History is filled with people who faced impossible odds and refused to back down. From soldiers, explorers, and rescuers to ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations, these 50 stories showcase remarkable courage, resilience, and determination from around the world.
From Runaway To Renowned
1. Jamie Hyneman, co-host of Mythbusters, left home when he was 14 and hitchhiked across the United States. After that, he has worked as a certified dive master, wilderness survival expert, boat captain, linguist, pet shop owner, animal wrangler, machinist, concrete inspector, chef, and television show host.
2. In 1942, a Chinese sailor named Poon Lim endured 133 days alone on a raft in the Atlantic by fishing and drinking bird blood. He even once killed a shark with a jug of water and drank its blood.
3. In 2005, Daniel M’Mburugu, a 73-year-old man in Nairobi, Kenya, killed a leopard that had attacked him using only his bare hands by pushing his fist into its mouth and tearing out its tongue. He had dropped the machete he was carrying during the attack and instead decided to fight with his bare hands.
4. During the 1999 India-Pakistan Kargil War, an Indian soldier named Yogendra Singh Yadav was shot in the groin and shoulder. Even with those injuries, he climbed a vertical snow-covered ice cliff under heavy machine gun and rocket fire, destroyed an enemy bunker with a grenade, and then killed four more enemy soldiers with his bare hands.
5. Theodore Roosevelt once delivered a speech right after an assassination attempt. He opened it by saying, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”
6. During the 1800s, Joseph Bolitho Johns escaped from Australian prisons so many times that officials constructed a special cell solely for him. The cell was so secure that they said they would pardon his crimes if he managed to escape from it too. He escaped from that one as well.
7. British soldier Adrian Carton de Wiart served as a veteran of four wars. He lived through separate gunshot wounds to the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear. He also survived two airplane crashes, dug his way out of a prisoner of war camp, and bit off his own fingers after a doctor would not amputate them. He later said, “Frankly I had enjoyed the war.”
8. Indian flight attendant Neerja Bhanot was on Pan Am Flight 73 when terrorists hijacked it during a stopover in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1986. She concealed the passports of the American passengers aboard to protect them from the hijackers. She was killed while shielding three children from a rain of bullets.
9. In 2005, Shayna Richardson made her first solo skydive and survived a parachute failure that made her strike a parking lot face first at 50 MPH. While operating on her, doctors found out she was pregnant. She recovered fully, and the baby was not affected at all by the accident.
10. After his Mercury capsule lost power and automatic control, astronaut Gordon Cooper had to rely on his knowledge of constellations, a wristwatch, and mathematical estimates to land the spacecraft by hand. He splashed down only 4 miles from his recovery ship, the most accurate landing achieved up to that time in 1963.
Laughter Before The Gunfire
11. In World War 2, Sergeant Leonard A. Funk was met by 90 German soldiers who had taken his squad prisoner, and he started laughing uncontrollably at the scene. A number of the enemy soldiers joined in the laughter, until Funk pulled out his machine gun, killed 21 of them, and took the rest captive.
12. In 2009, Claudio Vitale, an Italian neurosurgeon, suffered a heart attack while he was operating on a patient. He kept going after realizing that stopping would mean his patient would not survive. About 30 minutes after the surgery was completed, he had an angioplasty.
13. During World War 1, a homing pigeon called Cher Ami received the Croix de Guerre for its actions. Despite being shot through the breast, blinded in one eye, drenched in blood, and left with a leg hanging by only a tendon, the pigeon kept flying to deliver an S.O.S. message and saved 194 men.
14. Manute Bol, the tallest player in NBA history, was also the only NBA player who had killed a lion with a spear and paid 80 cows for his wife.
15. During the Vietnam War, helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson brought his helicopter down in the line of fire to confront and stop American soldiers who had already killed nearly 500 unarmed civilians in the My Lai Massacre. He even said he would shoot at his own troops if they kept attacking. Congress called him a traitor and told him not to discuss the incident.
16. In 2009, when 18-year old Rukhsana Kausar from Kashmir, India saw her parents being beaten as part of a forced marriage proposal by a militia commander, she killed one militant with an ax, gunned the commander down and then started a 4-hour gun battle with the militia.
17. During World War 2, a German soldier named Fritz Christen stood his ground for 3 straight days and knocked out 13 Soviet tanks and killed nearly 100 enemy soldiers single-handedly.
18. On 9/11, after both the towers were hit, some jet fighters took to the air without any live ammunition knowing that to prevent the hijackers from striking anymore intended targets, the pilots might have to intercept and crash their fighters into the hijacked planes, ejecting at the last moment.
19. David B. Bleak, an American Soldier from the Korean War was given the Medal of Honor for killing 5 Chinese soldiers, out of which, he killed 4 with his bare hands. He did all this while he was shot and giving medical aid to his fellow soldiers. He broke one of the enemy soldiers’ neck and crushed the windpipe of the other one with his bare hands. He severely fractured the skulls of two other soldiers by smashing their heads together
20. Iqbal Masih was a kid in Pakistan who was sold into bondage. At the age of 10, he escaped the shackles of bonded labor, freed over 3000 children who were trapped in the same carpet factory he worked in. He was responsible for bringing down Pakistan’s carpet exports by $34 million and was therefore murdered in 1995 at the age of 13.
Silent Rifle Counterattack
21. During the Second World War, Bhanbhagta Gurung was a Gurkha soldier serving in the British Army. When his unit was trapped by a sniper, he did not wait for orders, calmly rose into plain view, and shot the sniper with his rifle. He then ran to the nearest foxhole and drove out the enemy with grenades, his bayonet, and a Kukri, taking five enemy positions alone against light machine guns.
22. In 2010, Bishnu Shrestha, a retired Gurkha soldier from the Indian Army, was heading back to his village by train when armed robbers hijacked it. When they tried to rape a young teenager in front of him, he drew his Kukri blade and attacked all forty captors. He killed three men and wounded eight before he was overpowered. The remaining robbers then quickly panicked and scattered.
23. Two nights before he broke the sound barrier, Chuck Yeager fell from a horse and fractured his ribs. He did not tell anyone because he did not want to be removed from the mission. A local veterinarian taped him up.
24. A Labrador Retriever service dog named Endal once pulled his disabled owner into the recovery position after the owner was knocked unconscious, then covered him with a blanket. He fetched his mobile phone and pressed it against his owner, and he did not leave to get help until the owner had come back to consciousness.
25. Dip Prasad Pun, a British Gurkha soldier, fought off at least twelve Taliban insurgents attacking him in Afghanistan all by himself. He fired over 400 rounds, threw 17 grenades, set off a mine, and used his tripod as a weapon when his gun stopped working. He was given the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, the United Kingdom’s second-highest medal for bravery.
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