Badass Authors, Badass Soldiers, and Me

Not it. Not a badass. I wish I were, really. I’m afraid of bats. And mice. And hell, I’ll just confess it: I’m afraid of slugs and worms, too. I don’t know; obviously I can outrun them, but they really frighten me. In fact, at our house there is somehow some unwritten rule that Josh gets to poke my neck every time I’m insecure. Isn’t he precious. Note: the punctuation there should indicate my sarcasm. Side note: Berk is beginning to inspire me to expand my punctuation usage. SUPER Side Note: This post and all links will have a lot of (really kind of awesome) swears. Now on to the badassery.

A while ago my husband, Josh, told me about an article on Cracked.com about dudes in the military (or lone ranger types) who were so seriously badass that it made “Rambo look like a pussy.” So, yeah. I had to read it. And frankly, you do too. Here’s #5 (I dig this writing):

Simo Hayha had a fairly boring life in Finland. He served his one mandatory year in the military, and then became a farmer. But when the Soviet Union invaded his homeland in 1939, he decided he wanted to help his country. Since the majority of fighting took place in the forest, he figured the best way to stop the invasion was to grab his trusty rifle, a couple of cans of food and hide in a tree all day shooting Russians. In six feet of snow. And 20-40 degrees below zero. Of course when the Russians heard that dozens of their men were going down and that it was all one dude with a rifle, they got fucking scared. He became known as “The White Death” because of his white camouflage outfit, and they actually mounted whole missions just to kill that one guy. They started by sending out a task force to find Hayha and take him out. He killed them all. Then they tried getting together a team of counter-snipers (which are basically snipers that kill snipers) and sent them in to eliminate Hayha. He killed all of them, too. Over the course of 100 days, Hayha killed 542 people with his rifle. He took out another 150 or so with his SMG, sending his credited kill-count up to 705. Since everyone they had was either too dead or too scared to go anywhere near him, the Russians just carpet-bombed everywhere they thought he might be. Supposedly, they had the location right, and he actually got hit by a cloud of shrapnel that tore his coat up, but didn’t actually hurt him, because he’s the fucking White Death, damn it. Finally on March 6th, 1940, some lucky bastard shot Hayha in the head with an exploding bullet. When some other soldiers found him and brought him back to base, he “had half his head missing.” The White Death had finally been stopped…

…for about a week. In spite of having come down with a nasty case of shot-in-the-face syndrome, he was still very much alive, and regained consciousness on March 13, the very day the war ended.

Uh, yeah. And that’s only number 5! The article goes on to compare the best stories that Hollywood could come up with and it’s a hilarious comparison. So then I saw another article called, “Five Badass Authors Even More Badass Than The Character They Created.” The list includes characters like James Bond and King Arthur. Um, King Arthur? How do you out-badass King Arthur? If you’re Thomas Malory, you (among other things) “break out of jail three times, once by swimming across a moat at night, once by using swords, daggers and other pointy objects to stab your way free, and once by somehow getting a royal pardon.”

Insane!