Historical Moments of Badassery

Winston Churchill refusing to sign peace deal with Herr Hitler

The Alamo

Charles Martel

Why Gary why

ETA: I posted this because the OP's example brought it to mind.

But after looking at the photograph a little while, it really brings back all the feelings I experienced that day.

I was watching that speech live.

That was a very emotional day for me to see what our country had become - truly a sad day.

And for President Trump to raise his fist like that and say, "Fight. Fight. Fight," after being grazed by a would-be assassin's bullet, it just goes to show how much he loves America and the American people.

PFC William Hudson

"Come on you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" SGM Dan Daly at Belleau Wood

"We've dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen." Benjamin Guggenheim on the Titanic.

"And if we walk into a trap, if it turns out that they know we’re coming, don’t dream about walking out of North Vietnam — unless you’ve got wings on your feet. We’ll be 100 miles from Laos; it’s the wrong part of the world for a big retrograde movement. If there’s been a leak, we’ll know it as soon as the second or third chopper sets down; that’s when they’ll cream us. If it happens, I want to keep this force together. We will back up to the Song Con River and, by Christ, let them come across that God damn open ground. We’ll make them pay for every foot across the sonofabitch.”

Bull Simons prior to the Son Tay Raid.

Flight 93 bros on 9/11.

Sir Ernest Shackleton



The Voyage and The Trap

In August 1914, days before the outbreak of World War I, polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton set sail aboard the Endurance. Named after his family motto, Fortitudine Vincimus (Through endurance we conquer), the ship carried a crew of 27 men. In January 1915, just a day’s sail from the Antarctic coast, the ship was ensnared by the dense pack ice of the Weddell Sea. Rather than freeing itself, the Endurance became a prisoner of the shifting ice floes.Over the next ten months, the crew watched as the ice relentlessly gripped and crushed their ship. In October 1915, as the wooden hull groaned and splintered under the crushing horizontal pressure, Shackleton finally gave the order to abandon ship. The Endurance slipped beneath the surface in November 1915.

The Perilous Escape

Marooned on drifting slabs of ice, Shackleton and his men set up makeshift camps, surviving by hunting seals and penguins. By April 1916, the ice began to break apart, forcing the men into three open lifeboats. After a perilous six-day row through freezing, tempestuous waters, they landed on the desolate, uninhabited Elephant Island.Realizing that no one would find them on Elephant Island, Shackleton devised an audacious rescue plan. He and five companions modified the James Caird—one of their 22-foot lifeboats—and set out across the notoriously dangerous Southern Ocean toward South Georgia Island, located 800 miles away.After 16 days of navigating through hurricane-force winds and mountainous waves, the small crew made landfall. However, they landed on the wrong side of the island. Shackleton and two of his men were forced to become the first people to traverse the island’s unmapped, glaciated interior to reach a whaling station on the other side. Once there, he immediately began organizing rescue attempts for his men back on Elephant Island.

The Rescue

Despite multiple setbacks caused by severe winter sea ice, Shackleton finally succeeded in rescuing the men left behind on Elephant Island in August 1916 using the Chilean tug Yelcho. Miraculously, despite being marooned for roughly 22 months in some of the harshest conditions on Earth, not a single man from the Endurance crew was lost.

The Doolittle Raiders.

One of the world’s most accomplished alpinists Conrad Anker, 54, had a heart attack at 20,000' several thousand feet up a mixed rock and ice face while climbing the northwest face of 22,660-foot Lunag-Ri in Nepal. At the time it was the second highest unclimbed peak in the world. He decended to basecamp over the next several hours and was medivacced. He returned to climbing including an assent of El Cap.