Real Wartime Rescues More Dramatic Than Any Movie

If we told you Corporal Dakota Meyer and Staff Sergeant Juan Rodriguez-Chavez once saved baby unicorns from a burning building while covered in gasoline, it would still sound more believable than what they actually pulled off in Kunar, Afghanistan, in 2009. In the predawn hours of September 8, a patrol of Marines and Afghan trainees got ambushed by Hell's favorite jump scare, the Taliban. The troops found themselves drowning in bullets and grenades with no lifeguard in sight. Meyer and Rodriguez-Chavez, who were a mile away, volunteered to be the patrol's glistening Hasselhoff.

Four different times the pair asked permission to help the besieged soldiers, and each time they received unflinching no's. But citing the Marine Corps Manual's "orders-shmorders" clause, Meyer and Rodriguez-Chavez decided to go anyway. After cranking up their valor to "Super Saiyan," they drove a Humvee into a sea of 50 enemy combatants. Rodriguez-Chavez steered, Meyer manned the turret gun, and the Taliban tried to turn Meyer's unprotected head into a brain smoothie. That sounds like a recipe for total tragedy but ended up as a six-hour parade of epic fool-capping and troop-saving.

Meyer and Rodriguez-Chavez entered the Kunar death derby five times. In the first two trips they rescued 24 people by themselves. They rescued a group of wounded Americans on the third trip. On the fourth trip they were joined by Afghan forces who both wanted to rescue soldiers and determine if Meyer and Rodriguez-Chavez were secretly terminators. On the fifth trip the apparently indestructible Meyer – who had shrapnel in his arm – braved gunfire and rockets on foot. In the end, disobeying orders helped save 36 lives, earning Meyer the Medal of Honor and Rodriguez-Chavez the Navy Cross in 2011. They likely also received Straitjackets of Freedom, since heroes that fearless must be nuts.

Back in 1975, John Riordan had a sweet assistant manager position at the Citibank in Saigon. He lived in a fancy villa, hung out with tight-knit coworkers, and maybe even owned a cocaine chest made from powdered diamonds. (Probably not, but let's imagine.) However, things got deadly serious when Citibank learned that Saigon was about to become Commie chow. Riordan's bosses chartered a plane and told him and the other Americans to bounce like a bad check. His 34 Vietnamese coworkers, unfortunately, were out of luck.

Before jetting off to safety, Riordan promised his stranded colleagues he'd return for them and their families. Citibank, however, vowed to fire any would-be heroes. (And probably hide all their diamond cocaine, too.) Even so, Riordan had given his word, and bankers never lie. So he boarded the last commercial flight to Vietnam with no official backing, no cushy job to come back to, and no real plan for sneaking a total of 105 people out of an imploding country. He also had no choice but to succeed.

Americans and anyone who worked with them would receive Communist curb-stompings once the Vietcong arrived. But combat-eligible males caught trying to escape risked getting turned into bullet soup by the South Vietnamese. The Citibankers' only hope was to call Riordan daddy. As in, Riordan had to fabricate 105 Vietnamese children and spouses in order to get everyone evacuated. To make this rabidly absurd plan somewhat feasible, he broke them up into large groups (the first was of 15 people, while later ones were between 6 and 8) and made multiple trips. The downside? He had to pass himself off as an extremely fertile Lothario. How embarrassing.

In the early months of World War I, the hospital ship S.S. Rohilla charted a course from Scotland to Belgium. Passengers included 1,400 people and a black cat, which essentially meant disaster. Not because of the black cat, you zoological racists, but because Lady Luck was anti-ocean liner at the time. Just two years prior she'd made the Titanic French kiss an iceberg. Now she was gunning for the Rohilla, which coincidentally had a Titanic survivor onboard. But instead of sinking this ship with an ice-mountain, she threw the ground at it.

Storms intercepted the Rohilla off the coast of North Yorkshire, England, and sent it careening into a gaggle of cliffs. The vessel began to splinter into three sections, hemorrhaging people as it took in water. First responders from the nearby town of Whitby rushed to the scene before they could even finish choking down their crumpets. But awful weather forced them to hold off on most rescue efforts until the next day. In the meantime they just had to pray that the Rohilla's frustrated passengers wouldn't spew brutal "your mum" jokes in retaliation.

Over the course of three days, rescuers tried everything from rowing passengers ashore to forming a human chain in the sea. Some methods succeeded while others floundered in what was truly a historic effort. According to Mary Roberts, who survived both the Titanic and Rohilla disasters, the latter was worse, given the weather, crash severity, and absence of Leonardo DiCaprio. Still, rescue crews managed to spare 144 lives. They could have saved even more had they relied on steam-powered lifeboats instead of rowboats. And moving forward, that's exactly what they did.

Bullets and human bodies don't play well together unless there's a morgue involved. Despite that incontrovertible fact, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kettles insisted on making himself a lead magnet when his fellow soldier's lives were at stake. It's a tale of true grit and magnanimous insanity that took place back in 1967. Kettles was leading a six-helicopter rescue squadron into Vietcong territory to retrieve 44 men who'd been distinguished guests at an ambush party. Unfortunately, the party wasn't over.

The Vietcong unleashed a hailstorm of bullets and bombs. Five choppers collected 36 men before pulling back from the furious onslaught. The sixth helicopter was manned by Kettles and copilot Ray Seacrest, who somehow must have confused their skin with Kevlar. They landed their lonely chopper right in the line of enemy fire to snag the remaining eight men. The Vietcong fired every bullet, mortar, and exploding kitchen sink imaginable. But Kettle's biggest concern wasn't the busted windshields, damaged tail, or bullet-riddled propeller. With 13 people onboard, his chopper was almost too fat to fly.

The extra men made their helicopter 600 to 700 pounds (about one large sumo wrestler) overweight. Kettles and Seacrest had to compensate by bouncing their chopper like a flying lowrider. After several hops they got the metal grasshopper airborne and giggled at Death as they exited. Kettles' madcap bravery would earn him the Medal of Honor in 2016. Would have been nice to see his hydraulic chopper featured in a special episode of Pimp My Ride and fitted with propeller rims.

What do you get when you combine superlative fighting ability, extreme gruffness, and pit bull determination? A man capable of moving mountains by sheer force of punching, a man like Army Colonel Henry Mucci. Well-versed in judo, boxing, and murder-fu, he stood out as one of World War II's more beloved military leaders with his larger-than-life personality and knack for getting the job done. Arguably, his biggest claim to fame came when he led 121 Army Rangers across 30 miles of poisonous snake-infested Filipino terrain to free over 500 beleaguered POWs.

The seeds of the mission got planted in 1943 when it came to light that the Japanese had turned Bataan into the Torture Olympics. The number of death marches, starvation sessions, and beheadings POWs endured would give the Saw screenwriters nightmares. Fearful of mass executions toward the end of the war, American military brass tapped Mucci to storm Bataan in 1945. A beloved and batty leader, Mucci had also spent a year molding farm boys into granny-clobbering jungle fighters. That's no typo. Mucci had vowed to make the men so fierce they'd kill their grandmas.

With the aid of Filipino guerrillas and volunteers, Mucci and the granny slayers marched to Bataan in late January. They only needed five minutes to incapacitate the guards and another ten to get the POWs out of the camp. Eight hundred Japanese soldiers accompanied by eight tanks tried to stop the men from leaving but weren't ready for freedom's jelly. The combined American and Filipino forces thwarted the tanks with roadblocks and took out 300 enemy combatants. Outmatched, the Japanese sounded a brown alarm in their pants and yielded. The number of grandmas harmed was unreported.