Your Hardcore Moment of the Day, 7/30/10:
Waves batter a merchant vessel stranded along the coast during a heavy storm in Valparaiso City, Chile, 121 km (75 miles) northwest of Santiago on July 6, 2010.
Alternate caption: WHERE’S YOUR GOD NOW?
In the spirit of D-Day +3 and to follow up on a previous post about Oflag IV-C: one of the most certifiably hardcore people to grace the cold interior of Colditz Castle was a man whose exploits outside the prison far outstrip any of the hijinks he may have been up to inside. His name was Douglas Bader, and he was a fighter pilot for the Royal Air Force.
Continued…
![Your Hardcore Moment of the Day:
About 10:50 (local time) on 29 July, while preparations for the second strike of the day were being made, an unguided 5 in (130 mm) Mk-32 “Zuni” rocket, one of four contained in a LAU-10 underwing rocket pod mounted on a F-4 Phantom II, was accidentally fired due to an electrical power surge during the switch from external power to internal power.The rocket flew across the flight deck, striking a wing-mounted external fuel tank on an A-4 Skyhawk awaiting launch, either aircraft No. 405, piloted by LCDR Fred D. White, or No. 416, piloted by [future Senator and presidential candidate] LCDR John McCain. The warhead’s safety mechanism prevented it from detonating, but the impact tore the tank off the wing and ignited the resulting spray of escaping JP-5 fuel, causing an instantaneous conflagration. Other external fuel tanks overheated and ruptured, releasing more jet fuel to feed the flames which spread along the flight deck, leaving pilots in their aircraft with the options of being incinerated in their cockpits or running through the flames to escape…. With his aircraft surrounded by flames, McCain escaped by climbing out of the cockpit, walking down the nose and jumping off the refueling probe.
It’s easy to forget that, before he was the flaccid old sell-out he is now, John McCain was kind of a badass.
Other moments of badassery from the Wikipedia article:
LCDR Herbert A. Hope of VA-46 (and operations officer of CVW-17) jumped out of the cockpit of his Skyhawk between explosions, rolled off the flight deck and into the starboard man-overboard net. Making his way down below to the hangar deck, he took command of a firefighting team.
And:
The fire also revealed that Forrestal required a heavy duty, armored forklift for use in the emergency jettisoning of aircraft… since the sailors of Forrestal had been forced to manually jettison numerous aircraft through human force, which was both inefficient and dangerous to the exposed crew.
In other words, they had to, with their bare hands, push fully-armed jet fighters into the sea while fires raged around them and in the face of the very real possibility that at any moment they could be blown up with no warning.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l27sl9Zv5A1qbzu7qo1_500.jpg)
Your Hardcore Moment of the Day:
About 10:50 (local time) on 29 July, while preparations for the second strike of the day were being made, an unguided 5 in (130 mm) Mk-32 “Zuni” rocket, one of four contained in a LAU-10 underwing rocket pod mounted on a F-4 Phantom II, was accidentally fired due to an electrical power surge during the switch from external power to internal power.
The rocket flew across the flight deck, striking a wing-mounted external fuel tank on an A-4 Skyhawk awaiting launch, either aircraft No. 405, piloted by LCDR Fred D. White, or No. 416, piloted by [future Senator and presidential candidate] LCDR John McCain. The warhead’s safety mechanism prevented it from detonating, but the impact tore the tank off the wing and ignited the resulting spray of escaping JP-5 fuel, causing an instantaneous conflagration. Other external fuel tanks overheated and ruptured, releasing more jet fuel to feed the flames which spread along the flight deck, leaving pilots in their aircraft with the options of being incinerated in their cockpits or running through the flames to escape…. With his aircraft surrounded by flames, McCain escaped by climbing out of the cockpit, walking down the nose and jumping off the refueling probe.
It’s easy to forget that, before he was the flaccid old sell-out he is now, John McCain was kind of a badass.
Other moments of badassery from the Wikipedia article:
LCDR Herbert A. Hope of VA-46 (and operations officer of CVW-17) jumped out of the cockpit of his Skyhawk between explosions, rolled off the flight deck and into the starboard man-overboard net. Making his way down below to the hangar deck, he took command of a firefighting team.
And:
The fire also revealed that Forrestal required a heavy duty, armored forklift for use in the emergency jettisoning of aircraft… since the sailors of Forrestal had been forced to manually jettison numerous aircraft through human force, which was both inefficient and dangerous to the exposed crew.
In other words, they had to, with their bare hands, push fully-armed jet fighters into the sea while fires raged around them and in the face of the very real possibility that at any moment they could be blown up with no warning.
At midnight, on 5 March 2000 — after 12 hours of continual pain and little advancement in labour, Ramírez sat down on a bench, drank from either a bottle of rubbing alcohol or “3 small glasses of hard liquor” (accounts vary), and assumed the traditional Zapotec birthing position, sitting up and leaning forward. She then used a large kitchen knife to cut open her abdomen in a total of three attempts. Ramírez cut through her skin in a 17 cm vertical line several centimeters to the right of her navel, starting near the bottom of the ribs and ending near the pubic area. (For comparison: a typical C-section incision is 10 cm long, horizontal and well below the navel, the so-called “bikini-line incision”.) After operating on herself for an hour, she reached inside her uterus and pulled out her baby boy, who breathed and cried immediately. She then severed the umbilical cord with a pair of scissors and became unconscious. When she regained consciousness, she wrapped clothes around her bleeding abdomen and asked her 6-year-old son, Benito, to run for help.
…Ramírez was eventually taken to the local clinic, two and a half miles away, and then to the nearest hospital, eight hours away by car… She was released from the hospital on the tenth day post-surgery, and went on to make a complete recovery.
The child survived, too.
