian military history.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/prince5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"All my life I wanted to do something to help my people recover their good name. <br />I wanted to show they were as good as any white man.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.canada.com/national/features/remembrance2005/story.html?id=64f9ce9d-5631-4522-a44d-fb95bbc71826\">Canada.com</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://aiwa.americanindiansource.com/prince/prince.html\">American Indian Source</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=14741\">Histori.ca</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Prince\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Horn, Bernd and John Scott Cowan. <em>Intrepid Warriors</em>. Dundurn, 2007.<br /><br /> Nadler, John. <em>A Perfect Hell</em>. Random House, 2007.<br /><br /> Sealey, D. Bruce and Peter Van De Vyvre. <em>Manitobans in Profile</em>. Penguin, 1981.<br /><br /> Watson, Brent Byron. <em>Far Eastern Tour</em>. McGill-Queen\'s, 2002. </span></p>','2011-07-01','879698426093','prince1.jpg','prince2.jpg','Tommy Prince','The most hardcore man in the Devil\'s Brigade.','\"He moved with absolute quiet because of the pair of moccasins he\'d wear... sometimes, instead of killing the Germans, he\'d steal something from them. Other times, he\'d slit their throats and not make a sound.\"'),('Alasdair Mac Colla Chiotaich Mac Domhnuill','1610','November 1647','Colonsay, Scotland','17th-century Scottish Mercenary','<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A<span style=\"font-size: small;\">lasdair MacColla was a gigantic, completely-out-of-his-mind claymore-swinging Scottish Highlander who spent a good portion of his short adult life completely wreaking cringe-inducing amounts of ball-crushing havoc on his enemies, their families, their friends, their pets, and anyone he deemed worthy of a bloody, brutal destruction (or, incidentally, anyone who was unlucky enough to have the last name Campbell). As commander of a battle-hardened, take-no-bullshit company of veteran Scots-Irish Gaelic warriors, MacColla terrorized the Protestant populations of Northern Ireland and the Scottish Lowlands in a series of bloody campaigns that would have him forever remembered as a noble hero to his Clan, and a bloodthirsty evil motherfucker to his enemies.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">MacColla was dishing out flying kilted knee strikes back in 1640, meaning that he was out there rocking the Claymore-and-Tartan look a good 300 years or so after <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wallace.html\">The Wallace</a> was cleaving his way through the English feudal system. But despite being a little late to the party MacColla, would prove to be a worthy successor to a line of epic Scottish badasses. His legendary life starts out much the same as that of Wallace &ndash; Alasdair (whose first name is also written as Alexander and Alaster) was the son of a clan chief, and was known for his gigantic frame and immense strength. Reportedly standing over seven feet tall, MacColla (whose last name is also written as MacDonald, Macdonnell, Mac Colla, McColla, MacDonald, McDonnal, Donald, Donnelly, M\'Coll Keitach, and Mac Coll Chiotach Mac Domhnuill) was the sort of blood-raging Highlands warrior who was more than capable of cleaving you from brain to groin with a two-handed sword with all the ease of a Paul Bunyan lumberjack motherfucker hewing his way through the delicate flower department of a Home Depot Garden Center with a chainsaw. A devout Roman Catholic from the exceedingly-Catholic Clan Macdonnell (or MacDonald, McDonald, etc.), Alasdair developed a taste for human blood at a young age while doing battle with his Clan\'s ancient enemies &ndash; the Presbyterian Highlanders of Clan Campbell &ndash; and these two groups of pissed-off Scotsmen spent much of Alasdair\'s formative years fighting an ongoing, increasingly-brutal blood feud over land, religion, wealth, and political standing among the Highlander Clans.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/maccolla1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Some scary-ass looking 17th century Scotsmen.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">As you all know, when it come to the Highlanders, however, there can be only one, and despite all of the head-cleaving awesomeness wrought by our homedog Alasdair, Clan Macdonnell was eventually beaten down by the Campbells. The Macdonnells lost almost all of their land, their homes were torched, and most of their people were all killed, imprisoned, or exiled. Alasdair\'s father, the local leader of Clan Macdonnell, was one of those imprisoned (he would later be executed in captivity), and after this crushing defeat Alasdair was forced to leave Scotland with a handful of survivors and relocate to Northern Ireland, where he took over as the leader of his defeated people.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But if there\'s one thing you\'ll need to remember about Alasdair MacColla, it\'s that this motherfucker didn\'t give up for anything, never half-assed anything, and never turned his back on an opportunity to achieve blood vengeance against his foes. The virtual destruction of his entire Clan only succeeded in making this raging Behemoth of Douchebag Decapitation even more hell-bent on dismembering everyone in the world as quickly as his sword-arm would allow him.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/maccolla2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">I apologize for calling your wife a bloated warthog, and I bid you good day.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It turns out that within a year or two after Alasdair was expelled to Ireland from his Scottish homeland, pretty much all of Great Britain completely lost its shit and turned into a giant endless bloodbath of carnage and ball-sucking misery. There are entire multi-volume encyclopedias written about the English Civil War (and all the various different names for the same basic conflict), but I\'ll try to boil the whole bullshit down into one brief paragraph: A dude named Oliver Cromwell decided he wanted to overthrow King Charles I of England. He was supported by the Presbyterians (who are also known as Covenanters, or, as I like to call them, \"The Covenant\") in Scotland and Ireland. King Charles didn\'t want to be overthrown, so he got together a bunch of Royalists to fight against Cromwell. He was supported by the Catholics in Scotland and Ireland (where they were known as Confederates), because Charles was a Scotsman who had married a Catholic princess, which they were down with, and also because these guys fucking hated the Presbyterians and were really just looking for any reason to kill them, so hey, if the King of England was going to support it then fuck it, why not?</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Long story short, Alasdair MacColla was a Catholic/Confederate/Royalist Scotsman who lived in Ireland and commanded a now-battle-hardened group of Scots and Irishmen who wanted nothing more than to wade through a battlefield knee deep in the blood of anyone who wasn\'t at least some combination of Catholic, Confederate, and/or Royalist.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/maccolla3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Ok, now to the good part. Once MacColla basically fell from \"firstborn son of the leader of one of Scotland\'s most powerful Highland Clans\" to \"mercenary commander leading the remnants of his clan in a bloody crusade against those who wronged him\", things start getting a little bit over-the-top in a \"cleave \'em all and let their bastardized misinterpretation of God sort \'em out\". It started with the Ulster Insurrection in 1641, when the Irish Catholics decided to start shit with England by beating the crapballs out of Presbyterians all the fuck over the place. MacColla commanded two companies of Highlanders in a series of raids that pillaged, burned, and plundered much of the countryside, laying waste to Covenanter lands, and when Protestant Lord Archibald Stewart suddenly showed up near the town of Kilrea with six full companies of Covenant Infantry MacColla got his Master Chief on, ordered his men to pull their broadswords, and charged balls-out (literally &ndash; they wore their kilts like true Scotsmen) towards a force three times his own size. The Covenanters, many of whom had never really seen combat before, immediately shit their pants and ran for it.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Despite recording victory after victory and Alasdair proving himself to be a daring, bordering-on-reckless commander, the Confederate Catholics in Ireland were eventually defeated &ndash; a loss that I personally tend to chalk up to the fact that MacColla\'s commanding officer was some clown named Ranald MacDonald (of the Irish MacDonalds). I\'m not going to make any assumptions here, but come on, how talented could he have been? MacColla was badly wounded in battle when he was shot and stabbed &ndash; possibly at the same time &ndash; and ended up having to spend a year or two laying low and recovering from injuries that would probably have been fatal to lesser men.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/maccolla4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><center><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Author\'s note: This email is dedicated to my man Taylor AKA TTrain, who has been ritualistically sending me insane drunken emails at least once a month for the last two years begging me to write this story.</span></center></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It would take more than just a couple of gaping chest wounds to keep Alasdair MacColla down, though, and by 1644 not only had he completely recovered from his injuries, but he\'d assembled a force of 1,600 Gaelic mercenary badasses, loaded them onto warships, and crash-landed right in the middle of his Clan\'s ancient homeland &ndash; a land now occupied by the hated Campbells. Immediately upon landing, MacColla and the returned Clan MacDonald began to completely destroy every fucking thing they could get their hands on, plundering, pillaging, and burning shit Visigoth-style. He and his rampaging barbarians created a sucking swath of destruction 40 miles wide, destroying any Campbell or Covenant forces they came across. In their razing of the land, they burned people alive, wiped out entire cities, captured some castles, and basically did so much horrible shit to everyone they met that the Campbells rewarded MacColla for his unbridled cruelty by giving him an incredibly badass nickname: Alasdair the Devastator.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Awesome.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Hm, well, maybe not so much awesome if you were a Campbell. Or if you\'re really a huge fan of conducting war in a humanitarian manner. Or an author of the Geneva Convention protocols. MacColla liked to argue that he was just doing to the Campbells what they had done to his people a decade earlier, but pretty much everyone these days kind of agrees that this dude was pretty much a total fucking bastard. Which he pretty much was.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Whatever the case may be, the fact is that after he was done destroying everything in his path, Alasdair the Devastator returned to his ships, only to find that a group of Campbells had snuck in, killed Alasdair\'s ship guards, and burned the ships while McColla was out plundering their cities. This was bad news. It meant he was completely surrounded by people he\'d just spent the last 12 months massacring and pillaging, without much in the way of reinforcements, supplies, money, or food.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/maccolla5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Luckily it wasn\'t long before Alasdair McColla came across the Marquis of Montrose &ndash; a Royalist Scottish General (and fellow badass) who was commanding an army of British Infantry in support of King Charles. The two men joined forces, and immediately embarked on an epic campaign of Covenant-smiting retribution across the Scottish Lowlands. MacColla\'s troops, who by now were an elite cadre of hardened veterans, formed the shock troops at the core of Montrose\'s forces, and together the two leaders proceeded to crush the enemy at the Battles of Tippermuir, Aberdeen, Argyll, Inverlochy, Dundee, and a bunch of other places with funny names.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Despite being basically a British General by this point, Alasdair the Devastator didn\'t consider not kicking ass on the front lines for even a second. In combat his unit was usually placed on the wings, and he was infamous for charging out ahead of his men, chopping the enemy pikes and spears in half with his claymore, and then having the honor of being the first man to dive into the enemy mass.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">This strategy eventually led to the creation of a badass tactic known as the \"Highland Charge\". Basically, back in the 17th century, the Covenanters were using muzzle-loading gunpowder muskets, but MacColla didn\'t really see how that was much of an advantage over the old-school William Wallace sword-and-shield shit. So he developed the Highland Charge &ndash; a tactic where the Scots would line up across from the Covenanters, and both sides would fire a volley of musket rounds at each other in the true fashion of early modern warfare. Then, when the Covenanters went to reload their muskets (a process that could take anywhere from 20 to 40 seconds depending on how skilled the musketeer is) the Highlanders would drop their guns, unsheathe their swords, and fucking run full-speed at the enemy, trying to get to them and butcher them into pieces before they could get their weapons reloaded.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/maccolla6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">I hope your reloading skills work well under pressure.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">As you can imagine, this proved to be pretty fucking effective. In one of his first battles alongside Lord Montrose, MacColla didn\'t have enough weapons to provide to his troops, so he had his men charge the enemy armed only with a large fucking rock &ndash; when the fearless, basically-weaponless Scots-Irish badasses hit the enemy lines, they brained the first guy they could find with the rock, then they took that dude\'s weapon and used it for the rest of the battle. Using this crap-inducing tactic of fear, terror, and blunt-force trauma to the dome, MacColla\'s 2,000-man unit routed and annihilated a Covenanter force that outnumbered him three-to-one. At the Battle of Kilsyth he charged uphill against orders and ended up breaking the enemy formation with a perfectly-timed Highland Charge. At Auldearn, his 500 men were surprise-attacked by a coordinated attack from 4 full regiments of musketeers, but he managed to somehow hold off the attack long enough for Montrose\'s cavalry to get around the flank and break the enemy formation. MacColla was so pissed that he\'d been sneak attacked that he had his men run the enemy down on foot through a moor and kill as many as they could (which was a lot).</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It was during this campaign that Alasdair MacColla and Clan MacDonald eventually completed their vengeance on the Campbells &ndash; an act they accomplished while fighting with Montrose at the Battle of Inverlochy in 1645. MacColla marched through a dense bog to flank the enemy castle, then charged straight into the enemy formation, crushing them and capturing the ancestral castle of Clan Campbell. He was knighted by Montrose in 1645 (making him SIR Alasdair the Devastator), but the happy times wouldn\'t last forever. Even though things were going well in Scotland, the situation back in England was a different story. It turned out that Oliver Cromwell had defeated Charles\' forces, and the King issued an order for Montrose and all Royalists to lay down their arms and return to England.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">MacColla refused.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Montrose left, and MacColla fought a futile series of battles over the next two years, where he was constantly surrounded by attackers and had basically no support. He was finally killed in 1647 at the Battle of Knocknanauss (which, I am told, is definitely <em>not</em> pronounced as either \"Knock-an-Ass\" or \"Cock-and-Ass\"). Today he\'s a larger-than-life folk hero in of a bunch of badass bagpipe tunes and Scottish drinking songs, though most non-Catholics adamantly continue to think he\'s a motherfucker.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/maccolla7.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">True Story: They way the British finally ended up countering the Highland Charge was by <em>inventing the bayonet</em>.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.scotwars.com/maccolla_intro.htm\">ScotWars</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/biog/maccolla.htm\">British Civil Wars</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_Mac_Colla\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Bennett, Martyn. <em>Historical Dictionary of the British and Irish Civil Wars</em>. Scarecrow, 2000.<br /><br /> Cawthorne, Nigel. <em>The Immortals</em>. MBI Publishing Company, 2009.<br /><br /> Lee, Sir Sydney. <em>Dictionary of National Biography</em>. Macmillan, 1893.<br /><br /> Roberts, John Leonard. <em>Clan, King, and Covenant</em>. Edinburgh University Press, 2000.<br /><br /> Stevenson, David. <em>Scottish Covanenters &amp; Irish Confederates</em>. Ulster Historical Confederation, 2005. </span></p>','2011-06-24','314434326497','maccolla.jpg','maccolla7.jpg','Alasdair Mac Colla','Gaelic strongman, Scottish hero, and all-around bastard.','\"They would rather eat the husks from their children\'s mouths, they would rather die at the altars, sepulchres and hearths of their ancestors, than submit, for they regard themselves as an ancient nobility, kings among kings\".'),('John Zizka of Trocnov and the Chalice','1360','October 11, 1424','Trocnov, Bohemia','Medieval Czech General','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Jan Zizka was a badass 15th century Czech knight who led the first real Protestant uprising in Europe by building gigantic fucking war tanks and using these homemade custom iron-plated juggernauts to crush the balls of anyone who opposed him with extreme prejudice all the way up their asses. In his fifteen years relentlessly smiting bitches apart and flattening the skulls of his enemies by swinging an oversized steel mace that was presumably modeled after his oversized steel testicles, Zizka never suffered a defeat on the battlefield &ndash; an accomplishment made duly impressive when you consider the fact that he was commanding a semi-unruly horde of untrained peasants and religious fanatics against battle-hardened men-at-arms from some of the world\'s most dominant military powers.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Oh, and he did it all with one eye. Except for when that got too easy, and he did it while being completely fucking blind in both eyes.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zizka1a.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Look upon your doom.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The story of Jan Zizka starts with a significantly-less-murderous dude who just so happened to also named Jan. Almost a hundred years before Martin Luther stormed the Bastille and posted the Declaration of Independence on the doors of the Alamo by hammering a wooden stake through the Pope, a Czech priest named Jan Hus was already starting shit with the Church over that whole \"selling of indulgences\" thing that pissed so many people off in the Later Middle Ages. The short version of the story is that Jan Hus thought the Catholic Church needed to be reformed in three key ways: First, the Church services should be read in Czech instead of Latin, because who the fuck speaks Latin anyways. Second, everyone should be able to get in on the wine-drinking action during Holy Communion, and the Priests shouldn\'t bogart the Blood of Christ for themselves. Third, the only way to be absolved for your sins should be to make peace with God through Confession, and that rich people shouldn\'t be able to give the Church money in exchange for absolution from their evil deeds.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Naturally, the 15th century Catholic Church responded to this request for reform by excommunicating Jan Hus and burning him at the stake as a heretic.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">This \"die in a fire\" response didn\'t sit too well with the Hussites (a catch-all term used to describe people who thought Jan Hus was a \"pretty righteous dude\"), so in 1419 an angry mob of pissed-off Hussite villagers stormed into the town hall in Prague and threw a bunch of city councilors out the third-story windows onto a waiting hedge of well-sharpened spears. This balls-out riot is known as the First Defenestration of Prague, which is awesome not only because it is a brilliant use of the word <em>defenestration</em> (meaning \"to throw an object or a person out a window\") but also because it suggests that there was more than one Defenestration of Prague (which there was &ndash; the Second Defenestration of Prague was the precipitating event that kicked off the Thirty Years\' War). I guess it would have helped the rulers of Prague to invest in some storm shutters or something.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zizka1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Defenestration in action.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">When news got back to King Wenceslas IV of Bohemia that his citizens had revolted and chucked most of his favorite diplomats through a series of plate glass windows to their horrible deaths, he immediately stroked out and died. (Historical note: This is not the same man as \"Good King Wenceslas\" &ndash; that was King Wenceslas I of Bohemia, who was a decent human being and a Roman Catholic Saint. Wenceslas IV was known as \"Wenceslas the Idle\", and was basically worthless anyways, so it wasn\'t a huge loss.) Since Wenceslas didn\'t have any kids, the new Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund assumed control of Bohemia, and the Pope immediately ordered him to grab his blade and kick some heretic ass.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It wouldn\'t be that easy.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">You see, the leader of the Hussites and their politician-hurling revolution was a no-bullshit, battle-hardened military commander named Jan Zizka. Zizka, (whose name with all the wacky Eastern European diacriticals was Žižka) was a Bohemian, but it\'s important to note that this was back when \"Bohemian\" meant \"crotch-obliterating Czech hardass\" rather than \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism\">starving artist living in a marijuana-filled loft above a defunct Chinese restaurant listening to Bob Dylan</a>\". Zizka was a landowner near the Czech town of Budweis &ndash; the place that lends its name to Budweiser beer &ndash; and he had served as a commander in the now-dead King\'s royal bodyguard. By 1419, Zizka had already lost an eye fighting as a mercenary Captain against the Teutonic Knights - battling alongside Polish knights at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410, when he led a group of Russian Cossacks that held the line against an all-out charge by a horde of uber-hardcore Teutonic heavy cavalry. Even after his flanks fell back and he got an eye poked out by a lance or an arrow or something, Zizka the One-Eyed stayed strong, helping to turn the tides and contributing to the eventual destruction of the Teutonic Order as a political entity (but that\'s a tale for another day).</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zizka2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Zizka at Tannenberg, seen here flipping out Olde fchool.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">So when the Holy Roman Empire declared a Crusade against the Hussites in 1420 and Catholic loyalists started setting Hussites on fire and/or throwing them down mine shafts for fun and pleasure, their de facto leader Jan Zizka immediately sprung into action. He moved his angry mob to capture the one fortress in Prague that hadn\'t been locked down by loyalists (it helped that the fort was garrisoned by men who had served under his command in previous wars), and led his sort-of-warriors in a tough street fight with their religious freedom (and very existence) on the line.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Oh, and while he was riding the countryside consolidating his power and recruiting Hussite troops, Zizka also survived an ambush when his 400-man bodyguard was attacked by 2,000 of the enemy &ndash; he not only escaped with his life, but massacred the attackers almost to the last man. It would be the first true test for his homemade secret weapon:</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zizka3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The Hussite War Wagon.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Jan Zizka\'s War Wagon was a badass armored death machine that ended up being the closest thing real-life history has to a steampunk M1A1 Abrams tank. These doombringing monstrosities were ultra-sturdy wheeled vehicles built from heavy timber and reinforced with iron, and were so hardcore that they could withstand bullets, arrows, and crossbow bolts without buckling. In combat, Zizka would just load these suckers up with peasant men and women armed with cannons, small hand guns (the Czech <em>pistalas</em> were the beginning of pistols as we know them today), crossbows, or bows, and then just let his warriors pour fire on the enemy from the safety of their armored transport. On the attack he would shove them forward like tanks to smash through the enemy lines, and in defense he\'d chain them all together \"circling the wagons\" style so that they were immovable objects. The War Wagons could be deployed anywhere at a moment\'s notice, and when the Hussites weren\'t using them to bash the shit out of their enemies they converted them into Party Busses and transported food, families, and equipment quickly and easily. They even carried mobile ore-crushers and forges on these things so they could repair their weapons and mold new bullets or cannonballs while on the march. Pretty goddamned brilliant, if you ask me.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Jan Zizka never rode in these things during combat, however, preferring to fight face-to-face with a skull-obliterating mace on horseback, but the War Wagon was his design, and it was a damn good one at that. Considering that he was basically commanding heavily-outnumbered, under-equipped, disorganized peasants using shovels and pitchforks, he somehow whipped them into a fighting force that could take on even the toughest knights and aristocrats. It was pretty fucking impressive.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zizka4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Bringing the pain, lederhosen-style.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">So when Emperor Sigismund arrived at Prague with a huge besieging army of knights and crusaders, it shouldn\'t be a huge surprise that Jan Zizka kicked the shit out of them without a hell of a lot of trouble. Zizka set up defenses around Vitkov Hill, preventing the encirclement of the city, and then when the crusaders charged them he smashed them apart with his war wagons, then personally led a charge around the flank that crushed the last remnants of the enemy forces. The people of Prague (Praguians?) were so pumped that they crossed out the \"V\" in Vitkov Hill and renamed it Zitkov Hill instead, an act that drew the only single manly tear Jan Zizka ever shed in his entire life.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">From that point on, Zizka led a guerilla war against Royalist Bohemians and Holy Roman Crusaders alike, destroying everyone in his path and consolidating Hussite power in the land. Once he was firmly in control of Bohemia he signed a writ proclaiming religious freedom for all Bohemians, which was nice of him and all, but this religious tolerance thing still didn\'t stop some loyalist jackass from shooting him in his good eye with an arrow in 1421.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zizka5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Legend has it that when the Holy Roman Empire heard that Zizka was laid up with two missing eyes, they mounted an attack on one of his fortresses. When Zizka heard about this, he immediately got out of bed, hopped on his horse, and started riding toward the battle, warning the Romans that they needed to \"Czech themselves before the wreck themselves\". When the enemy soldiers heard he was coming for them, they dropped their shit and bolted without firing a shot.</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Having both his eyes put out by enemy weaponry STILL didn\'t stop Zizka, however &ndash; this tank-driving maniac was just too badass to fade away. He went on to command his army for 4 more years, the blind leading the non-blind, and still never lost a fight. The Pope ended up sending a second crusade after the Hussites in 1421, but even though the invading army outnumbered and encircled Zizka\'s forces, the Czech mastermind loaded his troops into their War Wagons and led a balls-out breakout that smashed through the cleverly-placed trap. Once he was free of the enemy, he circled his men around, turned the tables, caught the OTHER DUDES off guard (how you get ambushed by a blind guy is beyond me) and, at the Battle of Nemecky Brod in 1422, Zizka\'s army of 12,000 men charged 23,000 crusaders and destroyed them out of hand.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">After driving off two papal crusades and firmly establishing himself as the Big Shit of Bohemia, Zizka died of the Black Death, which is admittedly a pretty badass way to go out. After his death, his movement remained, however &ndash; the Hussites fought and defeated five papal crusades between 1420 and 1431, eventually made peace with the Pope, and installed a Hussite King of Bohemia. Today Jan Zizka is the national hero of the Czech Republic.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zizka6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The horse in this statue of Zizka is larger than any other horse in any other statue in the world.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.hotelpraguecity.com/fotky/okoli/zizka2.html\" target=\"blank\">HotelPrague</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.jpmarat.de/english/hussitee.html\" target=\"blank\">Jan Zizka</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%BDi%C5%BEka\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Dunford, Lisa, Brett Atkinson, and Neil Wilson. <em>Czech and Slovak Republics</em>. Lonely Planet, 2007.<br /><br /> Grant, R.G. <em>Commanders</em>. Penguin, 2010.<br /><br /> Houdley, William E. <em>Zizka</em>. Oxford University, 1871.<br /><br /> Nolan, Cathal J. <em>The Age of Wars of Religion</em>. Greenwood, 2006.<br /><br /> Scott, Richard Bodley and Peter Dennis. <em>Eternal Empire</em>. Osprey, 2008.<br /><br /> Turnbull, Stephen. <em>The Hussite Wars</em>. Osprey, 2004. </span></p>','2011-06-17','969498811215','zizka1.jpg','zizka2.jpg','Jan Zizka','The One-Eyed Czech asskicker.',''),('Joseph Henri Maurice Richard','August 4, 1921','May 27, 2000','Montreal, Quebec','20th-century Canadian Athlete','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">I don\'t write about sports heroes very often on the website. While I love all manner of sports ranging from professional football to underground Russian competitive slap-fighting, generally speaking I like to take the time to differentiate between a guy who\'s really good at something and a guy who is badass. Maurice Richard was both.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Professional Ice Hockey is one of those sports that breeds badasses. Not only is the game itself utterly over-the-top violent as fuck, with giant dudes body-checking each other with an endless series of mid-ice Newtonian collasions that give head-on car accidents a run for their money, but there\'s also something to be said for the fact that there are provisions explicitly built into the rule book solely for the purpose of letting you bare-knuckle kick the shit out of your opponents when the numbers on the scoreboard aren\'t going your way (or simply just because the other guy looks like a smarmy jacknut that needs to get the symmetry of his face realigned by a haymaker right hook to the jaw). In a somewhat-awesome twist, his game is so damn violent, brutal, and bloody that most pro teams actually have guys on their rosters who can\'t skate, shoot, or pass for shit, but who are just on the fucking roster because they\'re gigantically huge and capable of kicking the snot of out anyone on the other team. These Enforcers are key components of any lineup, solely because they keep the other team\'s goons from pummeling your team\'s best players. It\'s kind of like <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/battlegolf.html\">Battle Golf</a>, only the guys playing it are about a hundred pounds heavier and they\'re launching themselves as fast as possible on a thin sheet of ultra-slick ice with the intent of murdering the man across from them.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/richard1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><center><span style=\"font-size: small;\">In most sports, cold-cocking an opposing player repeatedly in the face with a series of gigantic Slovakian uppercuts would get you a multi-game suspension without pay.<br /><br />In hockey, it means you have to sit in the penalty box for five minutes.</span></center></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">If I was going to run a hockey badass in honor of the current Stanley Cup finals, the obvious choice would be to use one of those hard-as-fuck Goon Squad Enforcers, since guys like Dave Schultz and Peter Worrell were basically little more than professional old-school bare-fisted boxers who happened to own a set of ice skates and a hockey stick. But the legendary Maurice Richard of the Montreal Canadiens, a man believed by most hockey people to be one of the top five greatest players in the history of the game, was a bit of an anomaly &ndash; he was his team\'s best goal-scorer, and he also doubled as his own enforcer. Also he was scary as fuck, and one of the hardest no-bullshit bastards to ever play the sport. This guy was like the LeBron James of the NHL, only if instead of flopping on his ass every time someone slapped him on the wrist, he gritted his teeth and head-butted the offending party so hard the guy\'s eyes shot out through the back of his head like a pair of rubber bullets.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The oldest of six kids born to a French Canadian family outside Montreal, Richard grew up at a time when boys were forged into real men and for some bizarre reason every time our grandparents wanted to go anywhere they had to walk uphill through knee-high snow drifts infested with arctic wolves, radioactive nuclear fallout dust, and man-devouring Yetis. Maurice grew up playing baseball, boxing in local Gold Gloves tournaments, practicing hockey on the thin ice of a frozen river so dangerous it was permanently closed to the public, and helping his dad perform hard-ass fucking labor as a railroad machinist. When World War II broke out in 1939 and every Canadian was required to do his duty to kick Hitler\'s balls off, Richard attempted to enlist in the infantry, but he was rejected because the 18-year old had already broken both ankles, his femur, and both wrists while playing junior hockey, and none of his injuries had really healed up properly. When Richard couldn\'t fight in the trenches with a rifle, he still wanted to serve his country, so he tried to enlist as an Army machinist. He was rejected because he had dropped out of school at 16 to become a professional machinist and now he didn\'t have a high school diploma or an official trade certificate as a machinist (you have to love Army logic). With his dream of bayoneting Fascist stormtroopers on blood-soaked battlefields now unable to be fully realized, Maurice Richard decided that the closest thing to knife-fighting Nazis was playing professional ice hockey, so he took all four of his previously-broken limbs to play for the Montreal Canadiens.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/richard2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Richard, seen at right locking a submission hold on the<br />lifeless corpse of a man he has just ripped in half.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It\'s really beyond the scope of this article to get into an endless, largely-meaningless string of stats, figures, and Sabermetrics bullshit minutiae, so I\'ll keep this paragraph as brief as I can. In 1944, Maurice \"Rocket\" Richard became the first person to score 50 goals in the first 50 games of the season &ndash; a feat that has only been repeated by 4 other people in history. His 50 goals stood as a single-season record until 1961, when some guy beat it after they\'d increased the number of games in the regular season from 50 to 70. In 18 seasons with the Canadiens, the Right Winger won 8 Stanley Cups, went to 14 All-Star games, and led the league in goal scoring five times. He nearly doubled up the career NHL goal-scoring record (which had been set at 324) by notching 544 goals in his career, and to this day he\'s the only person in history to be awarded all Three Stars in a single game &ndash; meaning that he was voted the first, second, and third best player of the game. He was so good that the Hall of Fame waived the 3-year waiting period for induction, taking him into the Hall immediately upon his retirement, and nowadays the award given out to the NHL player who scores the most goals in a season is called the Maurice Richard Trophy. Let\'s just say that he was really fucking good at hockey and leave it at that.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Richard\'s badass cred doesn\'t come from being an amazing goal scorer or a talented hockey player &ndash; it comes from the fact that even though this 5\'10\" hardass wasn\'t anywhere close to being the biggest or the strongest guy on the ice, he never put up with anyone\'s obnoxious bullshit. He didn\'t go out and start fights &ndash; he was more than happy to kick your ass on the scoreboard and call it a night &ndash; but if people fucked with him, this scrappy French Canadian brawler would drop the gloves, cave in your face with his fists, and then score the game-winning slap shot by shooting the puck off your back like you\'re his own personal human golf tee. This motherfucker was so over-the-top awesome and hotheaded that the only way to strategize against the Canadians was to send your Goon Line out there and have guys constantly try to provoke him into flying off the handle and drawing a penalty, since every minute Richard was in the penalty box serving five for Fighting was a minute when he wasn\'t skating over your star Defenseman\'s groin or whipping a puck through your Goalie\'s abdomen.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/richard3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">No, this isn\'t a picture of prisoner torture in an underground military facility,<br />it\'s just Maurice Richard taking his uniform off after another routine day at the office.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The stories of Maurice Richard\'s badassitude are legendary. Like, one time he bought a new house for his family and spent all morning moving boxes, lugging furniture, and hauling a fucking grand piano into his new place (even in his prime Richard only made $25k a year, so he didn\'t have a ton of money to hire movers or anything &ndash; you have to love the days when athletes weren\'t all a bunch of overpaid primadonnas whining about how they only make ten million dollars a year when they should be making twelve), and when Richard showed up at the arena looking dead-ass tired and barely able to stand up his own buddy went out and put a bet down that the Rocket wouldn\'t score a point that night. Maurice went out and notched five goals and three assists, setting an NHL single-game scoring record.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Another time, Richard was skating hard to the goal, and a gigantic 210-pound Defenseman named Earl Siebert smashed into him with an earth-shattering check &ndash; not only did Richard remain on his feet and in control of the puck, but when Siebert <em>jumped on his back</em>, draping his arms and his legs around the Rocket like a goddamned chimpanzee, but Richard fucking <em>carried the dude 60 feet on his back</em>, put a deke on the Goalie, shot the puck into the back of the net, and then shook the Defenseman off, dumping Siebert unceremoniously into the corner boards.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Another awesome story involving Richard comes from Game 7 of the 1952 Stanley Cup semifinals. Early in the game, Richard took a two-handed stick swing to the face &ndash; a brutal blow that knocked the Rocket out on the spot, his body dropping to the ice like a sack of balls. Richard woke up in the locker room, groggy as hell, laying out on a trainer\'s table with a bunch of stitches in his face. He immediately got up, stumbled back up the tunnel, took a seat on the end of the bench, and asked the dude next to him what the score and the time were, since his post-concussion vision was so blurry and fucked up he couldn\'t read the scoreboard. As soon as Richard heard it was a tie game with only a few minutes remaining, he went over the boards, got into the game, took the puck, faked out a defender, and scored the game-winning goal with a bandage still strapped to his face, sending his time to the Stanley Cup Finals. The concussion Richard suffered was so intense that the next day he didn\'t even remember the game.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/richard5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Richard (right) shaking hands after the game while bleeding profusely out of his head.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Maurice Richard partied hard (one time he was so pumped up after scoring a game-winning goal that he broke his teammate\'s nose with a head-butt), but, like I said, he was also something of a total fucking hothead as well. One time he was doing a rehab start for the minors, and with the game well in hand Richard was ordered to sit out the third period, so he changed into street clothes and watched the end of the game from the stands. Well some idiot fan started talking shit about how Richard should have been out there playing, so Richard responded by calmly standing up, deliberately straightening his suit, and then knocking that douchebag fan unconscious with one lightning-quick punch, touching off a brawl/riot where players and fans all battled in the stands. The next day, when Richard asked if he was going to be getting sued for almost single-handedly taking on the entire stadium of fans in hand-to-hand combat, his coach told him that the guy that got cracked in the face was so pumped that he\'d received a black eye from Maurice Richard that he was running around town showing his busted eye to everyone who would look. Richard was never sued or arrested for the incident.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But that wasn\'t even close to the biggest riot Maurice Richard helped to instigate. During one particularly-violent game 1955, Le Rocket got high-sticked in the face with a nasty slash that opened a massive wound in the Rocket\'s head. Bleeding out-of-control from a gushing head wound wasn\'t enough to deter Richard from beating ass though, so the Rocket immediately skated up to the motherfucker that cheap-shotted him and smashed that suckbag twice with his stick, snapping the stick in half on the dude\'s body. When Richard dropped his gloves and went in for some good old-fashioned beat-down action on the man down on the ice in front of him, some moron ref came up to break up the fight so Richard, his vision almost completely obscured by blood, cracked the ref in the face twice, knocking that guy the fuck out as well. Local cops showed up in the locker room to arrest Richard for assault while the Rocket was back there getting 5 stitches in the face, but his teammates threw the police out of the locker room. The NHL President (a guy Richard had called out in the newspaper as \"a dictator\") suspended Richard for the rest of the season, since it was Richard\'s second incident of violence against referees (he\'d slapped a linesman in the face over a bullshit call a few months earlier). The dictator President then had the balls to show up to the a Canadiens\' home game the day after announcing the suspension, so rabid Richard fanatics greeted the Prez by slapping him in the face, throwing fruit at him, and then lobbing a tear gas grenade into his luxury box. The game was called on account of chemical warfare, and then 6,000 insane hockey fans went completely batshit crazy, tearing up the streets of Montreal in an over-the-top riot that did id=\"mce_marker\"00,000 of damage to the city. Today the incident is known as \"The Richard Riot\".</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/richard4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">True story: Many photographs of Maurice Richard are known to secret pure testosterone deposits.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Today Maurice \"Rocket\" Richard is something of a hero not only among Canadians and hockey fans, but also among his Quebecois brethren. I\'m not going to pretend that I understand anything about the civil rights situation of French Canadians in the 1950s, but it\'s my understanding that the Quebecois were something of an oppressed minority, and that they saw Richard as a cultural hero to their people, and they all looked up to him as a great sports hero. I don\'t know much about this, but I do know that any time you read anything written by a person who saw the Rocket play live, there\'s like an eerie reverence in their words &ndash; almost like they\'re talking more about a god than a mere mortal. I don\'t know much about that, either, but any god who straps steel blades to his feet and breaks wooden sticks on his enemies\' backs is a god I\'m pretty sure I can get on board with.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Maurice Richard died in 2000 at the age of 78. Over 11,000 people lined the streets of Montreal to attend his funeral.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/richard6.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"What a terrifying sight for a goalie &ndash; there was nothing like Richard at top speed.\"<br /><br />- Sugar Jim Henry, Boston Bruins goalie</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.legendsofhockey.net/LegendsOfHockey/jsp/LegendsMember.jsp?mem=p196108&amp;type=Player&amp;page=bio&amp;list=#photo\">Legends of Hockey</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://ourhistory.canadiens.com/player/Maurice-Richard\">Montreal Canadiens Site</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00016409.html\">ESPN</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Richard\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Falla, Jack. <em>Open Ice</em>. John Wiley, 2008.<br /><br /> Fischler, Stan and Shirley. <em>Who\'s Who in Hockey</em>.&nbsp; Andrews McNeel, 2003.<br /><br /> Melancon, Benoit. <em>The Rocket</em>. Greystone, 2009.<br /><br /> Stewart, Monte. <em>Great Right Wingers</em>. Heritage House, 2006.<br /><br /> Zweig, Eric. <em>Twenty Greatest Hockey Goals</em>. Dundurn Press, 2010. </span></p>','2011-06-10','389342812178','richard1.jpg','richard61.png','Maurice Richard','One of hockey\'s all-time toughest men.','This is not the face of a man who fucks around.'),('Carcharodon Megalodon','28,000,000 BC','1,500,000 BC','The Ocean','Prehistoric Dinosaur Monster','<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">I have no idea what the fuck \"verified anthropophagous inclinations\" means, but I do know that sharks freak me the hell out. On the one hand, I\'m so completely fascinated by them that any time I see anything shark-related on TV I\'m sucked in by some inexplicable primal urge to watch intently while these things annihilate seals with their horrible horrible teeth, but on the flip side I\'m more terrified of those mammal-obliterating aquatic murder machines than any other creature, person, or construct in real life or fiction. I\'m not even kidding &ndash; I\'d rather battle Cthulhu in hand-to-hand combat armed with a foam pool noodle than tread water in the ocean within a hundred yards of a Great White. Sure, a teeming face full of grisly tentacle-y death would be simultaneously painful and humiliating, but it\'s still better than chomped into tiny pieces by several rows of serrated teeth while staring into the endless black recesses of some emotionless beast\'s expressionless dead eyes.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">For starters, sharks are nature\'s ultimate killing machines. Obscenely-gigantic death factories with an insatiable hunger, no capacity for pity, and the disturbing ability to attack their unsuspecting prey from any direction, at any time, whenever they want, with enough power and ferocity to dismember you instantly and gruesomely. Their cold, dead eyes are windows to their black, all-devouring souls, and these permanently-pissed demonic spawn of Satan not only disembowel mammals, fish, and other unsuspecting idiots in roughly the time it takes most divers to barf into their rebreathers &ndash; they also hate everything that you love, like hot bikini babes, harpoon cannons, and not being horrifically mutilated. The only thing they even remotely derive joy from is consuming the blood of the innocent &ndash; the second you accidentally cut your hand on the poop deck and spill a single drop of crimson into the water these things freak the fuck out, come flying up from the murky blackness of the ocean, and start gnawing on your ship and tearing you and all of your friends into chum (which they then suck down like a bowl of chicken tortilla soup). Fuck, sharks are so evil they even attack other wounded sharks &ndash; as soon as their good buddy gets a cut and they smell his weakness they rip him apart and wear his skin around like a hat.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Hello, I have come to kill you.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Nowadays we usually like to think of the Great White Shark as being the most badass thing to ever live. And sure, it probably is the most fearsome predator on Earth <em>at this particular point in history</em>, but the Great White is actually just a smaller, probably-pussier version of the most badass shark-related monstrosity this planet has ever seen &ndash; the <em>Carcharodon Megalodon</em>. Mega Shark. The world\'s ultimate predator. An aberration against sanity. A prehistoric atrocity of nature so utterly gigantic and freak-out scary that looking at some of the pictures on this page might scar most mortals to point where they\'re going to spend the rest of their lives having fucking seizures and panic attacks any time they\'re near a body of water larger than a pint glass.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But, before we get into that, here\'s some shit for you to chew on &ndash; a size comparison chart between you (that tiny blue guy), a Great White Shark (the green one), and Megalodon (either the red or the gray, depending on whether the creature\'s actual size was on the low end or the high end of scientific estimates).</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon3.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Attention all hands, commence pants-crapping immediately.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Known by scholarly scientist types as \"MEGA TOOTH\" (usually pronounced by most professors and paleontologist in roughly the same way the monster truck announcers on TV say \"GRAVE DIGGER\"), was a no-bullshit, real-life thing that lived somewhere between 2 and 15 million years ago, give or take an epoch. Patrolling the waters back in the day when <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/titanoboa.html\">TITANOBOA</a> was doing his thing and everything in the world was way bigger (like even bigger than things are in Texas today), MEGA TOOTH was the largest marine predator in Earth\'s history &ndash; and that includes those stupid dinosaurs with the flippers.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Based on its teeth and vertebrae (the only two parts of the creature we\'ve ever been able to find), we believe that the Megalodon was somewhere between 50 and100 feet from snout to tail, making it roughly two-thirds the length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. It was not only two to three times bigger than the world\'s biggest Great White Shark, but the fact that it could open its mouth 9 feet wide means that it could actually <em>swallow a Great White whole</em> if he was in the mood to show one of those things how much they suck compared to him. This thing was even bigger than the impossibly-huge Bruce the Shark from <em>Jaws</em>, and what\'s worse is that at one point this was a <em>real fucking thing</em> that actually lived in the ocean.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">I feel like I should stress that this is not a Photoshopped image.<br /><br />(Image courtesy of <a href=\"http://www.ha.com/\">Heritage Auctions</a>.)</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Amateur, professional, and semi-pro paleoichthyologists find Megalon teeth every once in a while (like all sharks, Megalodon shed his teeth once they got dull and replaced them with a gleaming-new set of razor-sharp chompers that would have made the Jaws from the James Bond movies jealous) and it usually freaks them out because these things are 7 inches long, serrated, and really really fucking frightening &ndash; especially when you consider that the reconstructed Megalodon mouth in that picture with the cute girl is nine feet high by eleven feet across, and that there were two or three rows of these things jutting out of it from every direction.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The tooth on the far right is from a Great White.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">If you\'re wondering what the fuck you eat with a nine foot tall mouth stuffed with 7-inch spikes, the correct answer is <em>whatever the fuck you want</em>. We\'re pretty sure that Megalodons mostly ate whales, drilling their jagged pointy fangs into them with the most powerful bite strength of any creature that ever lived :&nbsp; In 2008 a team of researchers decided somehow that this guy could chomp down with a bite strength that measured somewhere between 10 and 18 tons of force. For comparison, Great Whites bite with 1.8 tons of force. Lions only bite with 600 pounds (pussies).</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Megalodons were ripping shit up way after the dinosaurs got meteor-ed out of existence, so he probably didn\'t actually eat T-Rexes or Plesiosaurs or shit, no matter how awesome the artwork depicting that might be. Shark researchers have found things like tin cans, giant squid parts, and old shoes in the stomachs of Great Whites, though, so if these MEGATOOTH fuckers were at all similar to their descendants, they probably ate any goddamned thing they could get their teeth on &ndash; sheep, speedboats, small continents, and god knows what else. They\'re like the goats of the ocean, only they\'re gigantic, not hilarious looking, and constructed from pure evil made manifest into flesh.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon4g.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The main point of reference we like to use for history\'s all-time apex predator is the Great White, but in reality Megalodon was like the Great White\'s badass awesome uncle who rides into town every once in a while on a Harley, gets hammered and smashes beer cans on his head at the family reunion, and then burns rubber out of there with your brother\'s topless wife riding on the back seat. If he hunted with the same tactics of the Great White (which is probably not outside the realm of possibilities), he would have attacked his prey by racing up from below, swimming up at it at unbelievable speeds, and disabling it on the first pass with a chomp to the flippers, legs, or propulsion systems. Once the target was disabled, the Megalodon then took his time devouring it slowly just to be a dick. You\'ve probably seen the <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T70ecorspEg\">Air Jaws shit</a> before, but the idea of a 100-foot shark propelling 50 tons of mass &ndash; roughly the same weight of 10 adults elephants or one of those gigantic construction cranes &ndash; and potentially sending it rifling through the water with enough force to <em>get airborne</em> is insane and scary and also kind of awesome in a weird sadistic way.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">And now, since I don\'t have enough text to accommodate the number of awesome pictures I found to illustrate this piece, I\'m just going to post some shit here without any real explanation:</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon4a.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon4b.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon4c.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon4d.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon4e.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon4f.jpeg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">One time I was telling a friend of mine about the Megalodon and his head exploded.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">In fiction, Megalodon does pretty much all of the awesome shit you would expect a giant Great White to do, plus a bunch of other things you didn\'t really expect a battleship-sized shark to attempt. In Robin Brown\'s book <em>Megalodon</em> he hauls ass around the North Atlantic eating nuclear subs like sausages, but it\'s in the <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/scifi.html\">Sci-Fi Channel Original</a> movies that he truly shines. Between <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa7ck5mcd1o\">Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus</a> and <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY4hnBOjDdg\">Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus</a>, this thing crushes a U.S. Navy warship with his teeth, bites the Golden Gate Bridge in half, tail-slaps an F-18 out of mid-air, battles the Kraken, and chases around Urkel, Debbie Gibson, the doctor from <em>Voyager</em> and that dude from <em>Torchwood</em>.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Also, this happens:</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/I16_8l0yS-g\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"425\" height=\"349\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Yes, you did just see that correctly. It\'s a Megalodon leaping up out of the water and eating a 747 out of the sky.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Like I said, the jumping out of the water thing might not have been a total impossibility for this thing, no matter how terrifying the concept might be. This clip from <em>Shark Attack 3: Megalodon</em>, however, probably differs slightly from the true physiological nature of <em>C. Megalodon</em>, but you can overlook that because of all the gratuitous cleavage and also because the friggin\' mega shark eats an entire a life raft full of rich people in tuxedos like he\'s wolfing down an enchilada:</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/1nzd0R_OeOc\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"425\" height=\"349\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Thankfully the Megalodon is extinct today, mostly because there\'s not much food left for them and because swallowing dudes on jetskis isn\'t as nutritious as you\'d think. There was also something I read about whales migrating to colder water and growing blubber to escape this thing (makes sense), and then when the cold-blooded shark couldn\'t follow them he died out (also makes sense). Some folks think the Megalodon might still be around today, but even hardcore cryptozoologists are pretty sure this is probably crap. Like, for instance back in 1918 some New Zealand lobstermen claimed they saw a 100-foot Great White on the high seas, but when the Guinness World Record office was like, \"Pics or it didn\'t happen\", they weren\'t able to back it up.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Let\'s all hope they were just full of shit.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/otherprehistoriclife/a/megalodon-facts.htm%27%3EAbout.com%3C/a%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Ca%20href=\">ThinkQuest</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/10203\">HistoryBlog</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/seamonsters/factfiles/megalodon.shtml\">BBC Fact File</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalodon\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Coleman, Loren and Jerome Clark.&nbsp; <em>Cryptozoology A to Z</em>.&nbsp; Simon and Schuster, 1999.<br /><br /> Ellis, Richard.&nbsp; <em>Monsters of the Sea</em>.&nbsp; Globe Pequot, 2006.<br /><br /> Klimley, A. Peter.&nbsp; <em>Great White Sharks</em>.&nbsp; Academic Press, 1998.<br /><br /> Peschak, Thomas P. and Michael C. Scholl.&nbsp; <em>South Africa\'s Great White Shark</em>.&nbsp; Struik, 2006. </span></p>','2011-06-03','891929112476','megalodon1.jpg','megalodon4g.jpg','Megalodon','The most terrifying thing ever.','\"Perhaps of all the monsters, the giant shark is the most enduring. It incorporates virtually every element that we require of our mythological sea beasts: great size, mysterious habits, verified anthropophagous inclinations, and a history that goes back to the beginnings of recorded time. More than Leviathan, more than the sea serpent, more than the Kraken, Megalodon may be the ultimate monster.\"\r\n\r\n- Richard Ellis, Monsters of the Sea'),('Gary I. Gordon and Randall D. Shughart','1960 (Gordon), 1958 (Shughart)','October 3, 1993','Lincoln, ME, USA  (Gordon) and Lincoln, NE, USA (Shughart)','20th-century American Soldier','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The situation was grim on the afternoon of October 3rd, 1993. Things had been fucked from the beginning &ndash; what was supposed to have been a routine, thirty-minute raid to bust in and snatch the brutal Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid from the confines of his Mogadishu hideout quickly devolved into a clusterfuck of epic proportions. One Black Hawk helicopter had already been shot down &ndash; hit by a salvo of RPG fire, stranding teams of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force operatives on the ground deep inside enemy territory, surrounded by people actively trying to kill them. The entire city had completely exploded into a full-blown warzone in the span of a little less than an hour, as men from Aidid\'s militia rushed out from buildings across the city, armed to the teeth with assault rifles, pistols, rocket-propelled grenades, and whatever other nasty weaponry they could get their hands on. And now, just because things weren\'t fucked-up enough already, a second Black Hawk &ndash; one that had been sent in to provide assistance with this rapidly-degenerating situation &ndash; had also taken an RPG to the tail rotor and was now spewing black smoke as it crash-landed in a residential neighborhood dozens of blocks from the battle.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">As Warrant Officer Michael Durant\'s Black Hawk, code named <em>Super Six-Four</em>, smashed down in a cloud of dust and smoke, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart watched helplessly from the deck of their Black Hawk as it maneuvered over to the crash site. These elite Delta Force snipers had initially been assigned to provide precision air-to-ground fire support to the operation, but now with <em>Super Six-Four</em> sitting helplessly in the middle of enemy territory like a six-million-dollar sitting duck, its crew all either dead or critically wounded, the herculean task had suddenly fallen on them &ndash; and them alone &ndash; to provide covering fire and keep any surviving crew members alive until a ground team could arrive and secure the area.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/gordonandshughart1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The crash site of <em>Super Six-Four</em>.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But the cavalry wasn\'t coming any time soon. Gordon and Shughart knew that as they looked out across the burning cityscape of Mogadishu. They knew that fewer than a hundred Rangers and Delta operatives were currently pinned down on the other side of the city, fighting for their lives, surrounded by thousands of well-armed Somali militia troops with explosives and heavy machine guns. The U.S. convoy that had been sent to rescue the stranded soldiers had been hammered by RPG fire from city windows, and they weren\'t making any progress through the maze of city streets that had been expertly blockaded by Aidid\'s men. <em>Super Six-Four</em> was completely cut off, and now a growing mob of AK47-toting militia was sprinting down the streets of Mogadishu, making a beeline towards the smashed helicopter and her severely battered crew.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Looking down at the wreckage of the Black Hawk, watching helplessly as Warrant Officer Durant sitting there in the pilot\'s chair of the crippled machine desperately fighting for his life, trying to pick off swarms of marauding militia men with an MP5 submachine gun set on single-shot fire, Delta Force sniper team leader Gary Gordon made the toughest call any man could possibly make.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">He was going down there.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/gordonandshughart2.jpeg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"Without a doubt, I owe my life to these two men and their bravery.<br />Those guys came in when they had to know it was a losing battle.<br />There was nobody else left to back them up.<br />If they had not come in, I wouldn\'t have survived.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">With the crowd rapidly closing in, and realizing that there was no chance for the downed pilot to survive the oncoming tidal wave of gunslinging humanity, Sergeant Gordon boldly requested to be placed on the ground so that he and Sergeant Shughart could set up a defensive perimeter and protect the downed helicopter and her crew. His request was denied. Twice. It was too dangerous, the commander argued, which is seriously fucking saying something considering that Sergeant Gordon\'s current job involved shooting a sniper rifle out of a moving helicopter while ground troops launched RPGs and shot AK-47s at him. But this was too much. He was volunteering for a suicide mission. Gandalf wasn\'t going to ride in on a white horse and save the day with a blinding flash of light. They were going to be going in alone.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart couldn\'t just sit there and do nothing while wounded Americans were down there fighting for their lives against impossible odds.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">On his third request, Gordon received permission to hit the ground and take the attack in.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/gordonandshughart3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"I never saw where they came from, but they had to come from the rear,<br />otherwise I would have seen them approach. It was a surreal feeling.<br />I mean it was like this awful situation that you just realized your in is now suddenly over.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The pilot of Gordon and Shughart\'s Black Hawk first attempted to land right next to the crash site of <em>Super Six-Four</em>, but the LZ was too hot &ndash; a flood of small arms fire, RPGs, and an excess of ground debris and fire made insertion impossible. So instead of putting down in the middle of the action, Gordon and Shughart jumped from the hovering helicopter 100 meters from the crash site, getting boots on the ground just seconds before an RPG smashed into the Black Hawk, blowing the door gunner\'s leg off and severely injuring many of the crew (in a related tale of impossible badassitude, the pilot of this Black Hawk ended up flying the bird home with a bullet in his shoulder and his co-pilot unconscious). The two Delta snipers moved quickly through the shanties of the neighborhood, fighting the enemy solely with their rifles and pistols. Before long, they\'d fought through the streets to reach the clearing where the smoking hulk of <em>Super Six-Four</em> lay motionless.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">They arrived just in time. Warrant Officer Durant was still strapped in the cockpit, running low on ammunition, his leg broken in several places and a couple of his vertebrae crushed but continuing to fight like a wildman. Three of the other crew members were in even worse shape, barely alive and in no condition to fight.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Gordon and Shughart were the best of the best. Green Berets. Delta Force. Veterans of countless firefights and career soldiers who always remained cool no matter how ridiculously the odds were stacked against them. The two men rushed to the cockpit, checked on the pilot, and pulled him from the wreckage without further aggravating the man\'s grievous injuries. They then moved him and the three wounded crew members back away from the wreckage, gave some ammunition to Durant and proceeded to set up the best perimeter they could muster, considering they were just two guys preparing to stand off against pretty much the entire fucking city of Mogadishu with nothing more than a pair of assault rifles and pistols.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/gordonandshughart4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><center><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"Their actions were professional and deliberate to the point that they looked like they were planning a parking lot. They didn\'t seem alarmed the situation that we were in. </span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It was just focused on the task, doing what they needed to do to improve our situation, and get through it, get us rescued. Whatever it is they needed to do.\"</span></center></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The mob arrived. Gordon and Shughart knew they were just going to have to go Horde Mode against an armed militia and hope that there might be any possible chance that they could hold the attack off long enough for rescue to show up. But that wasn\'t likely, and they knew it. These guys were the cavalry. The only thing standing between an angry throng of pissed-off Somalis and four critically wounded Americans.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Militia troops swarmed in from every side, scrambling over the rubble, AK-47s spewing lead. Some of them just ran screaming out into the middle of the road, without any cover, desperately trying to reach the Americans and achieve glory in combat or die for the cause in the process (Gordon and Shughart helped them out with the latter). Ducking behind cover, popping and firing, the Delta snipers laid down a wall of death for anyone who came close, blasting away with burst-fire with their rifles and switching over to double-tap pistol fire when necessary, trying their damnedest to separate the armed militia targets from the innocent civilians on the street. Carrying only those two firearms, this pair of death-dealing Delta operatives fought tenaciously, refusing to give up ground, defending at all costs, and surgically mowing down their foes while assault rifle rounds pinged off nearby debris and enemy troops chucked hand grenades at their positions.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/gordonandshughart5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"When you get in a situation like that, I think pretty much without exception, what I\'ve heard described as a feeling of I\'m not fighting for my country anymore, I\'m not fighting for my paycheck, I\'m not fighting for the flag, I\'m fighting for the guy next to me. I\'m fighting for my comrades. I\'m gonna do whatever it takes so that we get out of this alive. And uh, I\'ve heard that said before, and that, that\'s what it boils down to.<br /><br />I mean when I went back in there, I went back in there because I knew the Rangers on the ground needed our help. When Randy and Gary came into my crash site they knew the chances were pretty good they wouldn\'t make it out alive, but they did it because they knew that if they didn\'t take action, we were gonna die. And that\'s why they did it. \"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">There\'s some debate over who was killed in action first. The official military documents say it was Shughart. Durant is pretty sure it was Gordon. I would argue that it doesn\'t really matter. These two men &ndash; Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart &ndash; are going to be inextricably linked together forever in the annals of American military history, and I\'m completely confident that either of these men would have reacted the exact same way under fire.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Whatever the case may be, one of the snipers was finally shot with a mortal wound. Durant recalls the operative\'s last words as simply, \"Damn, I\'m hit,\" said plainly in a matter-of-fact way that \"sounded almost irritated\". The lone surviving Delta operator circled back around the nose of the Black Hawk, back into Durant\'s field of vision, handed the wounded pilot an assault rifle, and asked if there was any extra ammo in the helicopter. Durant told him about the M-16s the crew chiefs kept between the seats, so the lone survivor rushed over, grabbed a handful of mags, and got on the radio to request a status report. He was told that reinforcements would be there \"in a little while.\"</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">He knew what that meant.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The Delta operative showed no emotion as he walked back over to Durant, stopping only to say one thing &ndash; Good luck &ndash; before circling back around the front of the helicopter and taking the entire city on by himself. When this fearless soldier ran out of rifle ammunition, he took on the mob with only his pistol, but finally, after an heroic last stand worthy of the greatest warriors in history, the last member of this unbelievably-badass Delta Sniper Team was finally overwhelmed by a coordinated attack from the Somali National Alliance, and the position was overrun by a sea of militia troops and Somali citizens.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart\'s sacrifice would not have been in vain. Thanks to their ferocious defense of the crash site, giving up their lives to aid their fellow soldiers, Michael Durant was spared by the mob, imprisoned briefly, and survived to return home to his wife and kids. If these two men had done nothing, Durant would certainly have been killed while still strapped into his pilot\'s chair.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The Somalis would report at least 25 men dead at the crash site of <em>Super Six-Four</em>, with dozens more wounded and injured. Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart would be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Let\'s keep them in mind when we\'re grilling burgers for Memorial Day on Monday.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/mr_9hpVi9Ns\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"425\" height=\"349\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.history.army.mil/html/moh/somalia.html\">Medal of Honor Citations</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/weta/americanvalor/stories/durant_interview2.html\">Interview with Mike Durant</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_%281993%29#Engagement\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Bowden, Michael.&nbsp; <em>Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War</em>.&nbsp; Signet, 2001.<br /><br /> DeKever, Andrew J.&nbsp; <em>Here Rests in Honored Glory</em>.&nbsp; Lulu, 2008.<br /><br /> Griswold, Terry.&nbsp; <em>Delta: America\'s Elite Counterterrorist Force</em>.&nbsp; Zenith, 2005. </span></p>','2011-05-27','323854013393','gordonandshughart.gif','gordonandshughart2.jpeg','Gordon and Shughart','Delta Force snipers who fought a heroic last stand in Mogadishu.','\"It was terribly risky, maybe even hopeless. But one or two properly-armed, well-trained soldiers could hold off an undisciplined mob indefinitely.  Shughart and Gordon were experts at killing and staying alive.  They were serious, career soldiers, trained to get hard, ugly things done.  They saw opportunity where others could see only danger.  Like the other operators, they prided themselves on staying cool and effective even in extreme danger.  They lived and trained endlessly for moments like this.  If there were a chance to succeed, these two believed they would.\"'),('Bessie Lee Pittman','May 11, 1906','August 9, 1980','Muscogee, FL, USA','WWII American Pilot','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">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 fucking 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.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">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 &ndash; 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.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">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.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/cochran.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Jackie\'s husband, by the way, was the CEO of something called the Atlas Corporation.<br />Whenever I read that, I just keep thinking about those talking vending machines in <em>Borderlands</em>.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Zipping from stop to stop in a biplane selling her shit was kind of a practical matter, but Cochran quickly determined that she totally fucking 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 &ndash; well above the suggested ceiling for the aircraft she was piloting &ndash; 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.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">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 &ndash; 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 <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/earhart.html\">Amelia Earhart</a> (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 fucking airplane for a little over five.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/cochran3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">A few years later, some horrible shit started going down in Europe &ndash; 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 fucks 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.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">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) &ndash; 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.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/cochran4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">WASPs</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">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 <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yeager.html\">Chuck Yeager</a>, 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 fucking 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 &ndash; 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 <em>name</em> 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 fucking 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 fucking 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.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">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.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">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.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/cochran5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Cochran and Yeager chillin\'.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2011/05/0518jackie-cochran-breaks-sound-barrier-first-woman/\" target=\"blank\">Wired.com</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://waspmuseum.org/jackie-cochran-biography/\" target=\"blank\">WASP Museum</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Explorers_Record_Setters_and_Daredevils/cochran/EX25.htm\" target=\"blank\">U.S. Centennial of Flight</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/cochran1.htm\" target=\"blank\">Florida International University</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Cochran\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Cook, Bernard A.&nbsp; <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Women and War</span>.&nbsp; ABC-CLIO, 2006.<br /><br /> Douglas, Deborah G., et al.&nbsp; <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">American Women and Flight Since 1940</span>.&nbsp; Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2004.<br /><br /> Duncan, Joyce.&nbsp; <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Ahead of Their Time</span>.&nbsp; Greenwood, 2002.<br /><br /> Heinemann, Sue.&nbsp; <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Timelines of American Women\'s History</span>.&nbsp; Penguin, 1996. </span></p>','2011-05-20','551478813602','cochran1.jpg','cochran2.jpg','Jacqueline Cochran','The most accomplished female pilot in history.',''),('François-Dominique Toussaint L\'Ouverture','May 20, 1743','April 7, 1803','Haiti','18th-century Haitian General','<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Being a plantation slave in the New World\'s Caribbean colonies wasn\'t exactly a super happy fun time picnic of rainbows, ultrasuede teddy bears and delicious handfuls of pastel-colored tropical fruit flavored Skittles. I know that my cubicle-dweller day job provides me with little in the way of actual first-hand experience to substantiate this wild, completely over-the-top claim, but in my defense, I\'m pretty sure that most big-shot History PhDs these days agree that backbreaking fourteen-hour days working hard labor in burning hot temperatures and hygrometer-snapping humidity isn\'t exactly the most enriching character-building life experience a human being could possibly endure. It was a brutal, thankless, grueling existence that sucked a bag of fiery dicks with the efficiency of a bagless Dyson, and there\'s really no way you can argue otherwise without coming off sounding like a total fucking jackass. To give you an idea of what I\'m talking about, take this into consideration: When the Spanish and French first settled the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), they enslaved the local natives and made them work the sugar cane and coffee fields &ndash; the end result was that a giant chunk of the indigenous population ended up dying from exhaustion, dehydration, and disease, and the European plantation owners had to go out and import slaves from Africa to pick up the slack and fill out their conscripted work force.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Francois-Dominique Toussaint L\'Ouverture was born into this seemingly-endless cycle of spine-crushing misery, but didn\'t start the rebellion that would overthrow the government and abolish the slavery institution that had dominated Haiti for nearly a hundred years. In some ways, civil disobedience in the form of armed rebellion had been going on since the beginning &ndash; there had always been reports of slaves getting sick of the whole forced-labor bullshit, escaping into the mountains, and launching guerilla raids on plantations to plunder food, supplies, and weapons &ndash; but the big impetus that got the whole \"fuck slavery\" movement kick-started actually took place in the rural parts of the Haitian countryside in 1791. It was around this time that a loosely-organized group of mega-pissed slaves took advantage of the fact that the French homeland was a little busy with that whole French Revolution / Guillotine Everyone / Total Fucking Anarchy thing, and they seized the opportunity to rise up and wreak some havoc on the jackasses who had been viciously oppressing them for the entire duration of their natural lives. These pissed-off ex-slaves grabbed a hold of pitchforks, cane knives, shovels, or whatever other vicious farming implements they could convert into eye-puncturing weaponry of facial destruction and went on a murder-death-kill rampage across northern Haiti, massacring plantation owners and their families in admittedly-horrific ways, burning their shit into cinders, and generally just laying waste to the countryside with the realness. The Spanish government, seeing a deliciously-diabolical opportunity to have a bunch of renegade slaves weaken the French army to the point where the Spanish military could swoop in there like vultures and claim the entire island for themselves, eagerly provided money and supplies and weapons to help sustain the revolt. Good work guys, hang in there, liberty is close, etc.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/toussaint1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The island of Hispaniola in the 18th century.<br />The French owned the pink, the Spanish had the yellow,<br />and the blue is territory that was owned by the Brits for a while.<br />Toussaint L\'Ouverture is about to kick all of their asses and take this entire island by force.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">As a man who suffered under the yoke of slavery for over thirty years and could fully appreciate all the ways in which it bit a donkey\'s ass, Toussaint L\'Ouverture hated the institution about as much as anybody ever hated anything, so when he heard word that there was a revolution brewing in the countryside and people were freaking out with extreme violence, he grabbed a cavalry saber and ran out there to get a piece of the action for himself. A few months into the revolt, Toussaint signed on with a local rebel group, working first as a medical doctor tending to the sick and wounded, but eventually he determined that was too tame so he got involved with tactical and strategic decisions as well. An incredibly well-read military mastermind who had spent his life voraciously blowing through badass shit like Julius Caesar, Plutarch, Machiavelli, Stoic philosophy, and French Enlightenment literature (which might not be bone-crushingly badass, but hey, it\'s good to be well rounded), Toussaint gave the slave revolt the one thing it desperately needed &ndash; organization. Cohesiveness. Direction. Awesome-looking jackets. A guy who could strike a sweet pose on a horse. A student of military history and philosophy, Toussaint whipped his already-formidable army from a rag-tag group of disorganized civilian soldiers to an efficient fighting force capable of whipping serious asses, instructing his men in the \"European style\" of combat, drilling them in tactics and marching orders, and eventually taking on French regular infantry units in both pitched battles and hit-and-run <em>Red Dawn</em> guerilla attacks. Toussaint, being a warrior of honor who wasn\'t really down with butchering innocent bystanders just because they looked like maybe they had at some point in their lives been down with slavery, also worked to tone down that whole insane over-the-top brutality that had been a mainstay of the revolution up to this point, ordering his troops not to just run around wantonly massacring every white person they could find. Yes, he wanted vengeance as well, but arbitrarily impaling civilians wasn\'t necessarily the best way to go about it. He also opened negotiations with both his French enemies and his Spanish allies, communicating with them not as a desperate rebel leader, but as a calm-and-collected political diplomat.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Toussaint and his armies beat the holy living dogshit out of the French for a while, and his tactical genius was so impressive that his French adversaries ended up giving him the nickname \"L\'Ouverture\", which simply means \"The guy who finds the opening.\" Mostly they were talking about Toussaint\'s innate ability to find the weakness in his enemies\' lines and exploit it, but the dude did also supposedly father something like 16 kids so who perhaps other explanations are also appropriate as well. Either way, thanks to his badass battle skillz it wasn\'t long before the slave revolt turned into a full on organized revolution, and the tide of battle was quickly turning against his former French masters. Victory was close. You have no chance to survive make your time HA HA HA.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But then something weird happened. Just when the final conquest of his enemies seemed within his grasp, things got a little tricky for our man Toussaint &ndash; in May of 1794 the government of France formally declared an abolition of slavery in the colonies (something Toussaint\'s Spanish allies admittedly had no intention of doing), and the soon-to-be defeated French governor personally came up and asked Toussaint to come to his side and defend the island against the Spanish &ndash; who by the way were now starting to send regular army units on a mission of conquest.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/toussaint7.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Battling the French forces.<br />I particularly love the dude on the left holding the severed head.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Since Toussaint\'s sole goal in the war was freedom for his people and the end of slavery, and the French were offering it in cold, hard legislation while the Spanish were content to sit back and just say, \"Yeah dudes it\'ll be awesome, trust me! Just drive the French off the island, install us as your new all-powerful overlords, and we\'ll sit around the campfire all night long singing Kumbaya in Spanish and drinking awesome sangrias\" the decision wasn\'t quite as mind-racking as you might think. Toussaint pulled the Spanish flags down from his forts, ran up the French flags, offered safe passage back to Spanish lines for any of his men who disagreed with his decision, and just like that the former enemy of France immediately went to war on the side of his former masters, taking on not only the Spanish, but also a British army that suddenly showed up out of nowhere for some reason.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Toussaint L\'Ouverture and his now-hardened core of ex-slave asskickers immediately proceeded to beat the crap out of both the Spanish and the British and whatever else stood in their way, driving the enemies of France from Saint-Dominque in the span of just a few months of relentless kicks to the metaphorical nutsacks. The Spanish were pushed back to their side of the island, and a heaping dose of cannon fire and Yellow Fever (which was known to the Brits by the significantly less-sexy moniker \"The Black Vomit\") decimated the British army to the point where a couple English regiments actually fucking mutinied when they received orders to reinforce the units on Haiti.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/toussaint2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"Brothers and friends, I am Toussaint L\'Ouverture; perhaps my name has made itself known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want liberty and equality to reign in Saint-Domingue. I am working to make that happen. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight for the same cause.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Once the Spanish and British had been expelled and slavery abolished, the raging war of ultimate insanity came to an end. Toussaint, through his sheer unstoppable asskicking skills, now found himself as the most prominent commander on the winning side of the war, a distinction that brought a large number of eager reinforcements flocking in his direction, and a distinction that also afforded him the sort of godly prestige you can really only acquire by being the most badass military commander in the history of your country (i.e. groupies). Sure, the French were still in charge of the island, but Toussaint had achieved his ultimate goal &ndash; every man in the land was free, all people were equals under the law, and every employee in Haiti was receiving a paid wage for their work.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Toussaint was just getting started. A few months later, in March of 1796, the French governor of Haiti was captured and imprisoned by a band of pissed-off ex-plantation owners that were all butt-hurt about that \"violent overthrow of the feudal system\" thing, so Toussaint L\'Ouverture marched his army out, beat the ungodly shitballs out of the counter-revolutionary faction, and rescued the Governor. For bailing out the gov, Toussaint was subsequently appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Haiti (which at the time was still known as Saint-Dominique... did I already mention that?), and promoted to commander-in-chief of the island\'s military forces. With the army now under his able control, Toussaint went on a rampage, marching first against the remnants of the British forces in Haiti, driving them completely off the island, and then blitzing across the border into the Spanish-controlled area of the island, crushing the Spanish military with his surprise attack and sending them all running back to their mamas in Europe. By 1801, this former plantation slave had led a full-scale revolution, demolished the institution of slavery, liberated his people from over a century of servitude, conquered the entire island of Hispaniola, beaten up on the Spanish, British, and French regular armies, and appointed himself Governor-for-Life of Haiti. Not too shabby.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/toussaint8.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Why yes, I am awesome. Thank you for noticing.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Unfortunately for Toussaint, he wouldn\'t have much of a chance to enjoy his victory. You see, all this unstoppable asskicking eventually caught the attention of France\'s First Consul, and our friend Napoleon Bonaparte wasn\'t really the sort of guy who liked to share the spotlight when it came to military genius-ness. Napoleon was somewhat concerned that Toussaint had aspirations of an independent Haiti on his mind, so in 1802 the soon-to-be-Emperor sent his brother-in-law to the islandwith an army of 20,000 soldiers. Ostensibly the group was being dispatched to reinforce Toussaint\'s men, but in reality their true motives were far more ulterior (and also sinister).</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Toussaint had actually already put a pretty brilliant plan in place to fight against a potential invasion against Haiti &ndash; he would burn the coastal cities to the ground, retreat to the mountains in the center of the island, wait for the insane parasitic tropical diseases to take their toll on the invaders, and then ride down and crush his enemies while they were still barfing up black shit and suffering from comically-explosive diarrhea. Unfortunately, he didn\'t get a chance to put this plan into action &ndash; when Napoleon\'s army showed up, the first thing they did was request a meeting with Toussaint to negotiate terms. Toussaint wasn\'t exactly pumped about the idea of burning all of his cities to the ground and fighting a protracted guerilla war if he didn\'t have to, so he went out to the meeting to see what was up. As soon as the Governor-for-Life showed up to parlay, Toussaint L\'Ouverture was double-crossed, captured, and thrown in a dungeon in Paris, where he eventually died a year later.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It was an inglorious end, but Napoleon hadn\'t counted on one thing &ndash; Toussaint had build up an infrastructure, a national identity, and a love of freedom that wasn\'t going to die with him. When his allies heard of the double-cross, they immediately knew that Napoleon hadn\'t come in peace &ndash; he had come to conquer the island and re-enslave the populace. Fuck that. They fought the French tooth and nail, followed Toussaint\'s teachings and strategies, and in 1804 Toussaint L\'Ouverture\'s chief lieutenant defeated the French once and for all and declared Haiti and independent country. It was the first time a slave rebellion in the New World had led to the successful (and permanent) overthrow of a Western colonial government.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/toussaint9.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"In overthrowing me you have only cut down in Saint-Domingue the trunk of the tree of liberty;<br />it will spring up again from the roots, for they are many and deep.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.travelinghaiti.com/history_of_haiti/toussaint_louverture.asp\">Library of Congress</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toussaint_Louverture\">Wikipedia</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.historywiz.com/toussaint.htm\">HistoryWis</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Acton, John E. <em>The Cambridge Modern History of Napoleon</em>. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1906.<br /><br /> Adams, Jerome R. <em>Liberators, Patriots, and Leaders of Latin America</em>. McFarland, 2010.<br /><br /> Chartrand, Rene. <em>Napoleon\'s Overseas Army</em>. Osprey, 1989. </span></p>','2011-05-13','392004013800','toussaint.jpg','toussaint21.jpg','Toussaint L\'Ouverture','The slave who liberated Haiti.','\"All that the negroes lack is a leader courageous enough to carry them to vengeance and carnage. Where is he, this great man, that nature owes to its vexed, oppressed, tormented children? Where is he? He will appear, do not doubt it. He will show himself and raise the sacred banner of liberty.\"\r\n\r\n- Abbe Raynal'),('United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group','November 1980','N/A','Hampton Roads, VA, USA','21st-century American Commando','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Considering the fact that in one 24-hour period I received over a hundred emails regarding the events of last Sunday, I realize that it would be completely irresponsible of me as the operator of this website to not spend today writing about the most balls-out commando special black ops raid of our generation - a daring assault that took down the world\'s most universally-despised madman since Adolph Hitler.&nbsp; And, since the details behind this utterly hardcore attack on the planet\'s most notorious terrorist might never fully be made available to the public, I figure it\'s about as good a week as any to talk more generaly about the elite group of American badasses that pretty much everyone is convinced carried this op out &ndash; SEAL Team Six, the elite counter-terrorism unit of the United States military, and a group of shit-kicking counter-terrorist hardasses who spend their nine-to-five day jobs training to be an ultra-efficient cross-breed between Jack Bauer, Colonel James Braddock, and <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/bourne.html\">Jason effing Bourne</a>.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The now-legendary Team Six was formed in October 1980, in direct reaction to the clusterfuck of epic proportions that resulted when the Americans tried to rescue a group of civilians who had been taken hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Iran and failed so miserably that the Joint Chiefs decided, fuck it, we need to put together a team of guys whose only job is to kick terrorists in the scrotum until they cough up their marbles and then force-feed their own marbles back to them.&nbsp; Team Six was actually just the third SEAL team formed by the U.S. Navy, but the Admirals gave them <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Six_%28Battlestar_Galactica%29\">number six</a> because it\'s a much cooler number than three, and also because it might confuse the Soviets into thinking that we had way more of these guys than we actually did.&nbsp; Interestingly, the unit doesn\'t go by Team Six anymore, instead calling itself DevGroup or DEVGRU, which is short for \"Development Group\" or something equally boring and innocuous.&nbsp; The rationale behind changing the name to something that sounds like a financial consulting firm or a team of overworked video game designers was basically just so that nowadays high-ranking Admirals can honestly stand in front of TV cameras and say shit like, \"There\'s no such thing as SEAL Team Six,\" without lying.&nbsp; While I can understand and appreciate the whole \"plausible deniability\" thing, I should also mention that I have absolutely no intention of referring to a company of terrorist-eviscerating asskickers as The Development Group for the purposes of this article.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/sealteamsix1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Fast-roping from a helicopter onto a speedboat, to most people, is \"extreme sports\".<br />To the SEALs, it\'s \"a training exercise\".</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The general consensus is that we basically know about only a miniscule percentage of the badass operations Team Six has carried out in its career saving the world from terrorists, communists, vampire Nazis, and god-knows whatever the hell else out there is trying to kill us, but the shit we know about is pretty much totally fucking awesome.&nbsp; Commanded in the early days by Richard Marcinko (a man I intend to cover in much more detail in a later Badass of the Week article), Six\'s first operation was to parachute into a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico in the middle of the night, attack a terrorist camp, and recover a portable nuclear device from the clutches of a group of madmen.&nbsp; Now, if that\'s the sort of shit these guys were doing on their <em>first mission</em>, you can only imagine where it goes from there.&nbsp; Like, for instance, in 1985 thirteen SEALs from Team Six rescued Governor-General Sir Paul Scoon when he and nine members of his staff were taken hostage in his mansion in Grenada.&nbsp; Six briefly made tennis a badass sport, fast-roping down onto Scoon\'s tennis court from a helicopter while the Grenadan army shot machine guns and anti-aircraft cannons at them.&nbsp; The operatives, completely unfazed by staring death in the face while suspended in mid air from a rope, charged ahead and freed the Queen\'s Representative on Grenada by storming the mansion and clearing it of enemy troops with a dickload of bullets and concussion grenades.&nbsp; After securing the hostages, the SEALs, realizing they were cut off from extraction, then proceeded to hold the position against a full-on counter attack by basically the entire fucking Grenadan army.&nbsp; These 13 dudes held the position, staring down tanks, APCs and grenade launchers with little more than sniper rifles and small arms.&nbsp; Not only did Scoon get out safely, but all 13 SEAL team members survived, and none of the hostages were killed.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Their operational record only gets more impressive.&nbsp; In 1989, Team Six worked with Delta Force to capture notorious criminal drug lord Manuel Noriega from the jungles of Panama.&nbsp; In the days before Desert Storm they swam around in SCUBA gear disarming anti-ship mines in the Persian Gulf, and then when the war started they were fast-roping onto Kuwaiti oil platforms, wiping out the Iraqi defenders and re-taking the positions before the enemy could set fire to them.&nbsp; In the late 90s ST6 searched for war criminals in Bosnia.&nbsp; In 2009 they freed an American crew taken prisoner by Somali pirates in a manner so fucking badass that it belongs in an action movie:&nbsp; A team of SEAL Team Six snipers simultaneously coordinated three long-range shots from the rocking deck of one ship to another &ndash; the first two popped the heads off a pair of pirates patrolling the upper decks, and the third shot went through a porthole window and drilled a pirate who was holding the American ship\'s captain at gunpoint with an AK-47, killing the scurvy scalawag before he could pull the trigger.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">(As a weird side note, SEAL Team Six has also worked as a security force for every Olympic Games since 1984.&nbsp; This seems like overkill, but hey, if you\'re going to station <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/matrix.html\">Colonel John Matrix</a> as a mall security guard outside the fucking food court, you can be damn sure that\'s the safest Panda Express in the known universe.)</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/sealteamsix2.jpeg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"Excuse me, sir, if you don\'t have your ticket for the 100-meter freestyle<br />I\'m going to have to ask you to leave.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Another thing we know for certain about the SEALs in general &ndash; and particularly Team Six &ndash; is that their training process is fucking brutal.&nbsp; To put this in perspective, 80% of the people privileged enough to be admitted to SEAL Training wash out before making it through.&nbsp; If four out of every five of the toughest badasses in the U.S. military can\'t hack it, you can only assume that the demands this training put on you basically border on the inhuman.&nbsp; A typical day might involve running a few dozen miles through wet sand, swimming an ungodly distance through the ocean during high tide, and then coming back to camp, sparring your classmates in underwater hand-to-hand combat training, and then, when you\'re beat to shit and so damned exhausted you can barely breathe, your instructors tie your legs together, tie your hands behind your back, and throw you in the deep end of the swimming pool as part of \"underwater survival training\".</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">If you\'re one of the 20% lucky enough to make it through SEAL School, you can look forward to an <em>even more insane</em> series of physical tortures designed to make you a Beast Mode killing machine capable of annihilating anything on two legs in the time it takes most people to chomp down a piece of the Colonel\'s Spicy Chicken.&nbsp; Summers are spent parachuting into the Arizona desert and living off the land for a week.&nbsp; Winters are in Kodiak Alaska, where you are deployed via submarine, swim a couple miles through freezing water, and then march a few hundred miles through sub-zero temperatures with nothing more than a compass and a combat knife to keep you warm. It\'s the sort of shit that would kill most normal people, but by the time it\'s all done you\'ve got a hardcore team of motherfucking asskickers ready to deploy anywhere in the world within 4 hours for whatever ship-boarding, hostage-rescuing, amphibious-assaulting counter-terrorism operations even the most demented enemy of humanity could imagine.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/sealteamsix3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The big difference between \"SEAL training\" and \"Attempted Homicide\"<br />is that with an attempted homicide you don\'t expect the guy to survive and escape.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/sealteamsix3a.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"We all knew there was just one way to improve our odds for survival: train, train, train.<br />Sometimes, if your training is properly intense it will kill you.<br />More often -- much, much more often -- it will save your life.\"<br /><br />- Richard Marcinko</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Considering the fact that I went completely overboard with a couple-thousand-word background describing why these guys are easily one of the history\'s most over-the-top badass military organizations, you can understand why when it came time to go in after the FBI\'s most wanted terrorist these were the guys who got called in to do the job.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now, I\'m not going to completely go off on a tirade about Osama Bin Laden.&nbsp; I think that there\'s something to be said for having a little respect for the recently deceased, even when the warm corpse in question is a man who made it his goal in life to utterly destroy you, your family, your dog, and everything you love.&nbsp; Honestly, his career started off respectably enough, serving as a <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/massoud.html\">Mujahedeen freedom fighter</a> battling against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, but after the Communists were beaten back, Osama quickly gear-shifted from \"hey let\'s throw the invading Soviets out of our homeland <em>Red Dawn</em> style\" to \"hey fuck it let\'s have a complete jihad against everyone all the time,\" and everything went downhill from there.&nbsp; Bin Laden joined up with radical terrorist groups (and I mean radical here as a synonym for \"psycho extremist\" and not \"totally awesome\"), where he went on to orchestrate a lot of totally not-badass things like truck bombings, suicide attacks, and assassinations of Egyptian parliamentarians, all with the aim of furthering his political agenda not through democratic means, but instead by killing innocent civilians until people decided to submit to his will.&nbsp; This rarely works.&nbsp; So, when his part in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center got him disowned by his family and stripped of his Saudi citizenship, Bin Laden went to Afghanistan, founded al-Qaeda, befriended the Taliban, and basically declared war on the U.S., Israel, and everything else in the world.&nbsp; In 1998 he was behind bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, in 2000 a suicide bomber under his command killed 17 sailors aboard the USS <em>Cole</em> (something the SEALs probably didn\'t take lightly), and in 2001 he was the mastermind behind the greatest single loss of life on American soil since the Civil War.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">This aggression would not stand, man.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/sealteamsix4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">So, over the course of the last couple years, the CIA, Special Forces, Delta, and a guy named Admiral McRaven (perhaps the more badass, more accomplished cousin of Mayor McCheese?) tracked Bin Laden to Abbottabad, Pakistan &ndash; a quiet, middle-class neighborhood 75 miles from Islamabad and less than a mile from Pakistan\'s top military academy.&nbsp; He was holed up in an acre-wide compound surrounded by walls 12 feet high and over a foot thick.&nbsp; The compound\'s main structure was a two-story, fortified building with plenty of possible sniper perches and defensive positions.&nbsp; Obama thought about ordering a bombing raid, but that was deemed too messy, too imprecise, and too potentially dangerous to the nearby civilian population.&nbsp; This was going to have to be surgical.&nbsp; This was going to need the delicate, loving touch that only SEAL Team Six could provide.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">So, around 1am on May 1st, 2011, a couple black helicopters (possibly of some crazy Stealth variety nobody\'s ever heard of before, only further illustrating the fact that these guys get the coolest Batman-style shit out there) swooped in from a base in Afghanistan, and SEAL operators fast-roped down, possibly alongside an insane <a href=\"http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/04/war_dog\">commando dog</a>.&nbsp; Nearby Twitter fiends heard a series of large explosions (possibly flashbang grenades), as the SEALs went over the twelve-foot wall and assaulted the lair of the world\'s foremost terrorist.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/sealteamsix5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"I am a person who loves death.&nbsp; The Americans love life.<br />I will engage them and fight.&nbsp; I will not surrender.<br />If I am to die, I would like to be killed by the bullet.\"<br /><br />- Osama Bin Laden</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It took forty minutes.&nbsp; SEAL Team Six, in and out, all Tangos dead, no SEAL casualties, and the only civilian killed was a woman who was being used as a human shield by one of the terrorists.&nbsp; Even technical problems didn\'t stop these guys from getting the hell out of there before the Pakistani security forces arrived &ndash; one of the SEAL helicopters went down in the attack, either from mechanical failure or some kind of aerodynamic weirdness, but these guy blew that shit up, loaded into the other chopper, and peeled ass out of there before anybody knew what the fuck was going on.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">We probably won\'t ever know the truth about the men who performed this raid, the details of the mission, or any of the other insane black ops shit we\'re all dying to read about.&nbsp; Aside from the whole \"national security\" thing, SEAL team operators are completely self-effacing, largely because revealing their identities might make them high-priority targets for terrorist attacks, but also because, like true badasses, they like to say they\'re just carrying out their orders.&nbsp; It\'s a team effort, we all put work into it, we\'re just doing our jobs out there, blah blah blah. In the long run, however, this humility and mystery just serves to make these guys even more over-the-top hardcore.&nbsp; It\'s like how <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/snakeeyes.html\">Snake Eyes</a> was always the coolest of the G.I. Joes because you didn\'t know dick about him except that he could disembowel tanks with a ninja sword and dual-wield Uzis, or like how everyone thought Boba Fett was a hell of a lot more awesome before we saw him running around as a pre-teen in the prequel trilogy.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/sealteamsix6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message:<br />No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.\"<br /><br /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20110502/wl_time/08599206906900\">TIME Magazine: On the Scene</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2068858,00.html?xid=feed-yahoo-full-mostpopular\">TIME Magazine: Bin Laden Dead</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4818\">Defense Briefing Transcript</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/03intel.html?_r=1\">NY Times: Finding Osama</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/world/africa/13pirates.html\">Somali Pirate Rescue</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Bahmanyar, Mir.&nbsp; <em>US Navy Seals</em>.&nbsp; Osprey, 2005.<br /><br /> Fried-Perenchio, S., and Jennifer Walton.&nbsp; <em>SEAL: The Unspoken Sacrifice</em>.&nbsp; SFP Studio, 2009.<br /><br /> Lanning, Col. Michael Lee.&nbsp; <em>Blood Warriors</em>.&nbsp; Random House, 2002.<br /><br /> Marcinko, Richard.&nbsp; <em>Rogue Warrior</em>.&nbsp; Pocket, 1993.<br /><br /> Pushies, Fred J., et al.&nbsp; <em>U.S. Counter-Terrorist Forces</em>.&nbsp; Crestline, 2002.<br /><br /> Roberts, Craig and Charles W. Sasser.&nbsp; <em>Crosshairs on the Kill Zone</em>.&nbsp; Simon &amp; Schuster, 2004. </span></p>','2011-05-06','968168214502','sealteamsix1.jpg','sealteamsix2.jpeg','SEAL Team Six','The United States\' elite counter-terrorist task force.',''),('Albert Jacka','January 10, 1893','January 17, 1932','Winchelsea, Victoria, Australia','WWI Australian Soldier','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Last Monday, April 25, was ANZAC Day &ndash; a day we here in the United States all know and love and celebrate by running around in the streets and drinking beer brewed to look like the Union Jack. And, as we here in the U.S. all learn dating back to elementary school, ANZAC stands for the Australian/New Zealand Annual Conference, a magical happy time when delegates and badasses and other qualified people from the British Commonwealth nations of Oceana all get together to talk about terribly important things of mutual relevance, world-changing ideas like crippling <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/shelford.html\">rugby injuries</a> and the proper care and maintenance of indigenous dingo populations. So, in honor of my good friends on the opposite side of the world, I\'ve chosen to observe ANZAC Day (a full four days after everybody else has already forgotten about it) by dedicating this week\'s article to the most widely-revered war hero in the prestigious badass history of Dark Continent &ndash; World War I Victoria Cross recipient Albert Jacka, the first Australian to ever be awarded the United Kingdom\'s highest award for military asskicking in a live-fire situation.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Being known as the biggest badass from a place that <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/australia.html\">has trees that can kill you</a> is no small accolade, and you can bet your Bloomin\' Onion that Bert Jacka lives up to the hype in the sort of head-crushing, scrotum-eviscerating way you\'d imagine a ferocious Aussie war hero to represent himself. This guy was a hardcore woodsman-turned-infantryman so bare-knuckled tough he was known simply as \"Hard Jacka,\" which I personally find ridiculously awesome not only because it\'s a badass nickname, but also because it kind of sounds obscene, like if you said it out loud in public you\'d accidentally be saying something offensive. A tough, scrappy guy who never took bullshit from anyone (especially numbnuts superior officers he had no respect for), Jacka started out his career as a laborer in the Forests Department of Victoria, a job where he basically ran around lopping Eucalyptus down with a chainsaw and then using the mangled carcass of the tree to pick homemade crocodile jerky out from between his teeth. In 1914, when word came his way that every country in the world had basically lost its fucking mind and declared war on every other country in the world, the 21-year old Australian lumberjack decided he wasn\'t going to miss out on the opportunity to skewer the Queen\'s enemies on the point of his bayonet &ndash; he sprinted down to the recruiting office and enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force. A couple days after signing up to be part of the Great War, Jacka learned that they\'d lost his paperwork and he hadn\'t really signed his life away to the service of the Commonwealth, so he of course ran BACK down there, enlisted again, and then presumably threatened severe bodily harm on the recruiting officer if that dude didn\'t get his shit together and let Jacka start shooting people in the face immediately.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jacka1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">After going through boot camp, linking up with his Battalion, and participating two months of intense amphibious combat training in Egypt, the British High Command figured, \"Eh, that\'s probably enough training for these blokes\", and in April 1915 they shipped Jacka and the rest of the Australian Imperial Force out to a fun little Turkish peninsula called Gallipoli.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now, any time you read about World War I battlefields, one phrase consistently comes up time after time, and that phrase is \"meat grinder\". I\'m not even kidding... it\'s basically impossible to read a book about the Great War without somebody making the analogy in some capacity, like they were coming up with some brilliant new simile that was going to completely blow everyone\'s minds with the sheer concussive force of its brilliance. The reason that these guys have such a hard-on for largely-antiquated kitchenware, and the reason as to why this \"meat grinder\" expression has become the historians\' version of football coaches at press conferences constantly babbling about \"we need to execute our game plan\" is basically because back in the 1910s there honestly wasn\'t much difference between sending a company of infantry across no-man\'s land at a bunch of machine guns and artillery and actually taking a hunk of beef, throwing it into a stainless steel meat grinder, and then hand-cranking it until you\'re left with a nice-sized pile of delicious taco-grade ground round. The Gallipoli Campaign was no exception &ndash; through obscenely brutal fighting the Aussies and New Zealanders (and probably some other people) hit the beaches of the Dardanelles hard, carved out a foothold for their landing craft, and then slogged it out for months against a heavily-armed, dug-in force of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/ataturk.html\">battle-hardened Turks</a> who weren\'t fucking around when it came do dishing out the pain. The entire campaign claimed a half a million lives (on both sides), meaning that if you were present in the battle you had a 60% chance of being killed, crippled, or wounded. These guys were slugging the shit out of each other, brute force against brute force, and Hard Jacka was on the front lines of it all.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Jacka\'s finest hour in Gallipoli came in the ass-crack-o\'clock hours of 19 May 1915, when the Turks launched a massive attack on the ANZAC trench line. At roughly two in the morning (the party was still jumping), the trench in front of Jacka was infiltrated and overrun by a wave of gunslinging Turkish troops, who killed or drove off all the Aussie troops stationed there. Bert Jacka\'s lieutenant was killed attempting to re-take it, shot in the head the second he stepped out of his own trench &ndash; dude didn\'t even get a chance to shout, \"Follow me!\" (which nobody would have done anyway once they saw how his attempt at re-taking the trench turned out for him). With the enemy close enough that they could lob a bunch hand grenades right tJacka\'s dugout, the Australian Private knew that he needed to do something quickly or the entire position would be lost in a blaze of fire, smoke, shrapnel, and flying Aussie parts. First, he tried to take a section of men out on a direct assault, but it didn\'t work out too well &ndash; Jacka popped up, ready to rock, but when the two men with him leapt up to follow him they both took bullets to soft parts of their bodies. Jacka grabbed both of them, dragged them back to safety (both ended up surviving the war thanks to his actions), and quickly realized that he needed to work out another plan of action.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The one he came up with was pretty fucking awesome.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jacka2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">BARF</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Jacka had his buddies go to one side of the trench and start hurling a shitload of grenades and laying down covering fire. While the Turks were distracted with this sudden onslaught of explosive destruction, Jacka pulled himself up into no-man\'s land (you know, that place where he\'d just seen three different dudes get gunned down the second they stepped out there?), sprinted across the fucking field in a balls-out rush, and then made a flying leap feet-first into the enemy trench.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">He was already flipping the fuck out before the defenders even knew what hit them. Charging down the trench with a goddamned bolt-action rifle and a bayonet, this guy cleared out the entire trench of defenders, shooting five guys, bayoneting two more, and chasing the rest off with the sheer balls-out insanity of his attack. For the next 15 minutes, the Turks led a massive counter-attack to re-take the position, but Jacka held the trench by himself, fighting off anyone who came close to him in an unbelievable onslaught of gunfire and bayonet-y stabbing-ness. Reinforcements didn\'t arrive until dawn, because it wasn\'t until the sun came up that Jacka\'s buddies realize that he had actually defied the odds, single-handedly re-taken the position and driven off the enemy. When his commanding officer reached the captured trench, he found Jacka sitting there by himself amid a pile of corpses with a cigarette in his mouth. All he said was, \"Well, I got the beggars, sir.\"</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Private Albert Jacka became the first Aussie to ever receive the Victoria Cross. The medal was personally pinned on him by the King at Windsor Castle.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jacka3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">World War I.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Hard Bert Jacka still wasn\'t done Jacka-ing up the enemies of the King. In 1916 he was transferred to the Somme so that he could participate in yet another of the Great War\'s bloodiest campaigns &ndash; this time, the Aussies would lose 23,000 men dead in the span of 45 days assaulting the mega-fortified German Hindenburg Line, and once again Jacka found himself right in the middle of a fucked-up situation that could only be improved through the use of excessive violence, a little bit of luck, and a whole lot of seriously-not-giving-a-fuck-about-your-own-safety.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">One lovely French morning in mid-July 1916, after a long relaxing evening of having his position pasted with constant artillery shelling from three sides non-stop for eight hours straight, Albert Jacka awoke just in time to see some German stormtrooper casually roll a live grenade down the steps into his dugout. Jacka dropped to the dirt, covered his head, and when his ears stopped ringing from the concussive blast Jacka pulled his revolver, raced to the top step and looked out to see what the fuck was going on re: some asshole trying to pop him like an egg in a microwave. What he saw wasn\'t exactly heart-warming. The Germans had overrun the Australian positions during the night, and Jacka and his men were now a good 250 yards behind enemy lines. As if that wasn\'t bad enough, there was also a company of 60+ German soldiers leading 42 unarmed Australian infantrymen off as prisoners of war.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now, a rational person would have looked down into his dugout, saw the 6 battle-weary Australians sitting there, and realized that the only way they were walking out of there alive was if they came out of the dugout with their hands in the air.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Albert Jacka wasn\'t a rational person. He was a badass.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jacka4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">These are Turks, but I think you can see where this is going.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Albert Jacka, 250 yards behind enemy lines, surrounded, outnumbered, and exhausted, led seven Australian troops screaming out of the dugout, guns blazing, charging straight-on into a group of 60 well-armed German soldiers. Within seconds of the charge, every man in the squad was shot and wounded, but they kept on rolling. Jacka himself was shot seven times (including twice in the fucking head!) but when the soon-to-be P.O.W.s took one look at this berserker rage, they turned on their guards, overpowering some of them with a barrage of bare-knuckled face punches that would have made those hilarious boxing kangaroos proud. Jacka burned through his revolver rounds, took up a rifle and a bayonet, and kept fighting, and when the smoke finally cleared 12 Germans were dead and the rest had been taken prisoner. Rather than head back home, however, the Aussies kept fighting, re-taking the line in a battle that the Australian official war historian referred to as, \"The most dramatic and effective act of individual audacity in the history of the Australian Imperial Force\". (Editor\'s note: \"Audacity\" is high-brow speak for \"Balls-out-ed-ness\".)</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Jacka received the Military Cross for his actions at the Somme (many historians argue that he would have been nominated for a much higher medal if he wasn\'t also so insubordinate to his superior officers), and later received a second Military Cross when he went on a solo recon mission deep behind enemy lines and ended up capturing two German officers &ndash; they had spotted him laying tape to guide the Australian infantry, so he tried to shoot them with his revolver. When the pistol misfired, he just charged them, took them down with his bare hands, and dragged them back to Allied lines.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jacka5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">In the span of 18 months of constant combat, Albert Jacka was promoted from Private to Captain, hitting pretty much every rank in between. He was constantly insubordinate when he had no respect for his officers, and when his own subordinates were being disrespectful to him, he got them into line by cracking them in the jaw with a right hook... his men, being insane Australians, of course loved him for that shit, and the men of the 14th Battalion all referred to themselves as \"Jacka\'s Mob\", which is a friggin\' sweet name (plus it\'s very <em>Starship Troopers</em>).</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Jacka would later receive glory again, this time for taking half a mile of land and capturing a German field gun in the process, but he was knocked out of action for good in 1918 when a sniper shot him through the throat. This didn\'t kill him, mind you, but by the time he got out of the hospital in 1919 the war was already over, so he returned home to a hero\'s welcome. Jacka got married (probably to a total Aussie babe), became the Mayor of a town called St. Kilda, and died in 1932. He was buried with full military honors, and all 8 of his pallbearers were Victoria Cross recipients.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jacka6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/jacka.htm\">FirstWorldWar.com</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.hellfire-corner.demon.co.uk/jacka.htm\">Hellfire-Corner.com</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.awm.gov.au/people/226.asp\">Australian War Memorial</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.anzacday.org.au/miscellaneous/jacka.html\">ANZAC Day</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Jacka\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Hutchinson, Garrie.&nbsp; <em>Remember Them</em>.&nbsp; Hardie Grant, 2009.<br /><br /> Laffin, John.&nbsp; <em>The Australian Army at War</em>.&nbsp; Osprey, 1982.<br /><br /> Lawriwsky, Michael.&nbsp; <em>Hard Jacka</em>.&nbsp; Harlequin, 2010.<br /><br /> Staunton, Anthony.&nbsp; <em>Victoria Cross</em>.&nbsp; Hardie Grant, 2005. </span></p>','2011-04-29','180751414810','jacka1.jpg','jacka21.jpg','Albert Jacka','The most decorated Aussie of World War I.',''),('Crawford Goldsby','February 8, 1876','March 17, 1896','San Angelo, TX, USA','19th-century American Outlaw','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The most recent series of badasses I\'ve featured on this website have been from many different backgrounds and historical periods, but they\'ve all basically had one thing in common &ndash; they\'ve all been these grand, altruistic, noble do-gooders, heroically battling for the righteous principles they believe in, performing incredible deeds of bravery, and putting their lives on the line without hesitation to help their friends, save lives, and preserve freedom at all costs. This tale is a little different. This is the story of Cherokee Bill; and he was a complete motherfucker. A down-and-dirty, shoot-first plague on humanity without a single redeeming quality besides his unstoppable desire to murder, pillage, rob, and destroy everything he could get his hands on. A blood-chugging, sucker-punching outlaw from a gnarly tradition of ass-reaming wanton destruction so over-the-top maniacal in his diabolicalness that he would have made even the saltiest pirates, the most garlicy Mafia enforcers, and most mutton-soaked conquerors from history weep a single tear of joy into their extra-virgin Bloody Marys (which back in pirate days were called \"extra virgin\" simply because they were made with virgin\'s blood and vodka and maybe a stick of celery or a splash of V-8 juice).</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now, before we get into the face-shooting awesomeness of Bill\'s murderous death-trail of carnage across the wildlands of 1870s Oklahoma and Texas, I suppose I need to begrudgingly preface his story by saying that there seems to be an endless stream of wildly conflicting stories about the life of this insane-o-tron gunslinger, and that many of these delightfully-folksy anecdotes unfortunately seem to blatantly contradict one another so wildly that you\'d almost think you were reading about two different people. I have of course in true Badass of the Week fashion chosen the most interesting/awesome versions of his stories and assembled them into one hopefully-cohesive narrative, but as is the case any time you\'re talking about an obscure lunatic on the run from the law over two hundred years ago, you should take most of this shit with a grain of salt from an historical perspective.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/cherokeebill2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">A pictoral representation of the story about the time<br />Cherokee Bill helped George Washington win the Battle of Yorktown.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The man who I will refer to solely as Cherokee Bill was born in Fort Concho, Texas, on 8 February 1876. Bill\'s father was a hardcore <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Soldier\">Buffalo Soldier</a>, a Sergeant Major in the 10th U.S. Cavalry, and his mother was half-Cherokee, half-white, but apparently being just one-quarter Cherokee (and not named William) was enough for him to get the nickname Cherokee Bill at some point during his adventures. In any event, Cherokee Bill was infinitely better than his given name, Crawford Goldsby, which is such a fucking terrible name for a gunslinger that my hand cramped up just now when I tried to type it. So forget about that Crawford Goldsby bullshit, because even thinking about a mad dog face-eating outlaw with a name like that pisses me off.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Bill\'s father was kind of a badass, as you can probably tell from the fact that he was a Buffalo Soldier, but unfortunately for our future anti-hero the good Sergeant wasn\'t around too much for Bill\'s formative years. You see, one fine Texas evening some off-duty 10th Cavalry non-com was out at a bar when all of a sudden a couple unruly drunk jackass white dudes came up to him, talked a load of shit about how black men didn\'t belong in the military, and then tore the chevrons off of the guy\'s sleeve and threw them on the floor. The sergeant, realizing that he was heavily outnumbered, said nothing, picked up his chevrons, paid for his drink, and calmly walked back to camp. Fifteen minutes later, he, Sergeant Goldsby, and a shitload of other Cavalrymen came back to the saloon and shot the place to shit, killing everyone inside. After that tremendous display of vengeance/badassitude, Bill\'s dad kind of had to skedaddle, so he abandoned the family and fled to the Indian Territories. At least he went out in a blaze of glory, I guess.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/cherokeebill12.gif\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Even though Sergeant Goldsby wasn\'t around to instill the time-honored virtues of over-the-top vengeance and asymmetrical asskicking into his young son, Cherokee Bill did a pretty good job of taking after his no-bullshit father nonetheless. Bill is believed to have killed his first man at the age of 12, when his brother-in-law told him to go feed some hogs (and was being a real asshole about the whole thing) so Bill capped him in the throat. Bill was tried of murder but acquitted because of his age, because even back in the Old West the judicial system was whack. Of course, another story has Bill killing his brother-in-law later on in life by shooting him with a rifle at point-blank range (I\'ll get to that in due time), and he only had one sister, so either there\'s a mix-up in stories here or this guy\'s sis had fucking terrible taste in husbands.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Anyways, while this whole murder-at-twelve thing is hotly debated among historians with nothing better to do, what we do know for sure is that Cherokee Bill started getting hardcore into criminal evilness in 1894. It started innocuously enough &ndash; the 18-year-old Bill was at a county dance with some hot babe he was totally into &ndash; but then all of a sudden he came across some complete douchebag 35 year-old guy who was a rival of one of Bill\'s older brothers. The jerkface started fronting all up on Bill right in front of his lady, so of course Bill had to get this fucker off his bozak by cold-cocking him in the face right hook and shooting him a couple times in the chest. The dude ended up pulling through his wounds and surviving, but not before Cherokee Bill had fled the scene of the crime, escaped to the Indian Territories, and joined a gang of hardened criminals intent upon turning the entire Indian Territory into a gigantic cesspool of scum and villainy.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/cherokeebill9.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The dude on the right is lining up for the perfect dick-shot.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The next year and a half of Cherokee Bill\'s life basically reads like a non-stop series of murders, robberies, asskickings, and hostage situations without any trace of remorse, pity, or mercy. Riding with a hardened, ultra-mustachioed gang of badasses with names like Texas Jack, the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdigris\">Verdigris</a> Kid, Skeeter Baldwin, and Chicken Lucas (presumably the \"comic relief\" of the gang) these lawless desperadoes went on a criminal rampage that left every city in the Territories in the grip of panic and terror and death. In the summer of 1894, Bill robbed the railroad Depot at Nowata (in present-day Oklahoma), killing the depot operator with a mixture of bad language and bullets. He then proceeded to stand patiently on the platform next to a dead body and wait a few minutes for the next train to show up (he was just hard like that). When the train rolled up to the station, Bill threw open the express car\'s door and told the conductor he was robbing the joint. The conductor told Bill to go dry-hump a radiator, so Bill shot him through the beard at point-blank range, gunned down the brake man (just for good measure), robbed the train anyways, and then somehow rode the fuck outta there before the cops showed up.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">For the next couple months, whenever Bill wasn\'t stealing horses, robbing stagecoaches and trains, or moonshining his own whiskey (awesome), he was busting a cylinder\'s worth of .45s into anybody unlucky enough to be within a few hundred feet of whatever crime he was in the process of committing. Like one time he robbed a bank and somehow ended up shooting the town barber in the back for a reason that probably made sense at the time. Another time he was robbing a different bank, and some local painter peeked in the window to see what was going on, so Bill capped that jerk through the window, said some shit about how he had no appreciation for the fine arts, and went right back to emptying the contents of the bank safe down his pants. (Interestingly, despite all the robbing/pillaging/plundering/murdering this guy did, this murder was the crime he actually ended up hanging for.)</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/cherokeebill7.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">BTW this week\'s story goes out to the incredibly polite group of prison inmates<br />who emailed me asking for more Old West badasses.<br />Please don\'t try this at home, guys.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">All told, Cherokee Bill was responsible for killing somewhere in the vicinity of 7 to 14 men (best guesses place the number on the high end of this spectrum), plus dozens and dozens of robberies, stickups, holdups, larcenies, burglaries, and other words for robberies. The fact that he was willing to shoot anybody in the face at any time for no reason at all made him particularly fearsome, and Bill soon became known as the \"Terror of the Indian Territories\". Entire cities would shut down when they heard he was nearby, at id=\"mce_marker\",300 bounty was put on his head (this was a shitload of money in 1894) and, awesomely enough, at one point the situation got so bad that the Sheriff of Muskogee, Arkansas, wired Washington DC requesting for the Army National Guard to come out and \"break the state of siege\" Bill\'s gang held on the Indian Territories. The cops, posses, and vigilantes of the Old West, for their part, couldn\'t figure out what the fuck was going on, a shortcoming they mostly chalked up to the awesomely-pimpin\' fact that Bill was a total player and had a hot babe in every city just waiting for him to show up so they could harbor and abet him (in a dirty way). It also helped that Bill was on good terms with the Creek, Seminoles, and Cherokee tribes of the Indian Territories and could, for the most part, move through territories unharmed &ndash; though I should say that this wasn\'t particularly because those tribes supported his actions, but more so because they didn\'t have a whole lot of respect for the white lawmen who screwed everybody over and then rode through there like they owned the place. It also helped that these cops sound like they couldn\'t find their dicks from their elbows (or however the fuck that expression goes).</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Eventually posses started flipping out, hunting the gang down, and a bunch of badass shootouts ensued. Bill killed a couple deputies, but over the next couple weeks most of his gang ended up being shot in the ass, killed, or captured. Bill, for his part, continued to elude the cops at every turn &ndash; including one time when he was surrounded in a house, shot in the leg, and had his horse shot out from under him, but the dude still managed to escape the posse on foot and go right back to the business of doing horrible shit to people. It was also around this time that he went into the town of Talala, discovered that nearly everyone there had left town to go watch a baseball game, and subsequently went about the ballsy business of robbing every single store in the city, starting at one end and making his way door-to-door until he\'d reached the other side of the town. It was during this time period that he also gunned down his brother-in-law (again?), though this time it\'s a little more understandable than that whole hog-feeding thing &ndash; Cherokee Bill had received ward that his sister\'s drunken fuck of a husband had been beating her with a whip when she didn\'t respond to his orders fast enough, so Bill paid the dude a visit and shot him seven times at point-blank range with a Winchester rifle.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/cherokeebill1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Cherokee Bill with his gang.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But all things (both good and miserable) need to come to an end sometime, and Cherokee Bill was finally arrested in February of 1895. Bill was at some girl\'s house, hungover as shit from a night of whiskey, morphine, and sexing, and when Bill went to light a hand-rolled cigarette in her fireplace (I didn\'t even know this was possible, but I love the mental image I get when thinking about this guy leaning over a crackling fire to light his cigarette) some jerkwad deputy ran into the house and clubbed Bill in the back of the head with a giant log of firewood. The deputy later testified that he thought he\'d hit Bill hard enough to kill him, but instead Bill just fell down, rolled over, and started throwing haymaker punches at anything that moved. It took three deputies fifteen minutes to finally subdue him, but Bill still wasn\'t done resisting arrest &ndash; on the way to Nowata for trial he snapped his fucking handcuffs (!) and tried to grab the pistol from one of his guards\' holsters. The assaulted guard ended up falling out of the stagecoach, taking the pistol with him, and two deputies with shotguns managed to convince Bill to put on a fresh set of manacles and settle the fuck down.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">As you can imagine, Cherokee Bill still wasn\'t finished. When the sentence of \"death by hanging\" was issued by Judge Isaac Parker, Bill\'s mom started freaking out all hysterically, but Bill, in the middle of the courtroom, just turned to her, smiled a huge shit-eating grin, and said cryptically, \"Hey, I ain\'t dead yet.\"</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">A few days later an astute janitor found a six-shooter hidden in a bucket of lye in the prison bathroom.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/cherokeebill4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">This picture doesn\'t fit here, but for some reason I find it hilarious.<br />I can\'t figure out why, but I think it has something to do with the old dude in the window.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Three days after that, when a prison guard went to check on the prisoners, Bill pulled a false brick out of the wall of his cell, revealing a hand-dug hole behind the wall that had a revolver stashed in it. Bill drew the gun, killed the guard, and then orchestrated a fifteen-minute prison standoff, holding the guards off from his prison cell, shooting at anyone who peeked their heads around the corner. The terrified guards later testified that he was taunting them mercilessly, laughing like a madman, and, according to some versions, gobbling like a turkey every time he fired. This is weird, but I think it\'s weird in a good way.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The situation was eventually diffused by a fellow inmate, Bill was convicted for a second murder, and on 17 March 1896 Cherokee Bill was executed at a well-attended public hanging. One his way out to the gallows, all he said to the crowd was, \"This is about as good a day to die as any,\" which is I think where the Klingons got their favorite motto. He was twenty years old.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/cherokeebill5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"A bloodthirsty mad dog who killed for the love of killing.\"<br /><br />- Judge Isaac Parker, sentencing Bill to the gallows</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.gunslinger.com/goldsby.html\">Gunslinger.com</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.coax.net/people/lwf/CHEROKEE.HTM\">Cherokee Bill: The Toughest of Them All</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgozv\">Handbook of Texas Online</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.darkcanyon.net/cherokee_bill.htm\">Dark Canyon</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.nps.gov/fosm/historyculture/cherokee-bill-outlaw-trail.htm\">National Parks Service</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-cherokeebill.html\">Legends of America</a></span><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Katz, William Loren.&nbsp; <em>The Black West</em>.&nbsp; Random House, 1971.<br /><br /> Metz, Leon Claire.&nbsp; <em>The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters</em>.&nbsp; Infobase, 2003.<br /><br /> O\'Neal, Bill.&nbsp; <em>Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters</em>.&nbsp; Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1991.<br /><br /> Smith, Robert Barr.&nbsp; <em>Outlaw Tales of Oklahoma</em>.&nbsp; Globe Pequot, 2008. </span></p>','2011-04-22','156096215415','cherokeebill11.jpg','cherokeebill9.jpg','Cherokee Bill','The toughest, meanest, and most feared outlaw in the Indian Territories.','\"I came here to die, not make a speech.\"\r\n\r\n- Cherokee Bill, last words before being executed by hanging'),('Kratos','Unknown','N/A','Sparta, Greece','Mythological Greek God','<p>I love video games.&nbsp; Now that I\'m old and pseudo-responsible I don\'t get nearly as much time to play games as I\'d like, but I\'m an old school gamer back to the days of the old Commodore 64, and there\'s little in the world I enjoy more than wading into a horde of faceless digital foes and mulching them all into a fine paste with a wide array of deadly instruments of manslaughter-riffic goodness.&nbsp; So, given this background, you can probably understand why I was a little surprised when it was recently brought to my attention that I\'ve never actually featured a video game character as a Badass of the Week.&nbsp; I suppose this is partly because I\'m partial to real-life heroes as opposed to fictional ones (and, as it has been correctly pointed out, there are more than enough historical badasses out there that I could run this site from now until the end of time), and partly because the gaming community is such a niche market, but I\'d hope that even the most hardcore history buff would be willing to grant me one week out of six and a half years where I can indulge my inner nerd and geek out on a badass video game.</p>\r\n<p>So I put a query out there to the <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com/badasshistory\">Facebook</a> and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/badassoftheweek\">Twitter</a> crowds earlier this week asking for readers\' suggestions on their favorite badass video game heroes, and while I got some very excellent suggestions (I was particularly impressed by the guy who suggested Bo Jackson from Tecmo Super Bowl), but ultimately I decided to go with my gut and write about the insanely over-the-top Spartan warrior Kratos &ndash;hero of the incredibly ultra-brutal <em>God of War</em> series of games, and, as it turns out, a character who began as an equally-as-awesome mythological god who can be just as easily appreciated by those people who wouldn\'t know the difference between a Sixaxis and a DualShock if you hit them in the head with a pair of PlayStation controllers.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kratos1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Kratos chokes a Cyclops to death with it\'s own hand while also pulling out its eye and humiliating it by riding it like a donkey.<br />\"Overkill\" is not a word that factors into his vocabulary.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A lot of die-hard gamers out there might not realize that the much-beloved Kratos is actually based on a real (and utterly terrifying) character from Greek mythology (in so much as any character from Greek mythology can be described as \"real\"), but this is definitely the case.&nbsp; In fact, <em>kratos</em> is really just the ancient Greek word for \"strength\" or \"power\", a detail that wasn\'t lost on the dudes responsible for creating awesome myths and then convincing the ancient Greeks that they should sacrifice goats in the name of the aforementioned awesome shit.&nbsp; In the Greek Pantheon, the god Kratos was the son of Styx &ndash; yes, as in the river &ndash; and was the personification of brute force, raw strength, and the uncontrollable destruction of everything.&nbsp; His siblings were Force, Zeal, and the goddess Nike, who we all know was the Goddess of Victory and the patron saint LeBron James, and when these four destruct-o-matic deities got there murder-rage on, there really wasn\'t a whole lot anybody in the time-space continuum could do to stop them. As soon as he was old enough to decapitate Titans with his bare hands, the God Kratos took an oath to <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zeus.html\">Zeus</a>, swearing allegiance on the waters of the River Styx (the huge river of death that encircles the Underworld) to serve the King of the Gods faithfully and unquestioningly, no matter how ridiculous or gruesome his request may be.&nbsp; From that point on the Big Z would just dispatch Kratos to fly in (he had wings, and not just the ones he pried from the lifeless corpse of Kid Icarus like in the video game) and beat the asses of Olympus\' enemies whenever Zeus Himself was too bored or lazy or overly distracted by giant piles of sweaty naked goddesses to do so.</p>\r\n<p>(On a completely unrelated note, I tried every possible method of working a \"Mr. Roboto\" or \"Come Sail Away\" joke into the previous paragraph while discussing the River Styx, but was utterly unable to make it work in any meaningful capacity.&nbsp; Please accept my most sincere apologies.)</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kratos2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Kratos leaps off a flaming black Pegasus in the middle of a thunderstorm<br /> to kill a dude mid-air with a fire-covered pair of serrated swords.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now a good example of Kratos being the personal enforcer of the King of the Gods is found in Aeschylus\' tragic tale of the idiotic Titan Prometheus.&nbsp; Prometheus was some immortal dumbass who decided that it would be really hilarious to steal flame from the gods and show the poor clueless humans of the world that they could make fire by banging a couple rocks together like morons for a while, and Zeus went into a roid rage and started yelling about how he wasn\'t really down with a bunch of puny mortals being able to cook meat whenever the fuck they wanted.&nbsp; Prometheus had some serious balls to fuck with Zeus in such a blatant manner, and Big Z knew that gory, ultraviolent retribution was in order.&nbsp; He sent his boy Kratos to fly down there, beat the shit out of Prometheus with a tire iron made out of a bunch of human spinal columns zip-tied together, tie the P-man up, and drag him out to some peak high in the Caucasus mountains.&nbsp; There, Kratos threw Prometheus down before the god Hephaestus, the deity in charge of fire and forging, and ordered Hephaestus to bind Prometheus to a huge rock by shackling the dude\'s arms down and then driving a couple huge fucking spikes through his chest. When Hephaestus got all whiny and complainy about not wanting to ram a dozen sharpened steel pipes through the torso of a fellow immortal, Kratos ruthlessly berated the God of Fire for being a \"fucking pussy\" and threatened to kick his ass just like he\'d done to Prometheus.&nbsp; Urged on by Kratos\' R. Lee Ermey-quality verbal ass-reaming, Hephaestus drilled Prometheus to the rock, hammered him into place, and then Zeus sent a bunch giant eagles to disembowel him once a day every day from that point on until infinity. Interestingly, in <em>God of War II</em>, the video game Kratos actually frees Prometheus his eternal torment, rather than sentencing him to a couple lifetimes of agonizing torment.&amp;nbps; Of course, by \"frees Prometheus\" I mean to say that he \"drops Prometheus into some lava, melting him into magma and putting him out of his misery forever\", which is far more Kratos\' style than anything that might resemble mercy or decency.</p>\r\n<p><em>Kratos</em>, as I mentioned, is also the Ancient Greek word for \"power\", which is pretty awesome in and of itself, but becomes even more bitchin\' when you discover that the ancient phrase \"holding the kratos\" was the way of describing that a certain military commander was in charge of a certain situation.&amp;nbps; It\'s kind of like what the Greeks used for \"he wears the pants around here\", because as we all know the Greeks didn\'t actually wear pants.&nbsp; So like for instance Agamemnon was the commander of the Greek forces during the Trojan War, so because he \"held the kratos\" it meant he could tell Ajax to get fucked and then go bang Achilles\' girlfriend.&nbsp; This is pretty cool.&nbsp; Nowadays the anti-terrorist branch of the London Metropolitan Police remember the God of Strength by appropriating his name as part of their somewhat-controversial \"Operation Kratos\" policy for dealing with potential suicide attacks.&nbsp; Since suicide bombers can potentially be wearing remotely-triggered explosive vests, Operation Kratos dictates that security officers just shoot these particular terrorists in the head without warning.&nbsp; The United Nations is kind of against this, as you might expect, but the side-effect of this is that I can now list the <em>United Nations Convention Against Torture</em> book as a reference in my sources for an article on Kratos, which is kind of fitting considering some of the shit this guy puts his enemies through in the video games.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kratos3.bmp\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Kratos fights a dude on the back of a giant eagle thing while a tornado destroys the sky behind him.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In game terms, Kratos is a little different than his mythological counterpart in the sense that he\'s strong, sure, but if anything he\'s less like the God of Strength and more like the God of Making Other Gods His Bitch.&nbsp; A Spartan warrior who made a pact with Ares in exchange for further powers of asskicking awesomeness, Kratos got a pair of huge fucking blades grafted onto his arms with giant chains, and is somehow incredibly adept at swinging them around him at high speeds without accidently decapitating himself or snapping his spine in half with a super-heavy, fast-moving set of mega-long iron manacles.</p>\r\n<p>Equipped with these demonic flying blades and enough pent-up anger to choke the Incredible Hulk to death, Kratos decided to start running around murdering everything in sight, including his own family.&nbsp; He got so pissed about accidentally killing his own wife and kid that his now-dead family then spontaneously combusted, and the ashes were then glued to Kratos\' body, turning him completely white except for a bunch of red paint that apparently wasn\'t sticky enough for the ash to adhere to.&nbsp; From then on, the Ghost of Sparta lost his fucking mind even more.&nbsp; He decided to avenge his family\'s violent death by becoming <em>even more violent</em>, opening Pandora\'s Box, climbing Mount Olympus, killing Ares in a duel, and becoming the God of War himself.&nbsp; When this wasn\'t enough to satiate his unquenchable blood lust, he then destroyed the Colossus of Sardia, got himself killed, climbed out of hell, killed all the gods, their friends, the Titans, all the Greek heroes, a ton of monsters, himself, and anything else retarded enough to come into the wheelhouse of his giant whirling blades of death.&nbsp; He ran around murdering or humping his way through the entirety of Greek mythology in the sort of way that would make most respected Classicists start dry-heaving blood onto their favorite antiquities, and anyone lucky enough to witness this quest found themselves with a complete desensitization to video game violence and a new appreciation for the term \"badass\".&nbsp; I mean, seriously, when you look at the Wikipedia <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_God_of_War_characters\">List of God of War Characters</a>, pretty much every single on ends with either the phrase \"Killed by Kratos\" or \"Sex Mini-Game\", and while I don\'t necessarily consider Wikipedia a reliable source for damn near anything, you really can\'t fuck with it when it comes to video game trivia.&nbsp; That\'s the one place where it\'s rock-solid, every single time.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kratos4.bmp\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Kratos explodes a guy\'s head without moving his body,<br />then prepares to slaughter an entire army by himself.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>As one of the most badass video game heroes to ever turn a person from a large mass of pixels to one giant blood-colored digital explosion, when Kratos isn\'t ripping the Cyclops\' eye out of its head with his fists or punching Hercules in the face, he\'s showing absolutely no mercy or pity or sanity in any capacity whatsoever.&nbsp; Ultimately he gets his revenge (by killing everything), achieves ultimate redemption (by killing more people), and celebrates by killing anything on Earth not already lying face-down in a pool of whatever it uses for blood.&nbsp; Nowadays he has a Slurpee named after him, which is admirable, and the guy who did the voice-work for him now does Samuel L. Jackson impressions for Star Wars TV shows and video games, presumably because anything less would have been an unacceptable step down in badassitude after having dealt with Kratos.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kratos5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"If all those on Olympus would deny me my vengeance, then all of Olympus will die.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/prometheus.html\">Prometheus Bound</a> by Aeschylus (full text)<br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Kratos.html\">Theoi Greek Mythology</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_%28God_of_War%29\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Aeschylus.&nbsp; <em>The Collected Works of Aeschylus</em>.&nbsp; BiblioBazaar, 2002.<br /><br /> Allen, Danielle S.&nbsp; <em>The World of Prometheus</em>.&nbsp; Princeton Univ. Press, 2002.<br /><br /> Oliver, James H.&nbsp; <em>Demokratia</em>.&nbsp; Ayer, 1979.<br /><br /> <em>The UN Convention Against Torture</em>.&nbsp; United Nations Stationery Office, 2006. </span></p>','2010-10-29','21214026831','kratos1.jpg','kratos2.jpg','Kratos','The Greek God of Strength, as well as the God of Killing All The Other Gods with a Pair of Gigantic Fucking Swords.','\"Now take thine iron spike and drive it in,\r\nUntil it gnaw clean through the rebel\'s breast.\"\r\n\r\n- Prometheus Bound'),('Genevieve de Galard-Terraube','April 13, 1925','N/A','Toulouse, France','20th-century French Doctor','<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">In March 1954 the 10,000 soldiers defending the doomed French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, were embedded up to their jocks in some seriously deep shit. Entrenched in a sprawling, somewhat-efficiently-designed fortress at the bottom of a gigantic valley, the French had originally established this forward base as a way of trying to cut off the Vietnamese supply lines that ran through this strategically-critical position on the Laos border. Sounds like a good plan, sure, but while this may have been a decent idea on paper, the French commanders realized pretty damn quickly that the Vietnamese insurgents they were fighting actually weren\'t as dumb as the French thought they might have been &ndash; and, perhaps even more unpleasantly, they also had a lot more artillery than they\'d suspected as well. Like, a way lot more. And they\'d put all that shit on the fucking mountains surrounding the valley where the fortress was and aimed it straight down onto the fort. So now, with the French camped out at the bottom of a valley that suddenly now was bristling with a shit-fuck-ton of howitzers dumping high explosive shells down on them and blowing the ungodly bejeezus out of anything with a tri-color patch on its uniform, suddenly that whole \"totally rad Dien Bien Phu base\" thing started to look like it maybe wasn\'t such a great idea after all. I mean, I\'m not a fucking military genius by any stretch of the imagination, but even I know that being surrounded by an enemy that outnumbers you five-to-one, has the high ground, and has you zeroed in on a couple hundred artillery pieces usually isn\'t exactly a tactically advantageous situation. Korea might be the land of professional <em>Starcraft</em> grand master senseis, but at Dien Bien Phu it was the Vietnamese who had caught the French mid-game with a massive Terran Siege Tank Push, and there wasn\'t a goddamned thing the French could do about it. It didn\'t help that to of the defenders\' most senior Generals were killed in the <em>opening bombardment</em> of the battle, either, but yeah, even those guys weren\'t really about to bust out a Dark Swarm or start spamming Protoss Zealots to counter it or anything. The only time that artillery shells weren\'t blowing shit up all over the place was when the Vietnamese were launching full-on human wave attacks on the French positions &ndash; so far the defenders had managed to withstand this tsunami of gun-toting humanity, but there had been plenty of close calls already, and the prospects for survival weren\'t exactly looking like unicorns and Skittles.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">French Air Force Lieutenant Genevieve de Galard-Terraube was probably the last person you\'d ever expect to see transported into this raging psychotic hellhole of ass-sucking carnage. The daughter of the Viscountess de Galard Terraube, this 29 year-old French aristocrat hardly looked like the kind of woman who was going to flip her shit and go Princess Vespa on hordes of AK-47 toting maniacs in an effort to single-handedly defend the beleaguered garrison from this massive onslaught. But, nevertheless, there she was, and while she may not have made her mark on history through sheer unadulterated mega-violence, she did prove herself as a pretty serious badass on par with the ballsiest and most fearless war heroes around, serving as a front-line combat medic in one of the bloodiest sieges in French military history.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/galard1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">When Genevieve de Galard heard about all the horrible shit going down in \'Nam (which, at this point in history, was known by the significantly less badass name, \"French Indochina\" &ndash; I refuse to refer to it as this on principle alone, especially when a much-more-hardcore version of the country name is available to me), she knew she had to step up and help the troops out there that were busting their asses to fight off a full-scale, balls-out relentless attack from four full Divisions of Vietnamese Regular Infantry. Fresh out of nursing school, she had enlisted in the Air Force, and, by 1954, the young Lieutenant was already at the beginning of her second tour of duty in \'Nam as a combat nurse &ndash; one of the toughest and most under-appreciated jobs in any armed forces.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Lt. de Galard\'s early contribution to aiding the effort at Dien Bien Phu was as a nurse on medevac flights, a job that takes an incredibly difficult task and somehow makes it even harder. Have you ever tried to play cards or write on an airplane while it\'s going through turbulence? It\'s a fucking disaster. Being a medevac nurse is kind of like that, only you\'re doing it while people are launching artillery at you, and if you fuck up instead of writing an \"I\" that looks like an \"L\", you accidentally kill a man. So, despite that little bit of added pressure, twice a day Genevieve would make a three-hour round trip flight to the beaten-up, half-destroyed runway at Dien Bien Phu, screaming down in a hard landing while flak and anti-aircraft guns shredded the sky all around her C-47 cargo plane, and the second the landing ramp touched down she and her fellow nurses had three minutes to get out and speed-load 13 men and 6 stretchers into the cargo bay of the aircraft. That was all the time they had &ndash; any longer than three minutes and the Viet Minh would range them with their artillery and turn the entire plane into a smoking crater of suck. The second that the wounded were loaded, the pilot would take off, brave the flak fields once again, and de Galard would spend the return flight trying to provide medical assistance to guys who\'d had their arms blown off and shit. Not exactly a glamorous gig, but one that absolutely had to be done.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/galard2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Of course the French dude\'s smoking a cigarette while they cart him off on a stretcher.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Things were going well for the first week or so of the operation, and of course by \"going well\" I mean de Galard wasn\'t on board one of the eight C-47s that were shot down by anti-aircraft fire that week. But that\'s about where her luck stopped. You see, on 27 March, justas her plane was making a hard landing under the cover of darkness, one of the engines scraped against a barbed wire fence (that\'s how low they were flying these <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_C-47_Skytrain\">26,000-pound aircraft</a>!), tearing open the oil line and draining the engine dry. De Galard and her crew got the wounded men loaded on time, but without oil that plane wasn\'t going anywhere. Genevieve barely had time to get all the wounded back off the plane before a Viet Minh shell fragged it back to the Cretaceous Period (or whichever geological Era is responsible for airplanes).</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Just like that, Genevieve de Galard was now stranded in Dien Bien Phu, surrounded by 50,000 enemy soldiers and a shell-shocked garrison of 13,000 brave-yet-exhausted defenders. See seemed to take it well &ndash; moments after barely escaping the airfield with her life she walked straight off the runway, into the base hospital, and asked the doctor in charge how she could help care for the wounded.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/galard3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">de Galard applying a field dressing.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">For the next 41 days, Lieutenant Genevieve de Galard stayed with the men at Dien Bien Phu, providing medical care, aid, and help to anyone who needed it, no matter when or where. In the early days of her tenure, she took on any crazy shit they were willing to give her &ndash; triaging wounded as they were brought in to the hospital, assisting on surgeries (despite not even really being trained in how to do that!), and even going out onto the goddamned battlefield, providing emergency battlefield first aid, and carrying severely wounded men back to the hospital on stretchers. One day she\'d be out on a crater-filled wasteland pulling a guy through the grass while mortars blew the fuck out of everything around her; the next day she would spend her every waking minute assisting on up to 23 major surgical trauma operations in a single day. At night this high-born French aristocrat slept in a cot in the hospital, next to enlisted men who\'d had their fucking legs blown up or their faces shot in half, then get up the next morning and do it again. The only French woman on the base, de Galard wasn\'t even technically supposed to be there &ndash; in January 1954 France had ordered that all women be removed from front-line combat service &ndash; but not only did she diligently care for the wounded, but once the runway was back up and running she refused to be evacuated because she didn\'t want to leave her comrades.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It wasn\'t long before the entire garrison came to respect the woman they knew simply as \"Genevieve\", and Lt. de Galard was eventually put in charge of running a 40-bed hospital reserved for the most critically-wounded men on the base. As the situation became more and more dire (direrer?) de Galard continued to work through miserable heat and exhaustion while gunfire and mortars blasted around her. Despite her own suffering (food and medical supplies were so scarce that she lost nearly 20 pounds in the 3 months she was stationed there... not a weight loss regimen she would probably recommend to anyone) she never stopped soothing dying men, healing those she could, and making the best of whatever happened. A few weeks before the fall of the fortress, the military held a ceremony in the main fortress square in her honor. The Dien Bien Phu commander personally awarded her the Knight\'s Cross of the Legion d\'Honeur, and the commander of the paratroopers awarded her the Croix de Guerre and made her an honorary member of the French Foreign Legion. She told him that if they ever got out of there alive, she\'d buy him a bottle of champagne (they did, and she kept her word).</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/galard4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">This picture makes me regret ever bitching about my day job.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Finally, on 8 May 1954, after 41 days of constant battle and little to no sleep, the battered warriors of Dien Bien Phu were overrun by a massive attack of Viet Minh troops rushing in from every side at once. I guess you can say what you want about the French, but they went down like heroes at Dien Bien Phu, fighting to the very last and refusing surrender at all costs. Over half the garrison was killed in the course of the siege, and after the smoke cleared, Lieutenant Genevieve de Galard and what remained of the defenders now found themselves prisoners of the Viet Minh.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Once again, however, you couldn\'t get this badass chick down. Even with assault rifle-slinging enemy troops wandering the halls of the base, Galard continued attending to the wounded, blatantly refusing to leave her men or to cooperate with any of the stupid bullshit the Viet Minh were trying to get her to do. When the Vietnamese started confiscating what little remained of her medical supplies, Galard build secret stashes to hide shit so she could access it later when she needed it. When they put her in a cell by herself, she wrote letters to the troops to comfort them. When they released her from the cell, she went straight back to the hospital. After nearly 3 weeks of captivity &ndash; the majority of which was spent tending to the wounded French defenders &ndash; she has forcibly evacuated against her will by the French High Command in a POW transfer. She returned home a heroine of France, dubbed \"The Angel of Dien Bien Phu\" by the adoring press, and though even though President Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Paris threw a parade for her, and all the big magazines told her story, she never considered herself a heroine. She just figured she was doing her job.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Genevieve de Galard ended up marrying a Paratrooper she met in Vietnam and currently lives in France.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/galard5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"I do not deserve this honor... I have only done what any nurse would do.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,819906,00.html\">TIME</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3692767.stm\">BBC Story</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9959\">Presidential Medal of Freedom</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genevi%C3%A8ve_de_Galard\">Wikipedia</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Morgan, Ted.&nbsp; <em>Valley of Death</em>.&nbsp; Random House, 2010.<br /><br /> O\'Brien, Mary Elizabeth.&nbsp; <em>Servant Leadership in Nursing</em>.&nbsp; Jones &amp; Bartlett, 2010.<br /><br /> Windrow, Martin. <em>The Last Valley</em>. Da Capo, 2004. </span></p>','2011-04-15','544182715582','galard0.png','galard3.jpg','Genevieve de Galard','The Angel of Dien Bien Phu.','\"Mademoiselle Genevieve de Galard-Terraube, French Airborne Nurse, by her ministrations to the sick and wounded at Dien Bien Phu, inspired and heartened the entire free world. Her service to her comrades, marked by the courage of a woman in battle and by the devotion of a nurse to her sworn duty, has been unsurpassed in this century. Her supreme fortitude in hours of peril, her unfaltering dedication to her mission reflected the greatness of spirit manifested on many fields, in many centuries, by the soldiers of France.\"\r\n\r\n- Dwight D. Eisenhower'),('Dipprasad Pun','1979','N/A','Nepal','21st-century Nepalese Gurkha','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">I seriously don\'t want to turn this website into <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/gurung.html\">Gurkha</a> of the <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/shrestha.html\">Week</a>. I mean, honestly, I really don\'t. Sure, I have nothing short of an overwhelmingly unhealthy amount of respect for these Nepalese spike-devouring crotch-wreckers and their uncanny ability to routinely make the world a safer place by inserting their well-sharpened kukri blades into the softest parts of Democracy\'s enemies, but for the most part I generally prefer a little bit more variety when I write these stories up every week. In a perfect world, I\'d like to jump around between daring tales of awesome high seas piracy one week, insane stories of Viking warriors cleaving faces apart with battle axes another, and wash it all down with some murderous gunslingers Swiss cheesing their foes with .45 caliber ammunition and World War II flying aces sending Me-109s spiraling to the turf in a hail of fire and bullets and dead Nazi pieces. That diversity is the sort of thing that keeps this entire process fresh, because if I wrote about the same stuff every single week most rational people would probably eventually get really fucking sick of hearing about the same thing over and over and over, and they\'d start checking other sites and/or sending me bitchy emails about how I\'m about as interesting as a judo chop to the throat.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">What I\'m saying here is that the Gurkhas need to stop going out and doing ridiculously badass shit every time I turn around, because that way I\'ll have a chance to write about something else on this website. Based on the insane story I\'m bringing you this week, however, I\'m fairly confident this is something that might never happen.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pun1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">I very badly wanted to just work a bunch of terrible Puns into this article,<br />but that would only Dipprasad the point of this article.<br />Also I\'m not very good with puns.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It was a long, cold evening in September of 2010 when Acting Sergeant Dipprasad Pun of the Royal Gurkha Rifles was serving as the lone on-duty guard patrolling a small two-story, one-room outpost on the edge of the Afghan province of Helmand. The 31 year old non-commissioned officer, one in a long line of hardcore Gurkha soldiers who had served the British Crown since before World War II, quietly killed time sitting around with three of his buddies, just shooting the shit or playing cards or doing whatever the fuck it is that badass soldiers do whenever they aren\'t clubbing fools to death with rifle butts or dancing the typewriter while crotch chopping sideways across the countryside. Just another quiet night in lovely Afghanistan. Or so he thought! (DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNN!!!!!)</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere and without any warning, a cow reared its head back and mooed REALLY FUCKING LOUD. No shit, folks, that\'s how this story starts &ndash; a cow or a donkey or something honks out some probably-hilarious livestock-y noise outside the guard post where Pun is sitting quietly with his homeboys, and the next thing you know the manure is splattering into the HVAC intake fan. Sgt. Pun instinctively snapped his head over to look at the barnyard noise, presumably thinking to himself hey what the shit is going on with this cow mooing all willy-nilly at this time of the day without any warning, and no sooner did this guy look out the window than his eyes immediately fell onto to two men crouched in the middle of the road fucking around with some kind of weird device. Alarm bells immediately started clanging in Pun\'s head, and this battle-hardened Gurkha immediately sprang to his feet and rushed up the ladder to the roof of the guardhouse to get a better look. From the higher vantage point he did indeed see that it was in fact two guys fucking with some kind of device, so Pun of course shouted out for them to identify themselves. They did. With bullets.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pun2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Seven Taliban fighters with heavy weapons.<br />Pun was up against two or three times this many.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">And so, just as suddenly as the mournful mooing of the cow had broken the peaceful silence of the Afghan countryside, now the sky was filled with 7.62 millimeter bullets, epic profanity, and the tell-tale contrails of rocket-propelled grenade fire, as out of fucking nowhere somewhere between 15 and 30 Taliban warriors launched a balls-out attempt to smear poor Sergeant Pun all across the roof of his guardhouse. Gunfire was whizzing in from every direction, rock and smoke was getting kicked up all over the place, and Pun pretty much nearly shit a brick as RPG fire blew giant chunks out of the building he was standing on.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But then, after a brief moment of, \"What the fuck did I get myself into?\", Dipprasad Pun suddenly and instinctively kicked it into Ultimate Mega Gurkha Freak-Out Limit Break Mode. In a moment of berserker clarity, Pun took one look around, grabbed the heavy machine gun that had been positioned on the roof, and decided that if he was going to die he was going to make goddamned sure that he took as many of those fuckers with him as possible. With a mighty yell, the 5\' 7\" tall Sergeant shouted \"I WILL KILL YOU ALL RARARARGHGHGHHH!!!!!!!\" in his native language, ripped the machine gun up off its fucking tripod, and started firing indiscriminately at everything around him in one gigantic Rambo-style clusterfuck of munchy crunchy full-metal-jacketed carnage.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pun3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"Who are you?\"<br />\"I\'m your worst nightmare.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">For the next fifteen minutes or so, Sergeant Dipprasad Pun went completely fucking out of his mind batshit insane. Surrounded on all sides in a scene that makes me think of the rooftop finale for Mercy Hospital in <em>Left 4 Dead</em>, Pun fought off assaults from all sides of his fortified rooftop position, somehow avoiding being shot by thirty-plus guys with automatic weapons and explosives launchers as he laid down a curtain of bullets so over-the-top that it would have made John Woo jizz. Firing from the hip like the goddamned Terminator wasting those cop cars with the minigun in <em>T2</em>, Pun held back the Taliban assault on the town, blowing through all 400 rounds of ammunition for the machine gun &ndash; every single bullet in the rooftop bunker &ndash; in the span of just a few minutes. When the supply of large-caliber heavy weapons ammunition ran out, Pun ditched the MG and started grabbing grenades, two at a time, chucking them in every direction like he was dishing out beads from a Mardi Gras rooftop (only instead of topless drunk babes he was throwing them at terrorists, which is pretty much the exact opposite of topless drunk babes, but whatever). Seventeen high explosive fragmentation grenades cratered the landscape around him, fragging the shit out of anything that did or didn\'t have a bullet in it, but yet this insane-o-tron motherfucker <em>still</em> wasn\'t done turning himself into a one-man nuclear explosion &ndash; he was determined to put out more firepower than a friggin\' Cylon Basestar, and nothing was going to stand in the way of his inexorable desire to massacre the bejeezus out of any terrorists within a twenty-mile radius. With his machine gun and grenade supply depleted, he kicked over the ammo boxes, pulled his service rifle and continued popping caps into any and all deserving asses.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now, at this point you\'d think that the Taliban guys would be like what the fuck, this guy is out of his mind insane, let\'s just leave him alone and put our bullshit IED in some other village and forget about this place, but apparently this wasn\'t the case on this particular September evening. One Taliban fighter who, depending on how you look at it, was either delusionally insane or one of the bravest men in the history of warfare, decided that rather than run fleeing from this psychotic Gurkha spinning around in circles dishing out death to everyone in a 360-degree arc, he was going to <em>climb up the tower</em> and try to bum rush the Nepalese berserker off the roof of the guard house.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">This, as you might expect, does not end well for him.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pun4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">This expression is probably the last thing most of those guys saw.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">You see, Sergeant Pun\'s spider sense started tingling as soon as he he saw this AK-47 swinging Taliban soldier scrambling onto the roof of the tower, and if there\'s one thing you\'ve learned about this guy it\'s that he did not in any way intend to go down without an utterly epic fight. As the Taliban soldier scrambled to his feet, Pun immediately swung his L85 Enfield assault rifle to bear, sighted down the barrel, and pulled the trigger.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Click.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Nothing happened. Weapon malfunction. So now, with less than a second to fuck around with before this Taliban guy pulled up his AK and smoked Pun straight into the \"posthumous medal recipient\" column of the Sunday Times, this fearless Gurkha kept his composure, stayed cool, and did what any ultra-insane badass would have done in this situation &ndash; he improvised.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Sergeant Dipprasad Pun grabbed the tripod for his machine gun up off the deck, collapsed it down, and chucked it straight into that douchebag\'s face as hard as he could.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pun5.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">An M122 tripod.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now, don\'t go thinking that this is like flimsy plastic digital camera tripod or some shit &ndash; this was a serious chunk of metal designed to support the weight of a heavy machine gun, and it\'s built sturdily enough to survive being dropped out of a fucking airplane. I\'m not sure exactly what model of equipment Pun was dealing with here, but the U.S. M122 tripod weighs in at 16 pounds, which is roughly the same as two gallons of milk, so I can only imagine that getting your face rocked with this was kind of like getting pegged in the eye with a goddamned warhammer. The brave (if not misguided) Taliban trooper took it off the face, reeled backwards, and fell from the roof. Pun, unfazed, continued busting asses, single-handedly holding off a coordinated Taliban attack by himself and thwarting a would-be roadside bombing in the process. The Conspicuous Gallantry Cross medal citation he received last month also credits him with saving the lives of the three men inside the tower as well. I have no idea what the fuck those guys were up to during the battle, but I guess the important thing is that it seems to be a pretty agreed-upon fact that all 400 machine gun bullets, 17 grenades, and god-knows how many rifle rounds were all discharged solely by Pun in his ridiculous rampage, so it\'s probably safe to say those guys were pretty content to chill out and just stay the fuck out of this guy\'s way. Pun is also credited with setting off a land mine (how that fits into the story I have no idea), and of course pummeling a dude in the skull with the machine gun tripod.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">In true badass fashion, when the battle was over, reinforcements had arrived, and the smoke had finally cleared, Sergeant Pun\'s company commander quietly walked up to him, slowly looked the blood-lusted Sergeant over, patted him once on the back, and simply asked, \"You OK?\" Pun nodded, dazed, but unhurt. The company commander nodded once and walked away without a word. All in a day\'s work for the Royal Gurkha Rifles.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pun6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.thehimalayantimes.com/fullNews.php?headline=Gurkha+gets+UK%C2%B4s+2nd+highest+medal+for+bravery&amp;NewsID=281321\">Himalaya Times</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/uk-12854492?SThisFB\">BBC</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.metro.co.uk/news/859087-gurkha-who-fought-off-30-taliban-by-himself-awarded-honour\">Metro UK</a></span></p>','2011-04-08','738226015791','pun4a.jpg','pun.jpg','Dipprasad Pun','Gurkha soldier fights off 30 Taliban with a machine gun and grenades.',''),('Dudley Walker Morton','July 17, 1907','October 11, 1943','Owensboro, KY, USA','WWII American Sailor','<blockquote><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><em>Note:&nbsp; I am dead in the middle of the <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/booktour2011.html\">book tour</a> this week, and, between barely knowing what city I\'m in right now, not having access to either my own books or a reliable Internet connection, and the nasty case of food poisoning I\'ve recently come down with, I\'m not really in any condition to be researching and writing hilarious new content - no matter how badly I wanted to write an April Fool\'s Day article about Fred Rogers\' career as a Marine Corps sniper in Vietnam. So, having said that, this week\'s update is a piece that was emailed to me a few years ago by a reader named Henry Jacobs. I thought it was pretty awesome, so I\'ve rewritten parts of it and am posting it here in lieu of my regular update.</em></span></blockquote>\r\n<blockquote><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><em><br /></em></span></blockquote>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">In October of 1942, seven months into the overt American involvement in World War II, the USS Wahoo (SS-238) was a submarine with a fine crew, a totally sweet name, and a frighteningly limp-dicked pussy of a commander. His name was Pinky, a name more fitting a cartoon villain in a Ms. Pac-Man arcade cabinet than a hardcore flesh-reaving submarine commander, and ol\' Pinky seemed a little unclear on the concept of \"tetch\'in off\" Japanese freighters in the frontal cranium with an endless wall of large ass torpedoes. Although he had almost-accidentally destroyed a Japanese submarine that pretty much parked in front of his torpedo tubes, Pinky fucked up attack after attack, including once when he had the chance to donkey-punch a damned Japanese aircraft carrier. This guy had a lot of excuses, like his torpedoes being kinda fucked up and not exploding when they were supposed to, but in the end it was just a bunch of bullshit; he was getting punked and everyone knew it.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">So, before we get too far along, you need to understand a little bit about the nature of submarine warfare in the 1940s. Most combat surface ships were built tough, with lots of extra buoyancy to spare so they could get all shot up to shit and keep on pummeling people retarded. Submarines, in contrast, were required to sink as part of their job, so they had almost no excess buoyancy, and they could and did fucking sink instantly on a permanent basis in seconds if they got hit by pretty much anything bigger than a slingshot. They were also really fucking hard to get out of, so, if and when they did sink, everybody on board was pretty much guaranteed to be fish food. It was like fighting for keeps while sitting on a water balloon filled with ass-melting acid. US submarine crews had the highest death rate of anyone in the service. It required nuts the size of cannonballs to step onto a US fleet class submarine, and those men had \'em - they were all volunteers.</span></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wahoo1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The US Navy doctrine for submarine warfare held that submarines were supposed to hang out quietly and passively and suckerpunch passing ships with torpedoes. While subs also had 102mm deck guns, 20mm AA guns, .50 caliber machine guns, and plenty of small arms, the real ass-ripper was the torpedo, which contained enough high explosives to break a fucking ship in half and dump all its sailors into shark-infested waters. Navy doctrine basically regarded all the other weapons as excess bling, and they certainly didn\'t approve of any sub commanders going toe-to-toe with surface ships in a badass mano-a-mano death match. This would have been great, except that US torpedoes of this time period didn\'t always explode. The Japanese, on the other hand, knew how to make a serious torpedo: their \"Long Lance\" motherfuckers always blew up, mostly because they had no safety devices to speak of, but American torpedoes were too nice and safe for everyone involved, including the fucking enemy. More often than not, a surprise torpedo attack would result in a giant phallic-shapped hunk of metal harmlessly clanging off the underside of a depth-charge-laden warship. This is not ideal.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Into this world stepped Commander Dudley \"Mush\" Morton. He was assigned to USS Wahoo as a \"Prospective Commanding Officer\" (PCO), a \"coach in waiting\" type of dude who\'s just supposed to observe so he can get his own sub later. Wahoo went out on her second war patrol with Pinky still in command. Pinky fucked it up again, big time, sinking only one ship while the rest of the Imperial Navy sailedon through his gunsights like ducks in a carnival game. Pinky got his ass fired and they put Morton in command.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">(Note: Pinky later grew a substantial dick and nutsack, and commanded a US destroyer with valor and distinction in the 1944 Normandy invasion of France.)</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wahoo2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">With Morton at the helm, shiploads of Imperial Japanese shit suddenly started getting seriously wrecked throughout the Pacific. You see, it turned out that that Commander Morton was of the opinion that Navy submarine warfare doctrine was complete bullshit, and he set about perfecting the business of capping Imperial Japanese asses with a special psychotic vengeance. Wahoo started off by taking on a Japanese destroyer head-to-head and breaking it in half. Now, destroyers were supposed to hunt subs (not the other way around), but what the fuck. Not long afterwards, Wahoo tracked down a convoy of Japanese Navy ships, steered into the middle of the decent-sized formation, and opened up with every tube they had in one continuous spin move that basically resembled the balls-to-the-wall final scene from <em>The Last Starfighter</em>. Wahoo hit three of the enemy ships right off, cracking them open. Two stopped and the other two moved off and Morton let them go &ndash; for the moment. Then Morton surfaced the Wahoo (this is not stantard operating procedure for submarines, in case you need me to tell you this) and basically went absofuckinglutely apeshit with his torpedoes, deck guns, machine guns, sidearms, throwing knives, and whatever the hell else they could get their hands on. One of the ships had sunk immediately, but the other, a troop transport called Buyo Maru, was still afloat. Not for long. Morton blasted the transport out of the water with another torpedo, and the troops scrambled into lifeboats as the ship sank. So the Wahoo\'s crew figured, like, game over, good job, let\'s hit the Xbox dude. Wrong-o there Cochise, said Morton.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">See, many true badasses are dissatisfied anytime the enemy is left with a fucking pulse, and Morton was no exception. The way he saw it, the ship\'s cargo was soldiers who were now waiting in lifeboats to be picked up to go on to cap American soldiers. Not on his watch. Now the Japanese in the lifeboats may or may not have fired on Wahoo first, but the Wahoo\'s crew were still a little stunned when Morton ordered them to open up on the lifeboats with every gun the Wahoo had. They were like \"machine-gunning survivors in lifeboats... isn\'t that a little... ah?\", but Morton told them to shut up and fire until the lifeboats were matchwood. Turns out that they didn\'t actually kill very many of the troops in the boats, but hey, it\'s the thought that counts. A lot of people like to talk shit about Morton for this, and you could definitely make a case that it\'s not exactly the most honorable course of action he could have taken (being that shooting shipwreck survivors is explicitly forbidden by the Hague Convention), but you also kind of have to appreciate that he was always willing to take everything he did to the fucking xtreme gonzo.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wahoo3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">After taking down an entire convoy by itself Wahoo was out of torpedoes, so the crew figured, like, cool, we get to go home now. Not a fucking chance, said Morton. After all they still had ammunition for the deck gun, a pack of Roman Candles and a couple strings a Black Cats, didn\'t they? Commander Dudley Morton wasn\'t going home as long as he still had bullets, and if there were shells for the deck guns sitting in the hold he was damn well going to use them.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">First he took on a convoy of eight ships on the surface by himself, using his one fucking deck gun, and damaged several of the enemy ships before barely escaping after a destroyer depth-charged the shit out of Wahoo. Then he tried to shell a Japanese refinery over a fucking mountaintop. No American submarine had ever gone so completely out-of-control Frank Castle apeshit on the enemy before. Finally they head back to Pearl Harbor with a broom tied to the mast &ndash; clean sweep, killed all the motherfuckers.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Back at Pearl, the admirals are happy about the sunk tonnage, but that Buyo Maru thing bugged them. Since a true badass could give a shit about anything but the sound of the enemy\'s intestines spilling out on his boots, he just squinted, drank a shot of whiskey, loaded up more ammo, and rode out of town before they could call him up on charges.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The Wahoo returned to sea, and the shit got even more fucking insane. This time they headed for Korea, and they stopped off for fuel at Midway Island (subs ran on Diesel fuel, and the Pacific is a mother big ocean). While there, the crew found some insane Molotov cocktail exploding firebombs the Marines had made to fend off the expected Japanese invasion of Midway. These things were unstable as shit, and the Marines were like, dudes, seriously, don\'t fuck around with those, they\'re really really dangerous. Commander Morton didn\'t give a crap. He put those death bombs in the submarine and headed to Korea. In spite of a particularly fucked-up batch of dud torpedoes, Wahoo sank 9 Japanese ships, including one with the deck gun after they ran out of torpedoes. It was a US Navy record for ship kills in a single patrol.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wahoo4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But, as you might expect, Morton still wasn\'t done. Not long after smoking nine warships by himself, Morton found another ship, a smaller one, and Wahoo moved in in to wreck its ass. The were out of torpedoes and out of 102mm ammo for the deck gun, but fuck it, says Morton, use the 20mm anti-aircraft guns. The Wahoo opened up, but all three 20mm guns quickly jammed up. This only made Morton EVEN MORE PISSED. \"No problem\" says Morton, \"get the fucking Death Bombs\". Sailors run up to the upper decks with these goddamned Molotov cocktails, Morton orders his ship to dive, pull up <em>directly beside</em> the enemy ship (which was currently trying to blast them with everything they had) and Morton and his men popped up out the hatch and hand threw all of the bombs onto the enemy ship, torching it into a flaming wreck in one of the most balls-out events in Naval warfare since the days of the Roman Empire. The sea off Korea was full of flaming wreckage and floating bodies &ndash; the Japanese figured they had been hit with an entire wolfpack of submarines. There wasn\'t so much as a match stick left on Wahoo, so they returned to Pearl &ndash; clean sweep once again.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The next patrol went about the same, Morton and the Wahoo were ramming new Japanese assholes and dealing out headshots left and right in spite of the still-faulty torpedoes. When they got back to Pearl, Admiral Chester Nimitz himself finally cameaboard and personally pinned a medal on Morton. It goes on like this for two more patrols: ass-kicking galore. Then they head to the Sea of Japan for the final showdown. Morton and the Wahoo took down four ships in one battle, but then their luck ran out, and they were sunk by depth charges &ndash; fighting to the end, dying in a manner just as balls-out as they had conducted the entire war. The wreck of the Wahoo was found in 2006 on the bottom of the Sea of Japan, her crew is still aboard. The Admirals at least came and threw a wreath, that was nice.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Commander \"Mush\" Morton was a true badass who took charge of shit and layed the smackdown over and over when America desperately needed it done. Inspired by his badassitude the US submarine force went on to become a deadly group of mofos who wrecked the shit of the Japanese Navy a hellacious way, and Morton was the OG who started it all. It wasn\'t just the number of chump ships he personally capped &ndash; his actions changed Navy doctrine forever by showing other sub skippers how to be Real Men. At the time of his death, Morton was the top-scoring sub commander in U.S. history, having taken down 19 confirmed enemy vessels, and his executive officer Richard O\'Kane was so overawed by the size of Mush Morton\'s nutsack that when left the Wahoo for his own command he went on to surpass for former commander and become the top scoring US sub commander of the war. Just by way of comparison, Mush Morton, whose insane rampage of death was came to a close in 1943, still ended up as the #3 top sub ace of the entire war, which went on two years after his death. Morton didn\'t give a shit about anything but destroying the enemies of his country. He was a true hero, and a badass dude in every sense of the word &ndash; learn from this, bitches.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wahoo5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> O\'Kane, Richard H., Rear Admiral, USN (ret.), <em>Wahoo: The Patrols of America\'s Most Famous WWII Submarine</em>, Presidio Press, Novato, CA (1987)<br /><br /> Sterling, Forest J., <em>Wake of the Wahoo: The Heroic Story of America\'s Most Daring WWII Submarine, USS Wahoo (4th ed.)</em>, R.A. Cline, Riverside, CA (1999)<br /><br /> Beach, Edward L. \"Ned\", Jr., Captain, USN (ret.), <em>Submarine!</em>, United States Naval Institute Press, Annapoilis, MD (2003) (reprint of 1952 edition)<br /><br /> JANAC (Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee). <em>Japanese Naval and Merchant Shipping Losses. During World War II by all causes</em>, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (1947)<br /><br /> Blair, Jr., Clay, <em>Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan</em>. Philadelphia: Lippincott (2001). </span></p>','2011-04-01','623426716457','wahoo0.jpg','wahoo01.jpg','Dudley Morton','WWII U.S. submarine commander who once destroyed an enemy ship with Molotov cocktails.',''),('John Arthur Johnson','March 31, 1878','June 10, 1946','Galveston, TX, USA','20th-century American Athlete','<p>Jack Johnson was the first black American athlete to break the color barrier, fighting and defeating a world-class white boxer in old-school leather-gloves hand-to-hand combat in 1908 to become the first black Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>He did this 39 years before Jackie Robinson ever saw a Major League Baseball pitch, at a time when pro baseball games weren\'t played at night because stadium lighting hadn\'t been invented yet.&nbsp; It freaked the American media out so bad that the New York Times issued an editorial demanding a \"Great White Hope\" rise up and put this hotshot back in his place because what the hell are these black people doing thinking they can be good at sports and stuff anyways.</p>\r\n<p>Jack Johnson didn\'t give a shit.&nbsp; When he wasn\'t defending the title by knocking out chump after chump during his six-year reign as World Heavyweight Champion, &nbsp;the once-impoverished son of ex-slaves played in a jazz band, owned a badass Harlem nightclub, drove an ultra-fast pimped-out yellow hot rod, walked his pet leopard down the streets of New York City with a glass of champagne in one hand and a gold-plated pimp cane in the other, and allegedly banged everyone from movie star Mae West to German spy Mata Hari and that French chick from the Moulin Rouge.</p>\r\n<p>He\'s a real-life mix between Jackie Robinson, Mike Tyson, Dolemite, and a big bag of bricks that fucks movie stars.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/425012623235/jackjohnson1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> When I see a ghost, I cut the motherfucker.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Born March 31, 1878 in Galveston, Texas, Jack Johnson\'s parents had been living as slaves just 15 years earlier and were now barely scraping a living by working shit jobs as manual laborers.&nbsp; Dirt poor with little in the way of prospects, Johnson dropped out of school after fifth grade, got into fights with local street gangs, and took any job he could find.&nbsp; Eventually he settled into a gig loading cargo onto ships at Galveston Harbor, making extra money by challenging his co-workers to back-alley Fight Club no-holds-barred fucking bare-knuckle fistfights and then having the other guys on the dock throw money into the pot for the winner to take home.&nbsp; His first victory, a beatdown of some hardcore salty pirate motherfucker longshoreman, earned Johnson a buck, which he probably then spent on band-aids and an ice pack for his knuckles.</p>\r\n<p>While kicking his co-workers\' asses was probably incredibly fulfilling (I can think of more than a few former co-workers I\'d love to go twelve rounds with), it wasn\'t exactly paying the bills, so Jack Johnson decided to get serious and become a professional face-rearranger.&nbsp; He hitchhiked and train-jumped his way from Galveston to Chicago, where he met up with a couple promoters to try and help him out.&nbsp; In one of his first fights he battled a dude known as The Black Hercules, and was beaten unconscious in just a few rounds.&nbsp; Unsatisfied with the result, Johnson took him on in a rematch, knocking the well-known pro out in the 14<sup>th</sup> round.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/425012623235/jackjohnson2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Pretty much anything goes when you\'re doing the amateur face-punching circuit, and Johnson\'s first fight with a white fighter came when he knocked out Jim Scanlon in 1900.&nbsp; When Scanlon called bullshit on getting his ass kicked, Johnson offered to do it again in a rematch, but that fight was broken up by Nashville cops because they didn\'t really like the idea of black guys beating up white dudes on their turf.&nbsp; Johnson, a master counterpuncher with an unbreakable defense, continued to win fight after fight against white and black boxers alike, becoming well-known for his uppercut, his ability to wear down opponents, and the fact that he talked epic amounts of shit not only to his opponents but to everybody sitting ringside that didn\'t like him, and that he did this not only before and after fights but during them as well.</p>\r\n<p>Eventually Jack Johnson started getting a reputation, so a hardcore pro boxer named Joe Choynski came to Galveston to beat his ass.&nbsp; The fight was broken up by Texas Rangers, who stormed the ring and broke it up because oh yeah boxing was fucking illegal in Texas, not that this ever seemed to stop Johnson from doing it.&nbsp; The two guys were thrown in prison, the Rangers charged admission to fans who wanted to come see Choynski and Johnson spar in their jail cell like some crazy Django Unchained / Russian Underground prison mafia battle royale shit, and the two guys eventually became friends, with the aging Choynski offering tons of valuable fighting advice to his up-and-coming friend like some weird mix between HBO\'s <em>Oz</em> and David Carradine in <em>Kung Fu</em>.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/425012623235/jackjohnson3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Jack Johnson used his skills to rise through the ranks, and in 1903 he beat some guy up to become the Colored Heavyweight Champion of the World.&nbsp; But this wasn\'t enough &ndash; he wanted to be the best of the best, universally-recognized across all ethnicities as the hardest pipe-hittin\' motherfucker on earth.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The guy who held the belt at this time was Jim Jeffries, a 19-0 fighter who had never been knocked down in a match and who was famous for breaking the ribs of three different fighters while defending his title.&nbsp; Jeffries, not exactly excited about being punched in the face by Jack Johnson, said he refused to fight a black man for the title.&nbsp; Jack Johnson responded by challenging Jeffries\' younger brother (also a boxer) to a match &ndash; he beat little bro unconscious while Jim sat ringside, then pointed and demanded a fight.&nbsp; Then he went off, fought two white former heavyweight champions, and thrashed them both.&nbsp; Jeffries, seeing no other recourse, vacated his title to some Canadian guy and retired from boxing.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/425012623235/jackjohnson4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>To complete the Clubber Lang Mister T shit he had going on, Jack Johnson then challenged Jeffries\' successor, Tommy Burns, by taking out newspaper ads calling him a pussy and then traveling to Burns\'s fights so he could personally challenge him from the ringside.&nbsp; Burns eventually agreed to face Johnson in front of 20,000 people in Melbourne, Australia, though this wasn\'t out of range and was mostly just because the awesomely-named fight promoted Hugh \"Huge Deal\" McIntosh offered him $30,000 to do it.</p>\r\n<p>Jack Johnson beat Burns so badly that the cops stopped the fight in the 14<sup>th</sup> round because the boxing match was walking a fine line between \"professional sporting event\" and \"involuntary manslaughter\".</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/425012623235/jackjohnson5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>By becoming the World Heavyweight Champion, Jack Johnson immediately sent the American media into a frothing-at-the-mouth widespread panic frenzy that makes all that Tim Tebow ESPN fellatio look like a fluff piece about a dog show in the <em>Bumfuck County Post</em>.&nbsp; Apocalyptic doomsayers cried and wailed and tore their clothes, begging for a \"Great White Hope\" to descend from Heaven on a golden chariot and decapitate Jack Johnson in the boxing ring by flicking his head off his neck like it was a paper football.&nbsp; Southern ministers were calling for him to be lynched.&nbsp; Local cops were barring him from towns.&nbsp; Every time he was pictured in the newspaper walking to the opera with a hot white chick on his arm a thousand Jim Crow motherfuckers\' eyes exploded out of their heads like over-squeezed jalape&ntilde;o poppers.&nbsp; It was all plagues of frogs and locusts, etc. stuff, but, at the end of the day, what it all added up to was that the new Champ was getting more press coverage than contemporary black leaders W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington combined into a Voltron with LeBron James and RGIII.</p>\r\n<p>On July 4<sup>th</sup>, 1910, their prayers were answered.&nbsp; The Mighty Jim Jeffries, undefeated Heavyweight Champion of the World, the Great White Hope, came out of retirement to fight Jack Johnson and reclaim his title.&nbsp; The two faced off in Reno, in front of a rabid crowd of 22,000 people, most of them whites cheering for Jeffries.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/425012623235/jackjohnson6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzAS-wihuVI\">Here\'s a video of the fight</a>.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">I love that Jack is smiling here.</p>\r\n<p>Jack Johnson not only gave Jeffries the first knockdown of his career &ndash; he dismantled him, beat his ass, and won the fight in Round 15 when Jeffries\' corner threw in the towel.&nbsp; \"I could never have whipped Johnson at my best,\" Jeffries said after the fight. \"I couldn\'t have hit him. No, I couldn\'t have reached him in 1,000 years.\"&nbsp; He earned over $100,000 for the win, which a fuckton of money in 1910.</p>\r\n<p>For the next six years the Champ took on all comers.&nbsp; One time he won a fight despite having a broken arm and only punching with his left.&nbsp; Another time the World Middleweight Champion tried to make the jump to Heavyweight and lost five teeth to Johnson for his troubles. A national celebrity and an utterly divisive character, his picture was on everything from snake-oil medicine boxes to newspapers across the country, as \"Black Jack Johnson\" rolled through Harlem and New York City attending operas and hitting up jazz clubs.&nbsp; He loved opera, read a lot of books on Napoleon, married four different white women, and owned a badass nightclub where movie stars like Judy Garland watched music legends like Louie Armstrong shred jazz music.</p>\r\n<p>He also drove one of these things, which might as well have been a turbocharged V12 Lamborghini Aventador in 1910:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/425012623235/jackjohnson7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Things got weird in 1912, when the future commissioner of Major League Baseball convicted Jack Johnson of transporting his girlfriend and future wife across state lines for \"immoral purposes\", a charge that is so obviously total bullshit that John McCain and Mike Tyson have formed a weird alliance to try and get a presumably-irrelevant presidential pardon for the long-dead boxer.&nbsp;&nbsp; Bullshit aside, Johnson was sentenced to the maximum sentence &ndash; one year in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, the same place where guys like Whitey Bulger and Bugs Moran did their time.</p>\r\n<p>Johnson, in another balls-out display of his awesomeness, fled the country and spent 7 years fighting for money in Paris, Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Mexico City.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>He was still the reigning World Heavyweight Champion while a fugitive from justice.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/425012623235/jackjohnson8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Johnson lost a step later in life, and while fighting in Havana in 1915 the 37 year-old fighter was knocked out by a guy named Jess Willard after going 26 rounds in 108-degree heat with 100 percent humidity.&nbsp; Another black man wouldn\'t get a shot at the title for over a decade, and wouldn\'t hold the title until fellow badass Joe Louis did it 22 years later.&nbsp; His title reign over, Johnson went back home, served his time, boxed in the Leavenworth Fucking Penitentiary Prison Boxing Club face-punching inmates at 38 goddamned years of age, and apparently invented some kind of wrench that he got a patent for once he was out.</p>\r\n<p>The Galveston Giant would continue fighting in his spare time, getting banned from boxing in Kansas for illegally fighting and still fighting exhibition bouts at the age of 67.&nbsp; He died June 10, 1946 when the 68-year-old fighter wrapped his hot rod around a tree doing over a hundred miles an hour.&nbsp; His final official boxing record was 79-8 with 46 KOs, with most of the losses coming after he was 40 years old, but the actual number of knockouts and wins is probably much higher because the first rule of fight club is that you don\'t talk about fight club.&nbsp; He inspired future boxers from Joe Louis to Muhammad Ali, had songs written about him by everyone from Miles Davis to Mos Def, and is now remembered as one of the greatest boxers ever.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/425012623235/jackjohnson9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00014275.html\">http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00014275.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/unforgivableblackness/rebel/\">http://www.pbs.org/unforgivableblackness/rebel/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2010/jul/04/jack-johnson-pioneer-black-boxer\">http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2010/jul/04/jack-johnson-pioneer-black-boxer</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jack-johnson-wins-heavyweight-boxing-title\">http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jack-johnson-wins-heavyweight-boxing-title</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.biography.com/people/jack-johnson-9355980\">http://www.biography.com/people/jack-johnson-9355980</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Johnson_%28boxer%29\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Johnson_%28boxer%29</a></p>','2013-11-22','425012623235','jackjohnson.jpg','jackjohnson-small.jpg','Jack Johnson','the first black Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World','It wasn\'t just the championship that was at stake: it was my own honor, and in a degree the honor of my own race.'),('Judah Maccabee','c. 190 BC','160 BC','Modin, Israel','Biblical Jewish Warrior','<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Hanukkah is the story of balls-out asskicker avenging the desecration of the holiest temple of his religion by forming a rag-tag band of ultra-dedicated warriors, charging head-on into towering Macedonian armored war elephants armed only with spears and sharp rocks, and ultimately carving a bloody swath of destruction through a powerful, continent-spanning empire by masterfully executing one of the first successful guerilla war campaigns in human history.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The man who accomplished this tremendous feat would forever be remembered by one badass nickname &ndash; Judah Maccabee, the Hammer of Judaism.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>And while folks nowadays remember his daring stand against Selucid douchebaggery by drinking sweet wine, eating fake gold and wolfing down delicious sour cream-soaked latkas, his true story is a lot less about playing with dreidels and a lot more about shanking Greek phalanx warriors in the back of the skull with an iron lance and then cleaving an independent country out of their bloody carcasses.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/430875325388/maccabee1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Here\'s a preview from the upcoming card deck.<br /> If you missed the kickstarter, we\'ll be selling decks on the site later on.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The story starts with Alexander the Great, the 30 year-old dude who conquered most of the known world in a week and a half and then died from partying so hard that his head exploded.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Since Alexander didn\'t have any heirs, his empire broke apart into a couple big stupid empires ruled by various Ptolemies and other dudes who claimed some obscure tangential relationship to the young conqueror somehow.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>The realm of present day Israel/Palestine/Whatever was part of the Selucid Empire, a kingdom that stretched from Asia Minor through the Middle East and included most of Persia.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>The Selucids were ruled by a bunch of guys named Antiochus who generally let the Jews in Judea do their own thing, but all that changed in 170 BC when Antiochus IV Epiphany took over and decided he was tired of all these Jews hanging around not worshipping Zeus, and got all pissed off when he tried to speak Greek to them and they were all like \"What the fuck we don\'t speak Greek and even if we did you\'re Macedonian anyways so where is this shit coming from\".<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">So Antiochus had an Epiphany.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He\'d just assimilate the Jews into Hellenistic culture, and massacre the ones who refused to get with the program.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He marched his phalanxes into Jerusalem, destroyed the city walls, sacked the town, and sent troops to strip every single chunk of gold and silver from the Temple of Solomon &ndash; by far the holiest place in the Jewish religion &ndash; replacing the Torah and the altar with a big statue of Zeus, a bunch of dead pigs (basically the most unholy animal in the Jewish faith), and a shrine to himself that all Jews were supposed to pray to when they walked into the building (Antiochus\'s nickname, Epiphanes, doesn\'t have anything to do with this bright idea... it\'s a megalomaniacal nickname he gave himself that means \"God Made Manifest\".<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>The Jews just called him Epimanes, meaning \"The Madman\").</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/430875325388/maccabee2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">With the holiest place in Judaism now little more than a barren a mini-cult dedicated to the worship of his own ballsack, Antiochus then went to work on basically making it illegal to even think about being Jewish.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He banned the Hebrew language, doubled the taxes on everyone in Judea, tortured and killed Jews by the hundreds, and made things like praying to Yahweh, circumcising your kids, and not eating bacon punishable by death.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Then, to emphasize his point, Antiochus sent his minions out into the wilderness of Judea and had them force well-respected Jewish spiritual leaders to sacrifice pigs to Zeus as a show of their submission.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The first place he sent his men was the town of Modin, where a powerful rabbi named Mattathias was brought before an altar to Zeus and ordered to sacrifice a swine.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Matthathias refused.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>They offered him power, money, and the blessing of the Emperor.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He refused again.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>They threatened his life.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Again he told them to fuck off.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Then, out of nowhere, some other jackass was like, \"I don\'t get what the big deal here is\" and ate a little bit of the pork, so, naturally, Mattathias pulled a sword out and hacked that guy to death with it.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>The assembled Jewish townspeople got so pumped up that they killed Antiochus\'s messengers by beating them to death with rocks, then fled into the mountains before reinforcements could arrive.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/430875325388/maccabee3.png\" alt=\"\" /><br /> This guy <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">totally</em> deserved it, dudes.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Mattathias pretty much keeled over and died immediately following this episode, leaving it to his son Judah to take over, rally a motley crew of unarmed-yet-righteously-pissed Jews into combat against a Westnernized continent-spanning Hellenic empire, recapture the holiest place in his religion from the iron grip of hated pagan non-believers and liberate his people from tyranny.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>It\'s like Red Dawn with Yarmulkes.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Judah Maccabee was ready for the challenge.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">First, the Hammer of Judaism set up the infrastructure required to run a massive guerilla campaign against vastly superior forces.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>In caves and towns across the land he set up safe houses, training camps, weapons caches, and an intelligence network to funnel information to his commanders.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He trained his fast-moving light troops to fight heavily armored infantry, how to use their speed to their advantage, and inspired them with pump-up speeches about how the fate of their entire faith hinged on their ability to stab dudes in the neck with a sharpened wooden spike.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Before long, his men were ready for war.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/430875325388/maccabee4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Judah the Hammer, so called for his fearlessness and power in combat, used his knowledge of the countryside and a bunch of forward-thinking military tactical ingenuity to fight a badass guerilla war against the entire Selucid Empire.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Taking on Macedonian phalanxes, Syrian light cavalry, and even units of Hellenistic Jewish warriors (who he considered traitors), Maccabee went into battle after battle, winning victories despite being completely outnumbered and outgunned every step of the way.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>At the Battle of Beth Horon Pass in 166 he attacked an enemy rearguard as they traveled through a mountain pass, attacking in defile, routing a force that included a detachment of badass War Elephants, and driving the rest of the army from the field.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>After that he personally fought and killed Appoloinus, the Macedonian governor of Samaria, in the middle of a battle and used the dude\'s sword in battle for the rest of his career.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>At Emmaus he led a night attack on the enemy\'s camp, burning their tents as they slept and then killing men as they ran fleeing from the burning structures.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>At Beth Zur a year later, he took 6,000 men against Elephants, phalanxes, and other badass shit, and Judah\'s multi-pronged attack drove his enemies before him, routing the Selucid army and clearing a path all the way to Jerusalem.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">With each victory, more and more warriors flocked to the Hammer, eager to avenge the desecration of the temple and reclaim Judea from the Macedonians.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Warriors assembled and offered their swords to a hero, calling Judah the next iteration of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=618192623560\">Joshua</a> or <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=358650819080\">Samson</a>, and, as his prestige grew, Judah Maccabee was even able to secure alliances with badass places like Rome and Sparta (although they never gave him more support than a long-distance thumbs-up and a \"go get \'em tiger\" pump-up speech).<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Still, each time he won, he gained new recruits and sent the enemy scattering, and after a year and a half of hard-fought victories, the Hebrew Hammer was ready to move on Jerusalem itself.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/430875325388/maccabee5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Gird yourselves and be valiant. Be ready early in the morning to fight with these <br />Gentiles who have assembled against us to destroy us and our sanctuary.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">In a massive battle, Judah Maccabee and his army of iron-clad warriors carved through the phalanx of elephants, drove the enemy into the citadel at Jerusalem, stormed the city, and recaptured the temple.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Judah and his jubilant warriors tore down the statues of Zeus and Antiochus, removed all the gross pig parts from the Temple, and rededicated it in a triumphant ceremony which is now famous because they only had one day of oil but their lamp burned for eight days in a miracle believed to be a symbol of the triumphant Jewish spirit.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Antiochus, who had been off fighting against a rebellion in Syria when this whole Jerusalem thing went down, attempted to re-take the city from the Maccabees, but Judah once again drove him off with a flurry of eye-poking spear wounds to the faces of all his friends and pets.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Judah Maccabee, the Hammer of Judaism, had been an ordinary guy living an ordinary life in some random bumfuck town in the wilderness of Judea.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He was now the leader of a triumphant guerilla army that had just defeated an Alexander the Great-style army single-handedly, without any foreign aid, avenged and ended the suffering of his people, and regained control of the most epically-holy site in his religion\'s history.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/430875325388/maccabee6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The fitting end to this story is that after becoming the Savior of his People, Judah Maccabee goes down in a fiery badass blaze of glory, dying in single combat with an elephant packed full of sharpshooting archers and guys with 20-foot-long spears.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>His force had been cut off by an enterprising Seleucid general, but when Judah Maccabee saw his 800 guys outnumbered and surrounded by 22,000 phalanx warriors and elephants, he naturally ordered his men to charge and destroy everything they could before being violently impaled to death.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Judah rushed fearlessly into combat and died surrounded by piles of dead enemy warriors.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">But his story doesn\'t end there.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">After Judah\'s death, his brother Jonathan takes over as commander of the Maccabees, and he continues to expand Jewish-controlled territory for over a decade before he too is captured and executed and succeeded by a different Maccabee brother (Simon).<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Finally Antiochus, unable to crush the revolt despite decades of trying, decided that these Maccabees dudes were more numerous than the Baldwin brothers and more annoying than the Wayans brothers, and said fuck it &ndash; you guys have your own little kingdom here, see if I give a shit.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>The Hasmonean Dynasty would rule Judea as kings for the next hundred years.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/430875325388/maccabee7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\">He was like a lion in his deeds, like a lion\'s cub roaring for prey.<br /> He searched out and pursued the lawless; he burned those who troubled his people.<br /> Lawless men shrank back for fear of him; all the evildoers were confounded;<br /> and deliverance prospered by his hand.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Links:</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Ancient_and_Medieval_History/539_BCE-632_CE/Palestine_in_the_Hellenistic_Age/Maccabean_Revolt.shtml\">http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Ancient_and_Medieval_History/539_BCE-632_CE/Palestine_in_the_Hellenistic_Age/Maccabean_Revolt.shtml</a></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"http://judaism.about.com/od/jewishbiographies/g/judahmaccabee.htm\">http://judaism.about.com/od/jewishbiographies/g/judahmaccabee.htm</a></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"http://www.torah.org/features/holydays/judahmaccabee.html\">http://www.torah.org/features/holydays/judahmaccabee.html</a></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Maccabeus\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Maccabeus</a></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Sources:</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Barnavi, Eli.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span><em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People</em>.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Schocken, 1994.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Sandler, Stanley.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span><em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Ground Warfare</em>.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>ABC-CLIO, 2002.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Scharfstein, Sol.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span><em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Chronicle of Jewish History</em>.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>KTAV, 1997.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Scharfstein, Sol.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span><em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Understanding Jewish Holidays and Customs</em>.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>KTAV, 1999.</p>','2013-11-29','430875325388','maccabee.jpg','maccabee-small.jpg','Judah Maccabee','Jewish warrior leads revolt against the Selucids to avenge the desecration of the holiest temple in his religion.','You shall rally about you all who observe the law, and avenge the wrong done to your people.  Pay back the Gentiles in full, and heed what the law commands.'),('Hideaki Akaiwa','1968','N/A','Ishinomaki, Japan','21st-century Japanese Humanitarian','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">On the afternoon of Friday, March 11th, Hideaki Akaiwa was at his job, dully trudging out the final bitter minutes of his work week in his office just outside the port city of Ishinomaki in Japan\'s Miyagi Prefecture. What this guy\'s day job actually is, I honestly have no idea, but based on the extremely limited information I have on the guy I can only presume that his daily nine-to-five routine probably falls somewhere between the motorcycle chase scenes from the movie <em>Akira</em> and John Rambo\'s antics in the book version of <em>First Blood</em> on the ridiculousness/badassitude scale. But that\'s only speculation.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The one thing we know for certain is that Akaiwa was at work on the 11th, when suddenly, right as he was in the middle of jumping over a giant Gatling-gun-armed robot while riding on a rocket-powered jetbike he\'d MacGuyvered together out of vines, tree branches, and a couple thumbtacks, something terrible happened &ndash; an earthquake. And not just any earthquake &ndash; a mega fucking brain-busting insane earthquake the likes of which the island of Japan had never had the misfortune of experiencing before. The ground shook, buildings crumbled, lights smashed apart, and the entire population of the country froze in fear as fault line below Japan rumbled for a ridiculous two-plus minutes.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But, amazingly, an 8.9 magnitude earthquake wasn\'t the worst thing to happen to the town Ishinomaki on that horrible day. No, that was afterwards, when the tremors from the earthquake churned up a raging tsunami that took a bustling city of 162,000 people and suddenly turned it into little more than a ten-foot-deep lake.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/GpuLlIrUYsI\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"640\" height=\"390\"></iframe><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">This is not Ishinomaki, but it is still completely fucking terrifying.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">For reference, <a href=\"http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/japanquake/ishinomaki-20110315.html\">here\'s a NASA satellite comparison of the city before and after the tsunami</a>. Needless to say, poor Hideaki Akaiwa, concerned for his family, rushed out of his office in time to see his city completely submerged under an obscene ten feet of water that buried everything from houses to businesses. He ran to the high water mark and stared helplessly into the sprawling lake that once used to be his home.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But it gets even worse. Hideaki\'s wife of twenty years was still buried inside the lake somewhere. She hadn\'t gotten out. She wasn\'t answering her phone. The water was still rising, the sun was setting, cars and shit were swooshing past on a river of sea water, and and rescue workers told him there was nothing that could be done &ndash; the only thing left was to sit back, wait for the military to arrive, and hope that they can get in there and rescue the survivors before it\'s too late. With 10,000 citizens of Ishinomaki still missing and unaccounted for, the odds weren\'t great that Hideaki would ever see his wife again.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">For most of us regular folks, this is the sort of shit that would make us throw up our hands, swear loudly, and resign ourselves to a lifetime of hopeless misery.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Hideaki Akaiwa isn\'t a regular guy. He\'s a fucking insane badass, and he wasn\'t going to sit back and just let his wife die alone, freezing to death in a miserable water-filled tomb. He was going after her. No matter what.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akaiwa1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">How the fuck Hideaki Akaiwa got a hold of a wetsuit and a set of SCUBA gear is one of the great mysteries of the world. I\'m roughly twenty hours into <em>Fallout 3</em> and I\'m lucky to come across a fucking vacuum cleaner in that godforsaken post-apocalyptic wasteland, yet this guy is in the middle of a real-life earth-shaking mecha-disaster and he\'s coming up with oxygen tanks, waterproof suits, and rebreather systems seemingly out of thin air. I guess when you\'re a truly unstoppable badass, you, by definition, don\'t let anything stand in your way. You make shit happen, all the time, no matter what.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Regardless of how he came across this equipment (borrowing, stealing, buying, beating up a Yakuza SCUBA diving demolitions expert, etc.) Hideaki threw on his underwater survival gear, rushed <em>into the goddamned tsunami</em>, and dove beneath the rushing waves, determined to rescue his wife or die trying. I\'m not exactly sure whether or not the dude even knew how to operate SCUBA equipment, but according to one version of his story he met his wife while he was surfing (which is awesome, by the way), so it doesn\'t seem like that much of a stretch to say that he already had a little experience SCUBA diving under a more controlled situation. Of course, even if this dude didn\'t know how to work the gear I\'m certain that wouldn\'t have stopped him either &ndash; Hideaki wasn\'t going to let a pair of soul-crushing natural disasters deter him from doing awesome shit and saving his family. He dove down into the water, completely submerged in the freezing cold, pitch black rushing current on all sides, and started swimming through the underwater ruins of his former hometown.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Surrounded by incredible hazards on all sides, ranging from obscene currents capable of dislodging houses from their moorings, sharp twisted metal that could easily have punctured his oxygen line (at best) or impaled him (at worst), and with giant fucking cars careening through the water like toys, he pressed on. Past broken glass, past destroyed houses, past downed power lines arcing with electrical current, through undertow that could have dragged him out to sea never to be heard from again, he searched.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Hideaki maintained his composure and navigated his way through the submerged city, finally tracking down his old house. He quickly swam through to find his totally-freaked-out wife, alone and stranded on the upper level of their house, barely keeping her head above water. He grabbed her tight, and presumably sharing his rebreather with her, dragged her out of the wreckage to safety. She survived.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akaiwa2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Dramatization of the rescue.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Hideaki Akaiwa still wasn\'t done yet.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now, I\'m sure you\'re wondering what the fuck is more intense than commandeering a wet suit, face-punching a tsunami and dragging your wife of two decades out of the flooded wreckage of your home, but, no shit, it gets even better. You see, Hideaki\'s mother also lived in Ishinomaki, and she was still unaccounted for. I think you all know where this is going.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">First, Hideaki searched around the evacuation shelters and other areas, looking for his mom among the ragtag groups of survivors who had been lucky enough to flee to higher ground. She might have escaped, and he needed to find her. Now. He ran through the city like some post-apocalyptic action hero, desperately trying to track her down, but when a couple of days went by without any sign of her, he knew what he had to do. The water had only receded a few inches by this point, the rescue teams weren\'t working quickly enough for his tastes, and Hideaki Akaiwa fucking once again took matters into his own hands &ndash; rushing back into the waterlogged city looking for his mom.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akaiwa4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">These are not ideal SCUBA diving conditions.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">So, once again Hideaki navigated his way through the Atlantean city, picking his way through crumbling wreckage, splintered wood, and shredded metal to find his elderly mother. After another grueling trek, he tracked her down on the upper levels of a house &ndash; she\'d been stranded there for four days, and would almost certainly have died without the timely aid of her son. He brought her to safety somehow as well, as you might expect at this point.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Now, while most people would have been content in the knowledge that their family was safe, Hideaki Akaiwa isn\'t the sort of badass who\'s going to hang up his flippers and quit just because he\'d taken care of his own personal shit &ndash; this guy made an oath to <em>keep going back</em> into the wreckage on his own to find people and help them to safety. Today this 43 year-old Japanese badass rides out every single day, multiple times a day, riding around on a bicycle with his legs wrapped in plastic to keep himself dry. His only equipment &ndash; a pocketknife, a canteen, a flashlight, a change of clothes, and a badass set of aviator sunglasses &ndash; packed into a trusty trio of backpacks, he rides out in search of people needing rescue, a modern-day, real-life action hero.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akaiwa5.jpeg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"https://american.redcross.org/site/Donation2?5052.donation=form1&amp;df_id=5052&amp;idb=0\">Donate to Tsunami Relief</a></span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-quake-scuba-20110317,0,7192950.story\">LA Times</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/955222--the-star-in-japan-hideaki-akaiwa-must-keep-looking?bn=1\">Toronto Star</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.theaustralian.com.au/heros-solo-swim-to-save-beloved/story-fn84naht-1226023561529\">The Australian</a></span></p>','2011-03-18','867423617340','akaiwa.jpg','akaiwa51.jpeg','Hideaki Akaiwa','Fearless Japanese hero goes into his tsunami-flooded village to save his family.',''),('Princess Zhao of Pingyang','598','623','Taiyuan, China','Ancient Chinese General','<p>In the history of Imperial China &ndash; all 2,100 years of soul-crushing, iron-fisted autocratic awesomeness of it &ndash; only two men ever Hulkamania\'d through the shackles of the peasant class to assume the throne and declare themselves Emperor of China.&nbsp; It wasn\'t just any idiot with a plowshare and a misguided delusion of grandeur who got to rock the sweet gold-threaded silk robes and spend his life drinking wine out of an above-ground swimming pool surrounded by an army of nubile concubines &ndash; to put this shit into perspective, more people have <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_laughter\">died from laughter</a> in the last 2,000 years than Chinese peasants became emperors, and that\'s saying something because seriously, who the fuck dies from laughter? What the hell, people?</p>\r\n<p>In <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Badass-Relentless-Onslaught-Gunfighters-Commanders/dp/0061749443\">the book</a> I talk about a guy named Liu Ji, who was a local street cop turned petty bandit turned beloved freedom fighter who overthrew the Empire, founded the Han Dynasty and ruled over a golden age of Chinese history as the Emperor Gaozu. The other man, Li Yuan, would also go on to be named Emperor Gaozu (why the hell they both called themselves Gaozu I have no idea... maybe it just translates to \"Emperor Some Dude\") and found yet another golden age in Chinese history (there were only two), but his path to the top was slightly different &ndash; mostly because the military commander who helped secure his rise to power was a little different from most hardass army officers and ball-crushing strategists in ancient China: It was Liu\'s 20 year-old daughter Zhao, the woman who would become the future Princess Pingyang of the Tang Dynasty.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pingyang1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>It takes a special kind of woman to forge an empire shaped like a giant cock.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Since Imperial Chinese history isn\'t the sort of shit you can pick up by watching Miley Cyrus smoke bowls on CNN, I\'ll start at the beginning. In the year 617, the ruler of China was a completely incompetent dick-for-brains jackwagon known as Emperor Yang of Sui. Yang was a miserable, self-loathing tyrant douche-rocket who had assumed the throne after courageously having his father poisoned to death by hired assassins (Yang wasn\'t even man enough to regicide the Emperor out himself). As soon as his dad\'s corpse was cold, Yang immediately proceeded to take over and inadvertently kill as many Chinese people as he possibly could, usually in a series of incredibly violent and unpleasant ways. First he decided he was going to try to extend the Great Wall of China and make the Grand Canal even more obscenely gigantic, so he sent a bunch of untrained losers out there with hammers and told them to \"hammer shit\". Thanks to back-breaking labor practices that would make even the most slacker OSHA foreman start blasting geysers of blood out of their eyes, six million people died working on these two projects, and even after all that everybody still just called them the Great Wall and the Grand Canal, which is the same thing people called them even before Yang started his idiotic wankering. Seeing as how this wasn\'t enough of a bungling abuse of power, Yang then decided to put a big army together and invade Korea and Vietnam, because what the hell else did he have going on? Of course, he was such a mouth-breathing dumbshit that all he managed to do was get his armies annihilated in a seemingly-endless series of soul-sucking failures, and his incredible ability to lose military campaigns despite overwhelming numerical superiority earned him the hatred and contempt of his subjects, his commanders, and his soldiers, and in the process of his fuckery he\'d bankrupted the Chinese Empire and lost over a million soldiers in combat. With the Yang\'s empire falling apart and bandit and rebel groups sprouting up all over the place, Yang did the tactically sound thing and used slavery, conscription, and paroled prisoners to bring his army back up to a million men, invade Korea once again, and get his entire army wiped out by 300,000 Koreans and a little bit of malaria.</p>\r\n<p>Yang\'s top military commander, General Li Yuan, had been born a peasant, but by this time he was a professional soldier. A tough, likeable, charismatic hardass who had fought with honor in all of Emperor Yang\'s bullshit military wanderings across Southeast Asia, Li had earned the respect of his men and the support of the people he governed, who saw him as fair, just, and awesome. So, of course since this guy demonstrated that he had two brain cells to rub together, the Emperor decided the General Li was a threat to his rule and stationed him way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere so that he could spend every day getting his ass ambushed by Turks and Mongols and god knows what else all the time. Li didn\'t even complain &ndash; the dude went out to the frontier, and not only repelled attacks from across the border, but was so fucking hardcore that his enemies negotiated a peace treaty with him, promising not to attack Chinese lands as long as Li was in charge. When Emperor Yang heard about this, he got so pumped up that he ordered General Li arrested and executed as a threat to the security of the Empire. Nobody ever accused Yang of being a political genius. So suddenly Li Yuan had a decision to make &ndash; surrender to the Emperor and face death by torture, or stand and fight. When he looked around and saw the Empire in shambles, the Imperial Army garrisoned entirely by untrained prisoners and slaves, and the countryside degenerating into small, independent warlord bands and bandit gangs, he knew he needed to sack up, take control, and show Emperor Numbnuts what it meant to beat some motherfucking asses.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pingyang2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>A typical sequence of commands issued by Emperor Yang to the troops in the field.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now declaring open revolt against the Emperor is pretty great when you\'re positioned way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere, but it came as something as a surprise to his daughter Zhao when she heard that her father had taken up arms against the tyrant king. You see, Zhao\'s husband was the commander of the Emperor\'s Palace Guard, and when they got word of the rebellion the happy couple was living about a block and a half from a few million people that were soon going to be trying to execute them at traitors. With little other recourse, both Zhao and her husband departed the city under the cover of darkness, headed opposite directions across the countryside so as not to draw any attention to themselves, and ran for it.</p>\r\n<p>For the next couple days, Zhao hauled ass across China, rushing back to her family\'s home province, all the while avoiding Imperial assassins and roving bandit tribes looking to do any number of ungentlemanly things to her. When she got back to her province safely, rather than chill the fuck out and wait for daddy to march his army back from the frontier, Zhao went to work being fucking awesome and hardcore. First, she sold her family\'s home and most of its land, using the money to buy weapons, equipment, and enough badass shit to outfit an army of motherfuckers. Then she went to family friends and loyal retainers, and began assembling everyone she could find into an army of her own &ndash; Zhao wasn\'t going to sit around like a chump, she was going to seize the capital herself if she had to, because fuck the Emperor for starting shit with her family and then having assassin douchebags try to ice her.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pingyang3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Did anybody order a face kick? Because I brought enough for everyone.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now, a peasant-born commoner raising an army in rebellion against the brutal despotic Emperor is impressive enough in its own right, but this was even more skull-fuckingly hardcore when you\'re talking about Zhao: This was a 20 year old woman raising an army of warriors in ancient China, at a time where men really didn\'t do all that well when it came to taking orders from women in any capacity at all, let alone war. Yet somehow Zhao fucking whipped the disgruntled peasants of her home province into shape, unifying her people and assembling a force worthy of the battlefield. Once she had a decent cadre of warriors, Zhao led them into combat against the neighboring warlord tribes in an effort to consolidate her power base. Her typical m.o. was to first approach the local bandit leader, and offer him an officer\'s commission in her force to join. If he refused, she tried to bribe him with money or food. If he refused that, she steamrolled his balls on the battlefield and gave his battered army two options &ndash; join us or die. They usually joined.</p>\r\n<p>After a few months of crushing scrotes up and down the burning lands of the Chinese countryside, Zhao\'s \"Army of the Lady\" soon became a damn respectable fighting force of over 70,000 warriors. She took on and defeated other rebel groups, as well as bandits, raiders, and brigands that were terrorizing the countryside, and her attacks were so vicious that the term \"bitch slap\" was coined to describe sneak attacks by the Army of the Lady. When Zhao conquered a town or city, she forbade her men from looting, raping, and plundering, because that sort of shit just pissed the people off and made the army look more like uncultured thugs than a legit fighting force, and the relieve populace quickly grew to appreciate their new ruler\'s desire to not rape and pillage them. They also liked the fact that the first thing she would do after moving into a town was to bring food and drink to the oppressed citizens, throwing bacon from the back of wagons and having Maple Syrup Infantry deploy through the streets with jugs of syrup on their backs. Her ranks swelled with recruits, or, as they said in the days of ancient China, her army \"got swole\".</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pingyang4.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>Some versions of the story have Zhao shaving her head before negotiating with warlords or leading her men on the battlefield.&nbsp; Even though I wasn\'t able to confirm this anywhere, I still pretty much just picture her looking like Jack from <em>Mass Effect 2</em>.</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Army of the Lady soon became so formidable that the Sui sent the shattered remnants of their pathetic forces after Zhao, but she was such a battle-harded ass-smasher at this time that she basically throat-stomped the entire Sui army into meat slurry without even taking her sandals off. Soon after crushing the Sui forces, she linked up with her father\'s equally-badass army (they had been blitzing in from the frontier), and together the two forces led the final assault on the Imperial palace at Chang\'an (in modern day Xi\'an). Zhao commanded a wing of the army in the assault, and together the father-and-son face-smashing duo drove the Sui from Chang\'an. General Li seized the throne, declaring himself Emperor Gaozu, the first ruler of the Tang Dynasty. Emperor Doucheface fled the town before being captured, but one of the guy\'s chief advisors finally got sick of his retarded bullshit and mercifully choked the guy out until he died from it.</p>\r\n<p>After helping her father conquer China, Zhao was appointed a military marshal, spending the rest of her life as the Princess Pingyang and ruling over a second Golden Age in Chinese History. Lasting nearly 300 years, the Tang Dynasty is seen as the high point in Chinese Imperial civilization &ndash; trade, culture, and military might would flourish under the Tang Emperors, and under their guidance China would grow to become the largest and most powerful empire on Earth in the 7th century.</p>\r\n<p>Sadly, Pingyang wouldn\'t live long enough to see the glory days of her father\'s reign &ndash; she died just two years later at the age of 23. Her father gave her a military burial fit for a general, complete with a band playing badass war music. Some of the more traditional d-bag administrators were all pissy about having music at her funeral (women weren\'t allowed to have bands play at their funerals in Ancient China for some reason), but the new Emperor told them to blow it all out of their bung holes, saying, \"The Princess personally beat the drums and rose in righteous rebellion to help me establish the dynasty. How can she be treated as an ordinary woman?\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pingyang5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>EPIC GONG</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Pingyang\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.wofs.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;Itemid=35&amp;task=view&amp;id=598#pinyang\">Five Women Warriors</a></p>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> De Pauw, Linda G.&nbsp; <em>Battle Cries and Lullabies</em>.&nbsp; Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2000.<br /><br /> Miles, Rosalind, and Robin Cross.&nbsp; <em>Hell Hath No Fury</em>.&nbsp; Three Rivers, 2008.<br /><br /> Peterson, Barbara Bennett.&nbsp; <em>Notable Women of China</em>.&nbsp; Sharpe, 2000.<br /><br /> Sima Qian.&nbsp; <em>Records of the Grand Historian</em>.&nbsp; Trans. Burton Watson.&amp;nbps; Columbia Univ. Press, 1993.<br /><br /> Tanner, Harold Miles.&nbsp; <em>China: A History</em>.&nbsp; Hackett, 2009. </span></p>','2011-02-18','953196923134','pingyang.jpg','pingyang1.jpg','Princess Pingyang','20 year old woman leads an army of peasants against the Emperor of China.',''),('Joseph Lozito','1971','N/A','USA','21st-century American Humanitarian','<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It\'s 8:45am on the morning of Saturday, February 12, 2011. A 40 year-old man named Joseph Lozito is riding the New York City Subway to work at his 40-hour a week gig in the box office of Manhattan\'s Avery Fisher Hall. He\'s nearing Penn Station on the final leg of his retardedly long commute from his home in Philadelphia &ndash; a two-hour pilgrimage he readily undertakes every day as a way to help provide food and a roof for his wife and two young sons. A ridiculous trip that makes pretty much everyone else who complains about their commute look like total pussies. A trip he\'s been taking five days a week since 2005.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">As his Subway car pulls into the station, he notices a commotion taking place on the platform. Cops are running around frantically, people are shuffling around like spastic zombies, and even though it\'s obvious that things are weird nobody really seems to know what the fuck is going on. This probably isn\'t all that uncommon &ndash; it\'s New York, for god\'s sake, and crazy shit happens here all the time. Maybe some kid went missing. Maybe a creepy old dude exposed himself to a minor. Who fucking knows with this place.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The Subway doors hiss open, and a super-shady dude with sandy blond hair calmly strolls onto the car. Everybody kind of eyes him a little suspiciously, but then again crazy people on the New York Subway aren\'t exactly anything new either.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lozito1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">A typical morning commute in New York City.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But then shit goes straight from weird to alarming. This bizarre dude quietly surveys the car, looking across the faces of Joseph Lozito and the other men, women and children who happened to be unfortunate enough to be stuck on that Subway car at that particular point in time, his face completely devoid of emotion. Without a word he marches up to the conductor\'s door and starts pounding on it, demanding for the train driver to let him in. When the conductor shouts, \"Who the hell are you?\", through the door, this guy responds by boldly declaring, \"I\'m the police\".</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Ok, shit just got really fucking eerie. Red flags are up. Alarm bells are going off in Joseph Lozito\'s head. He stays calm. Just a couple more stops and he\'s out of here.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Then, to the surprise of everyone on board (including the police-impersonating psycho), the conductor\'s door slides open. Standing in the entryway are two New York City police officers, their hands on their still-holstered pistols, demanding the man back up slowly and put his hands in the air.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The creepy dude doesn\'t register any emotion. He takes one look at the cops, then calmly turns his back to them and starts walking towards the back of the train car &ndash; directly at Joseph Lozito. Lozito\'s eyes are now cautiously locked on 23 year-old Maksim Gelman, a 6-foot-tall Ukrainian dude who suddenly rocketed up the list from \"creepy weirdo\" to \"what the fuck is up with this guy\" to \"holy shit he\'s coming right for me\" on the freak-out scale.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Gelman\'s eyes don\'t blink, move, or register any kind of emotion at all. They\'re dead, black holes. Gelman calmly reaches into his coat, eyes still fixed on Lozito\'s gaze, and smoothly draws an eight-inch-long, razor-sharp kitchen knife from his waistband. Lozito then suddenly realizes the man is muttering to himself. No, worse. He\'s chanting. \"You\'re going to die. You\'re going to die.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lozito2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">An eight-inch kitchen knife.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It turns out that Maksim Gelman wasn\'t just any nutjob riding pantless on the Subway &ndash; he was a bona-fide spree killer in the middle of a 28 hour stabbing rampage that had left four people dead and five more wounded across the boroughs of New York City. Earlier in the weekend, Gelman had done a shitload of crack and murdered his stepfather and his girlfriend\'s mom with a knife, stabbed his girlfriend 11 times, ran over a dude with a car, slashed another motorist, and carjacked an unsuspecting couple, stabbing both of them in the process. He was a career criminal who had completely lost his fucking shit, and now he was swinging a goddamned machete around a crowded Subway train filled with women, children, and more innocent bystanders than a superhero comic. And now he\'s coming straight for Joseph Lozito, and there isn\'t a hell of a lot this Pennsylvania native can do to avoid the confrontation. It\'s like a bad 80s movie about gang violence on the Subway, only this was rush hour traffic, real life, and Gelman is definitely not wearing an awesome headband or listening to rad jams blasting from the tape deck on his boombox.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">But Joseph Lozito isn\'t just any chump on his way to work, and he sure as shit isn\'t about to sit there and let some psychotic madman knife him to death without putting up a fight. This guy is a life-long MMA fan who took his love of the sport to super-fan levels &ndash; he\'d been to UFC 1 in 1993, never missed a pay-per-view, and celebrated his friggin\' wedding anniversary by taking his wife to see the Ultimate Fighting Championship live.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">He\'s also fucking gigantic &ndash; standing 6\'2\" and weighing in at 260 pounds. Gelman wasn\'t going to know what the fuck hit him.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lozito3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span></p>\r\n<table align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"I would have done what any other person would have done, but he picked me,\" he said.<br />\"I\'m glad he picked me. There were a lot of women and children on the train who couldn\'t defend themselves. <br />He picked me and instinct kicked in.\"</span></p>\r\n</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">As Gelman approaches, Lozito does the last thing the knife-wielding maniac expected &ndash; he attacks. Without warning, this 260-pound wrecking ball of awesome beardage leaps up from his seat, driving his chest into the spree-killer\'s chest Goldberg Spear style. Gelman staggers back, dazed, and Lozito busts out a fucking leg sweep that (from what I understand) probably sounds a hell of a lot more awesome in theory than it actually looked in practice. I\'m picturing a goddamned duck-spinning leg swipe that would have made the evil Cobra Kai sensei cry a single tear of pride, but by Lozito\'s own admission, \"I wouldn\'t win any style points for taking him down, but it did the job.\" I guess that\'s all that matters. Both men crash to the floor of the Subway, and a battle for life and death immediately ensues. Lozito is pinning the guy to the turf, desperately trying to grab control of the knife, and Gelman is slashing wildly at anything he can reach. His face and head are sliced and bleeding badly, but Lozito never even considers anything other than pummeling this guy mercilessly about the head and neck &ndash; as the two men stared each other down in their deathmatch Lozito looks his enemy in the eyes and unflinchingly tells him, \"You\'ve messed with the wrong guy. You\'d better hope I die, because I\'m coming to kill you.\"</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">I fucking love this. There is little in the world more badass than threatening a psychotic madman while he\'s in the process of trying to kill you. Never back down, never surrender.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">After a short but bloody duel, police officers board the train and three cops jump in and grab Gelman. Lozito sits back and watches as they slap handcuffs on the murderer, read him his rights, and carry him off. He gets up, dusts the nasty funk of the Subway floor off his work clothes, walks back to his seat, and sits down like nothing happened.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">It\'s only then that he realizes he\'s bleeding like fucking crazy.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lozito4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">True badasses like Joseph Lozito destroy their enemies without even taking off their ties.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Another guy on the train quickly shows up with a makeshift tourniquet and applies pressure to Lozito\'s cuts, but it turns out that this guy was way more messed-up than he had originally thought. When the paramedics show up and rush him to the hospital, they find that he\'s got a 4-inch gash along the back of his head, an 8-inch knife wound behind his ear, three 3-inch-long wounds on his arms, a huge cut under his eye that\'s going to leave a seriously badass-looking scar, and a tremendously-gnarly series of cuts on his hands. The doctors who stitched him back together again couldn\'t understand how this guy was even still conscious &ndash; let alone beating the shit out of a knife-wielding murderer in a fight for his life.</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Joseph Lozito, the Subway Hero of New York, had single-handedly captured a man responsible for killing or wounding eight people in a 28-hour period, and had probably saved the lives of everyone on that subway car through his incredible determination, ridiculous bravery, and a seemingly-unflinching dedication to wrecking the asses of horrible murdering bastards. His story has been covered in newspapers and television, and the MMA-uberfan receive a special guest at the hospital when UFC owner Dana White personally came to see him and give him a set of VIP passes for the upcoming UFC 128 (an experience that Lozito awesomely-equates to being, \"like a 13-year-old girl meeting Justin Bieber.\") He remains one of the greatest examples of a regular guy being put in an insanely-shitty situation and proving to the world that he\'s a face-crushing badass.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lozito5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></span><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\">\"I wasn\'t going to go down without a fight. I took his best shots and I am still standing.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://abcnews.go.com/US/nyc-stabbing-spree-hero-joseph-lozito-calls-suspect/story?id=12910843\" target=\"blank\">ABC News</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-02-13/local/28616147_1_knife-wielding-maniac-martial-arts-subway-train\" target=\"blank\">NY Daily News</a></span><br /><br /><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> <a href=\"http://www.mmafighting.com/2011/02/16/years-of-watching-mma-helped-heroic-joe-lozito-help-end-murder-m/\" target=\"blank\">MMAFighting.com</a></span></p>','2011-03-11','54143335351','lozito1.jpg','lozito1a.jpg','Joseph Lozito','The New York Subway Hero.',''),