Human beings are such frail things. You step on a nail, you get tetanus, you die. You get too excited about eating pretzels, you choke, you die. You stand next to a guy, he sneezes on you, you die. We are the canaries in the coal mine of the universe, and we face mortality every single moment of every single day. We do -- these people don't ever face mortality because they're too busy giving it a wedgie and kicking its feet while it walks so it trips all over the place.
#7. Charles Lightoller Survives A Lifelong Series Of Absurd Calamities
F.G.O. Stuart
Charles Lightoller started sailing at the tender age of 13. Tragically, somebody put a "kick me" sign on his back, and, for the rest of his life, fate obliged. While setting out for an island, his ship was dismasted in a storm and had to get pulled into Rio for emergency repairs. During a rebellion and a smallpox epidemic. After leaving port, he sailed into another storm, got dismasted again, and washed up on an uninhabited island where he was marooned for eight days. Every time a little praying child wondered why God wasn't answering her, it's because He was somewhere else, trying to kill Lightoller.
via Wikimedia
Too bad for God -- Lightoller had the devil's own luck.
For the next several years, God threw everything He had at Lightoller. A tropical storm assaulted him on one ship. A massive coal fire assaulted him on a different ship. He caught malaria. He was the final boss for causes of death, and none of them could figure out how to beat him. So when Harland and Wolff built the most gigantic boat in the world, the Titanic, who else would they hire to be the ship's second mate?
Lightoller banged the universe's wife, and it was coming after him with everything it had.
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"Yo, Nootaikok, can you do me a solid?"
As Lightoller sank with the Titanic, he was pinned to the deck by the tremendous suction of a zillion tons of sinking steel. However, instead of getting yanked to the bottom of the sea, the boilers under him exploded, launching him to the surface. With anyone else, that would sound like bullshit. With Lightoller, it only makes us wonder why he wasn't attacked by a giant squid at the same time.
After riding an explosion away from the biggest disaster in naval history, he rallied approximately 30 survivors onto a capsized lifeboat -- the very last lifeboat to be found. And, as the last one off that boat, he became the actual final Titanic survivor. If Lightoller was the star of a Final Destination movie, it would be 780 hours long and end with Death hanging itself out of frustration.
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"Oh yeah, bony guy, carries a big metal thing? Rowed past him an hour back. Fella didn't make it."
But, Lightoller's story isn't over yet -- not even close.
After the sinking of the Titanic, Lightoller survived two more goddamn shipwrecks. After a lifetime on the sea, he very nearly destroyed every boat he touched. Lightoller actually found a way to use this power for good in 1918 when he rammed his ship into a German submarine, sinking it and earning a medal. Every single time this man asks, "What's the worst that could happen?" -- everybody within half a mile of him dies, and then he gets an award.
#6. Mike Day Gets Shot 27 Times Before Massacring Terrorists
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In 2007, Navy SEAL Mike Day was clearing houses in Iraq's Anbar province, a region that had been in a constant state of gunfight for four years. He was ambushed by four Al-Qaeda militants who shot him, from less than 10 feet away, 27 goddamn times.
AP
Twenty. Seven. Times.
His rifle was shot out of his hand, 11 bullets hit his body armor, and 16 bullets hit his arms, legs, and torso. Those are Alabama road sign numbers, and we haven't even mentioned the grenade. That's right -- the insurgents, after shooting him 27 times, threw a grenade at Day.
The grenade exploded, and with his rifle gone, swiss cheese for armor, and a body full of new holes and shrapnel, Day pulled his sidearm and dropped all four insurgents. He then stood up, cleared the rest of the house, and walked to the helicopter.
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The chopper hadn't been there before. It just spontaneously generated out of badassery.
After meeting Day, Al-Qaeda video store owners now categorize Die Hard and Terminator in the "American Documentaries" section. "Mike Day" is what Al-Qaeda members scream when they want their friends to wake up peeing. This man killed those insurgents so hard that when they got to paradise, all 72 of their virgins were pregnant with his babies.
#5. Alistair Urquhart Survives Everything Both Sides Of World War Two Has To Offer
The Courier
On Dec. 8, 1941, Japan launched the invasion of Malaya. And, like all Japanese occupations, it was a fun combination of atrocities and nothing else. Unfortunately for British infantryman Alistair Urquhart, he was among the men forced to surrender to the Japanese in Singapore.
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Unconditionally. That wasn't going to bite the Japanese in the ass.
Urquhart and 50,000 other prisoners were treated with the dignity the nation of Japan reserved for all non-Japanese -- they were marched down a street lined with human heads and jammed into a building meant to hold 800 people. When this didn't work out, they were moved to Burma with a method called a "jungle death march." It was mostly what it sounds like. Being a prisoner of the Japanese army was a lot like being a Taco Bell burrito two hours after being eaten.
Urquhart survived the brutal, barefoot march and spent two years being beaten and starved by Japanese soldiers. He survived an alphabet soup of deadly diseases, including a tropical ulcer he treated by applying maggots to himself. And, if you're sitting there thinking about how you would handle this nightmare, let us assure you Urquhart tried that -- he spent seven days in an oven after kicking a Japanese guard in the dick.
Channel 5
"It was probably the part when I ran around yelling, 'GOOOOOOOOOOAAAALLLLL' that did it."
After two years of this torture, Urquhart and the shambling remains of the other surviving POWs were death-marched back to Singapore. When Urquhart arrived, the Japanese surprised him with a cruise to Japan. As you might imagine, it was aboard something historians now refer to as "Hell Ships." Seriously, historians really have trouble referring to any Japanese WWII facts without adding some kind of unspeakable adjective.
Urquhart's Hell Ship was especially unlucky, since an American submarine, unaware it was full of allied POWs, torpedoed the shit out of it. Urquhart managed to find a life raft in the night and, without food or water, floated alone for five days. Five days without water. After a shipwreck, two death marches, home maggot surgery, and 24 months of torture and starvation. And that's when an allied ship found him and brought him safely to- hahaha, just kidding; Urquhart was found and recaptured by a passing Japanese ship and then brought to his new home in Japan.
Nagasaki, Japan.
Charles Levy
Home to some lovely shrines and delicious seafood.
Urquhart was working as slave in coal mines when the bomb hit, but like any of the thousand things that should have killed him, it didn't. He picked himself up, got liberated, went home, and lived a long and happy life, before passing away at the tender age of ... never. As of publishing time, Urquhart is 95 years old and ready, willing, and able to beat the shit out of you if you so much as look at him sideways, sonny.
#4. Paul Templer Survived Being Eaten By A Hippo
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Paul Templer ran a kayaking business in Zimbabwe, taking tourists down the hippo-filled Zambezi river. We mention it being filled with hippos because hippos are like a compact car that hates the living -- and because we're terrible at subtle foreshadowing. You can only kayak by a four-ton killing machine so many times before it realizes you're food in a cup. The hippo crashed into one of the group's boats, launching a guide into the air. And in the moment Templer turned around for him, he suddenly went blind and deaf.
Animal Planet
"At first, I thought it was one of those Zimbabwean stealth eclipses you hear about."
After some wriggling and deduction, he soon figured out the top half of his body was inside of the hippo's mouth. He struggled out of what almost certainly smelled like a baby changing station at a Long John Silver's, and got to the surface where the hippo promptly decided to attack him again. Apparently, this godless killing machine wanted Templer to be really, really, super-extra fucking dead, so it just went complete turbo hippo mode on him. It threw him into the air over and over and over again, impaling him with its tusks each time he came down. Say what you want about its unprovoked savagery -- this was the four-homer of hippo attacks.
After stabbing Templer just under 40 times with its tusks, the hippo thought, "Jesus Christ, why won't this son of a bitch die? I'm just going to drown him and get it over with."
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"Fuck it, next time, I'm just biting the head off Highlander-style."
So back down into the dark depths of the Zambezi river went Templer, this time with much less blood inside him. Incredibly, after all of that work, the hippo spat him back out again. Templer struggled to the surface and was dragged to shore by another kayaker. He owes his life to a guide who managed to seal his collapsing lung with a plastic wrapper he got from the snack supply. So, the lesson here is: When deadly hippos are trying to eat you, rub yourself in snacks.
With the kind of luck you wouldn't expect from a man recently eaten by a hippo, a fully-trained medical team happened to be nearby, in the middle of nowhere in Africa, doing an emergency drill. Thanks to them, Templer made it back to a hospital. He lost his left arm, which wasn't bad considering he was almost hippo cavities, and he returned to kayaking the same river. In fact, he says he's almost certain he ran into the same hippo two years later. And, while it didn't try to eat him, we're certain it was super awkward.
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