History’s 50 Most Awesome Badasses You Should Know About – Part 3

During the Vietnam War, when Sergeant Bennie Adkins's camp came under heavy enemy fire, he manned a mortar position for two days without any sleep. He was wounded 18 times in various parts of his body, eluded the NVA for 48 hours through the dense jungles of Vietnam, survived a run-in with a man-eating tiger, dodged NVA patrols, and somehow made it back to a position where he could contact rescue and get out of there alive. He is personally credited with killing 145 enemy soldiers in his 86-hour battle.

In 2012, a 90-year-old Baltimore woman named Venus Green locked a police officer in her basement when he tried searching her home without a warrant. She sued and won a $95,000 settlement.

During Vietnam War American sniper Carlos Hathcock volunteered to crawl for 3 days across 2000m of the open field containing an enemy headquarters. He had bed sores from staying motionless for so long. He could only move when the wind blew the grass around him. Enemy patrols came so close that they actually stepped on his knuckles and stopped to smoke within feet of him. He took a single shot that killed an NVA General and he then had to backtrack the same way while enemy patrols were swarming looking for a sniper. He was only able to move inches at a time and made it back without being spotted.

On January 2014, Aitzaz Hasan, a 15year-old boy in Pakistan, died when he bravely confronted a suicide bomber walking towards his school, which resulted in the early detonation of the bomb. His action saved the lives of hundreds of students.

Liviu Librescu was a Romanian-born internationally renowned professor of aerospace engineering at Virginia Tech. He survived the Holocaust when he was young. At the age of 76, he held the door of his classroom shut while the gunman attempted to enter it. Most of his students managed to escape through the windows. He was shot 5 times through the door and managed to saved 22 out of the 23 students in his class. A shot to his head proved fatal.

There was a Jewish boxer named Salamo Arouch imprisoned at Auschwitz. He was forced to fight fellow prisoners. The losers were sent to the gas chambers or shot. He survived more than 2 years and 200 fights, eventually being released when the camp was liberated.

As an officer of the California highway patrol, Sgt. Kevin Briggs has stopped more than 200 people from committing suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Edward Loder is the most decorated man in the Boston Fire Department's history. After his first decade of service, he was assigned to Rescue One because of his reputation for being tough. In 1990, he saved a mentally unstable woman from jumping from her 16th-floor hotel room by rappelling down from the roof of the hotel by a guideline and tackling her away from the ledge right when she was about to jump. In 1993, he caught a mental patient with one hand right after he jumped and had to hang on to the rescue ladder with the other hand. He had to hold on to the jumper until the ladder was lowered down.

Joseph D. Pistone a.k.a “Donnie Brasco” was an FBI agent who worked undercover infiltrating a mob family for 6 years to the point that he was going to be “made” (becoming a fully initiated member of the mafia family) but he was pulled out because his superiors decided that the operation was becoming too dangerous.

Samuel Whittemore was a true American patriot, and he gladly fought for his freedom against the British during the Revolutionary War at the age of 78. Prior to this, Whittemore served as a private in King George's War and aided in the capture of the Fort Louisburg in 1745. Some believe he also fought in the French and Indian War when he was 64. By the time most of us will be retired, he was fighting in the Battle of Lexington and Concord. He also single-handedly killed three British soldiers in his fields with a rifle and his dueling pistols. For his efforts he was shot in the face, bayonetted, and left for dead. He refused to die, and in fact, fully recovered and lived until the ripe age of 98.