Badass

by Ben Thompson

  Gurung, now totally berserk, decided, “Screw these dicks,” and single-handedly went completely nuts on those Japanese bastards like a velociraptor at an all-you-can-eat superbuffet. He firmly gripped his rifle and sprinted twenty yards uphill toward a fully operational machine gun position, where imperial gunners were desperately trying to mow him down. Gurung somehow reached their position in one piece, pulled two grenades off his belt, and lobbed them into the gun port, gibbing the machine gun team into bite-sized morsels. With the heavy weapon rather efficiently neutralized, this kill-crazy Gurkha warrior then sprinted toward a nearby foxhole, where two Japanese soldiers were foolishly trying to shoot him in the neck. Gurung dropped feet-first into the bunker, rifle at the ready, and promptly gutted the now-terrified defenders with his gruesome three-foot-long bayonet. As if this wasn’t enough destruction, Gurung then charged a second foxhole, clearing it out with a well-placed hand grenade, and then immediately proceeded to yet another enemy position, where he disposed of the horrified Japanese defenders with his rifle and bayonet.

  At this point, it’s safe to assume that pretty much every Japanese weapon on the hill was pointed in the direction of this ultra-stabby samurai-killer who was impaling dudes all over the flipping place, but Gurung couldn’t have cared less about the constant stream of deadly bullets constantly buzzing around his head if you’d paid him to. When a heavy machine gun team from a nearby pillbox had the nerve to direct its fire toward the Gurkha infantryman, it succeeded only in making him even angrier. He commando-rolled out of his foxhole and ran full speed toward the concrete bunker, avoiding bullets all the way, and vaulted himself up onto the roof of the fortified position with one jump. Though he was completely out of bullets and frag grenades, Gurung pulled the only armament he had left—two phosphorous smoke grenades—and chucked them through the window of the bunker. The grenades went off in a flash of white smoke and superheated liquid, and when two burning Japanese soldiers came running out of the entrance to the bunker, engulfed in flames and screaming like madmen, Gurung eviscerated them with his totally awesome Gurkha knife. He then ran into the pillbox, where he found a wounded machine gunner still attempting to operate his weapon. Unable to swing his knife in such tight quarters, Gurung simply grabbed a gigantic rock and bashed the dude’s head in with it.

  Even though he had just single-handedly eliminated a dozen soldiers with little more than brute force and a healthy disrespect for his own safety, Bhanbhagta Gurung’s work still wasn’t finished. He ran outside the now-empty bunker, signaled for the rest of his squad to advance, set up a heavy machine gun in the pillbox, and manned the position against a desperate Japanese counterattack. By the time the smoke cleared at the end of the day, Snowdon East was firmly in Gurkha hands, and the bodies of sixty-six Japanese soldiers were strewn along the hilltop.

  For his incredible actions in the battle for Snowdon East, Bhanbhagta Gurung won the Victoria Cross—the highest award for bravery offered by the British Government—and his unit was issued a battle honor for valor in combat. Gurung returned home after the war, took care of his sick mother, nailed his hot wife, and raised three sons who also went on to become Gurkhas. Despite having an impossible to spell name featuring no fewer than eleven consonants, he now has a wing of the Gurkha training facility named after him and is remembered as a testament to how tough these Nepalese warriors can be.

  * * *

  A Sikh soldier named Nand Singh performed a similar feat of awesomeness in 1944, when he single-handedly assaulted a heavily fortified Japanese trench network armed only with a bayonet and a handful of grenades. Despite being wounded six times, he annihilated four imperial bunkers and fragged thirty-seven of the forty men garrisoning the position.

  The Gurkhas have an elephant polo team. I would assume that these guys win the World Series of Elephant Polo pretty much every single year, since I have a hard time believing that anybody else in the world is hardcore enough to tear ass at full speed around a football field on the back of a giant pachyderm waving a giant stick around like a crazy person (or take on the Gurkhas at any kind of physical competition, for that matter), but maybe that’s just me.

  When Prince Harry went off to serve in Afghanistan he was stationed with the Gurkhas for a very good reason—the Taliban are terrified of them. Some Afghan fighters believe that these Nepalese warriors are living demons who slaughter men and eat captured soldiers alive, so they generally just refuse to fight against them. The Gurkhas, for their part, do nothing to dissuade these notions.

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  37

  GEORGE S. PATTON

  (1885–1945)

  We’re not going to just shoot the sons of bitches, we’re going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks…. War is a bloody, killing business. You’ve got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours.

  AS A YOUNG MAN GROWING UP IN SAN GABRIEL, CALIFORNIA, GEORGE SMITH PATTON JR. CULTIVATED A LOVE FOR ALL THINGS AWESOME. He studied the great works of classical badassery, read any military history book he could get his hands on, and spent long evenings listening to his father’s buddies swap tales about shooting people’s faces off in the American Civil War (six of Patton’s great-uncles were Confederate officers). Basically, Georgie pretty much knew he wanted to be the second coming of Hannibal before he was out of short pants.

  At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Patton represented the United States in an event known as the modern pentathlon. This event was basically a combination of all the major badass food groups: fencing, shooting, horseback riding, swimming, and running. Patton performed well in every single event and ended up finishing fifth in the final standings. However, there is some controversy regarding this final score, because during the handgun accuracy portion of the competition Patton was ruled by the official scorers as having completely missed the target on his final shot. Patton argued that the bullet didn’t miss the target but instead passed through the bullet hole from the shot before—the modern-day equivalent of Robin Hood splitting the arrow at the archery competition—but instead of being hailed as the greatest and most accurate shooter in history, Patton was completely hosed out of a chance at winning the gold medal in badassitude.

  Patton also receives further points in my book because while the Olympic standard for the shooting competition was a .22 caliber round, Patton rejected that pussy ass bullcrap and used his .38 instead, because what good is handgun accuracy if your bullets lack adequate stopping power?

  Patton spent one year at the Virginia Military Institute before transferring to West Point, where he graduated and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Cavalry. After graduation he continued his study of cavalry tactics, horsemanship, and fencing, and eventually was certified as the army’s first Master of the Sword. I’m not really sure what a Master of the Sword actually is, but I picture it having something to do with raising your saber over your head and shouting, “By the power of Grayskull!” while a bunch of stuff explodes around you. He was actually such a skilled sword fighter that the army asked him to help design the Model 1913 cavalry saber, a design known today as the Patton Saber.

  But even though he knew he was totally dope, George was still dying to test out his skills on the battlefield. He finally got the opportunity to do so while serving under the famous hardass American general “Black Jack” Pershing. Patton went into Mexico as part of the Punitive Expedition to try to hunt down Pancho Villa, and while the mission itself was pretty much a complete bungling clusterhump of an operation, Patton did manage to track down and kill two high-ranking bodyguards in Villa’s army, capping them in the head with his custom-made ivory-handled, nickel-plated Colt .45 Peacemaker revolvers during an epic John Woo-esque shootout in an old abandoned Spanish mission. Patton returned to camp with the dead Villistas’ bodies tied to the hood of his Jeep.

  Pershing was duly impressed with Patton’s pistol skills and his kill’em-all attitude, so he took the young officer to Fran
ce to fight in World War I as commander of the newly commissioned United States Tank Corps. Patton quickly rose through the ranks, earning a battlefield promotion to colonel, winning a Distinguished Service Cross, and getting shot in the thigh by a machine gun during the Battle of St. Mihiel. After the war, he would often get drunk, drop his pants, and tell everyone he was the “half-assed general,” which is kind of cool, I guess.

  Between the world wars, Patton became an advocate for armored warfare and went to work designing, organizing, and training the next generation of American tank forces. By the time the Germans needed their butts whipped once again in 1942, Patton was already a major general in command of the U.S. 2nd Armored Division, a unit lovingly known as “Hell on Wheels.”

  It wasn’t long before “Old Blood and Guts” would get his chance to prove his mad over-the-top generaling skills. Early in the North Africa campaign, the U.S. 2nd Corps was under the command of some dude named Lloyd Fredenhall, who was basically an incompetent moron. For the first couple of months of Operation Torch, Fredenhall was getting his ass whomped up and down the northern coast of Africa by the notorious German general Erwin Rommel, a guy who was pretty much in the business of making the Allies his bitch all over the place. Eventually General Dwight D. Eisenhower got sick of hearing about how the Allies were getting kicked in the sack every day, so he yanked command away from Fredenhall and gave it to Patton, who, as we’ve seen, was an original gangsta of tank warfare. Together with the British Eighth Army under General Bernard Montgomery, the Allies were able to face-kick Rommel and push the Nazis out of Africa. After Africa, Patton invaded Sicily in 1943, where his rapid assault and relentless attacks helped the Americans capture the strategic strongholds of Palermo and Messina. Then it was off to England to gear up for D-Day: the big-ass Allied invasion of Normandy.

  By this time, Patton’s epic, profanity-riddled, blood-and-guts speeches and his no-screwing-around attitude had already earned him quite a colorful reputation among his soldiers and the American public, but it was Patton’s success at the helm of the U.S. Third Army in Europe that would cement his legend as one of the twentieth century’s most hardcore military commanders.

  During the Normandy campaign, Patton burned rubber through the French countryside like a six-legged robotic ass-kicking machine with the kick-ass dial cranked up to maximum firepower. He covered nearly sixty miles in the span of about two weeks, encircled and outflanked the German defenders, and liberated most of northern France from Nazi control. He knew that his armor wasn’t going to be able to slug it out with the heavier and more powerful German Tiger tanks, so he preferred to use the Allied forces’ superior mobility and speed to its fullest extent. He outmaneuvered the enemy, surrounded them, and pretty much disregarded all classical and traditional military tactics in favor of full-on, balls-out attacks. The only thing that was able to slow down the Third Army in Normandy was when they ran out of gas, and even that was just a temporary setback.

  Patton’s full-throttle “kick them in the crotch repeatedly until they die from it and then continue kicking them a couple more times just for good measure” leadership strategy was a good representation of the man himself. He was headstrong, cocky, stubborn, and ambitious, and he didn’t tolerate anything less than victory. He did his best to drill a sense of discipline and toughness into his soldiers through strict rules of conduct and rousing speeches, and he once got in deep trouble for slapping a man in the face because he was being a pussy and bitching about being shell-shocked. For the most part, Patton was largely unpopular with his soldiers, but even so, his confidence rubbed off on them and deep down they all trusted him to get the job done and get them home alive. He didn’t let them down.

  While he pounded the Hun up and down the hedgerows of Normandy, Patton is perhaps best known for his actions in the Ardennes Forest during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. In this particularly brutal campaign, Hitler’s elite SS panzer units made a last-ditch mad dash toward Antwerp in an effort to break through the Allied lines, and a large portion of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division was besieged in the town of Bastogne. Patton’s Third Army disengaged the enemy they were fighting and blitzed north at top speed several hundred miles in the middle of a damn snowstorm to bust through the German lines and end the offensive. Afterward, they marched east, liberated the Buchen-wald concentration camp, and were already in Prague by the time the war ended. When Hitler finally capped himself in the dome and the rest of Germany was like, “Whatever, okay, you guys win—just please stop hitting us already,” Patton wanted to keep marching east and fight the Soviet Union “while the bayonets were still sharpened.” Luckily for the Russkies, he never got the chance to stick it to those Commie bastards—he died on December 21, 1945, as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident a few days earlier.

  George S. Patton is one of the most hardcore bastards the United States has to offer and one of the most widely recognized military hardasses to ever live. No legitimate discussion of badassitude is complete without him.

  I don’t want to get any messages saying, “I am holding my position.” We are not holding a goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy’s balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all the time. Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy.

  * * *

  The first all-black armored unit in U.S. history, the 761st Tank Battalion, served in Patton’s Third Army throughout the war. The baddest man in the 761st was a guy named Warren Crecy—a soft-spoken, mild-mannered dude who became a crazy Nazicidal maniac on the battlefield. Crecy won the Silver Star for climbing out of his broken-down tank and using the roof-mounted machine gun to single-handedly take out a couple of German machine gun nests, a bazooka team, and two full companies of regular infantry. During the war he is believed to have killed more than three hundred enemy soldiers.

  While marching toward Berlin, the men of the Third Army captured a thoroughbred racehorse intended as a gift from Adolf Hitler to the Japanese emperor, Hirohito. Patton kept the steed for himself, and was occasionally seen riding it through the streets of liberated European villages.

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  38

  CARLOS HATHCOCK

  (1942–1999)

  He’s dead, sir. They just flop around a lot when you shoot them in the head.

  SNIPERS ARE SOME OF THE DEADLIEST SOLDIERS IN THE HISTORY OF WARFARE. Sitting motionless in their cleverly concealed hiding spots, lying in wait for anyone stupid enough to stroll into the crosshairs of their telescopic sights, and controlling their breathing and heart rate to ensure the steadiness of their aim, these insane sharpshooters are more than capable of blowing your face off with a well-placed round from hundreds of yards away. By the time the sound of the gunshot reaches you, you’re already dead. In this demanding, ultra-high-stress job, one that requires superhuman mental and physical fortitude, one man stands out as being the toughest and most hardcore individual to ever peer through a scope and calmly squeeze the trigger—United States Marine Corps supersniper Carlos Hathcock.

  Standing five-ten and weighing all of 150 pounds soaking wet and with a ten-pound barbell hidden underneath his jacket, Hathcock didn’t exactly look like the sort of dude who could snuff out a man’s existence with the same ease that most people rip a giant fart. Well, this guy knew how to work a rifle before most kids know how to work a toilet, using a bolt-action .22 to hunt for food in the woods behind his tiny Arkansas farm as a young child. At seventeen, Hathcock enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, earned a stripe on his sleeve, and then promptly had it cut off when he slugged his commanding officer in the face during a rowdy bar fight. Sure, that kind of sucked, but seriously, if you’re going to get demoted, cracking your boss in the face is probably the most badass way of accomplishing the task.

  When he wasn’t beating t
he hell out of his superiors, grilling up delicious burgers, or tying a bunch of awesome knots, Carlos served on the Marine Corps Rifle Team. This dedicated killaholic put in thousands of hours on the firing range and was such a stone-cold gunslinger that he won the 1965 National American High-Powered Rifle Marksmanship Shooting Accuracy Competition Contest Challenge of America—the most prestigious shooting competition in the United States. He beat out two thousand elite sharpshooters for the prize, including a bunch of other U.S. servicemen and some of the top members of the National Rifle Association (and you know those NRA dudes can really shoot their asses off).

  As cool as it is to be pretty much universally recognized as the most bananas marksman in the U.S. of A., Carlos Hathcock had bigger fish to sauté—namely, the entire country of North Vietnam. When those crazy Commies started their wacky hijinks in 1966, Hathcock was immediately shipped out to the South Pacific in a giant radioactive overseas freight container labeled “Whup-Ass” and unleashed on the unsuspecting enemy hordes.

  I probably don’t need to tell you that hunting down guerillas deep in the canopy jungle of Vietnam isn’t like bull’s-eyeing womp rats in your T-16 back home. As a death-dealing Marine Corps sniper, Hathcock constantly found himself alone, unsupported, and surrounded by hostile Vietnamese people actively seeking to wedge large chunks of lead into his torso at incredibly high velocities. But Hathcock wasn’t exactly going to go AWOL and swim across the Pacific Ocean on the back of a magical dolphin just because some dumbass with a rifle wanted to take a few potshots in his general direction. Quite the opposite, in fact. Wearing a camouflaged boonie hat with a single white feather stuck in the hatband and using a Winchester Model 70 sniper rifle—an old throwback weapon from World War II—Hathcock soon made a name for himself as a legend in the Marine Corps. In one of his first missions he busted a .30–06 cap in the infamous Vietnamese sniper known as “Apache Woman,” a vicious manslayer who commanded a Viet Cong sniper platoon and was notorious for publicly torturing American POWs to death in such horrific ways that it made the Spanish Inquisition look like the animatronic party time jug band at Chuck E. Cheese’s.