Category: Heroism

Dept. Of Righteous Slinging

Heroism

Reader Quentin sent me this little piece of hilarious goblin takedown:

A teenager helped save his younger sister from an alleged kidnapper by shooting the suspect with his slingshot, Michigan authorities said.

The 8-year-old girl was mushroom-hunting in her backyard in Alpena Township on Wednesday when “an unknown male appeared from the woods,” the Michigan State Police said in a press release on Friday.

“The suspect had come through the woods onto the property and came from behind her, grabbed her like you’d see in the movies — hand over the mouth, arm around the waist — and was attempting to pull her into the woods,” Lt. John Grimshaw with the Michigan State Police told ABC Traverse City affiliate WGTU.

The girl was able to break free, police said. Her 13-year-old brother also witnessed the attack and shot the assailant in the head and chest with his slingshot, police said.

And then:

The suspect fled the area but was located by state troopers hiding at a nearby gas station and was able to be identified in part due to injuries from the slingshot, police said.

“The suspect had obvious signs of injury sustained from the slingshot with wounds to his head and chest,” police said.

Now, can I ask you all to rise…

Well done, youngster.  Bravissimo.

(Too bad he didn’t have a .22 rifle, but in this case, I’ll definitely take two ball bearings to the body for $400, Alex.)

I can just hear the other prisoners now:  “Dude!  You got whacked by a kid with a slingshot?  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!”

Scrabbling Through The Rubble

Heroism

…or, not all heroes are gunfighters.

I thought I’d share a few WhatsApp exchanges with y’all.  This is about SARZA, which is a privately-funded search & rescue organization based in South Africa (!), and which sent a team to help out in Turkey.  Here’s a first-hand account from one of the SARZA team:


A little background:
“Mark” is a skinny kid of about 23.  He’s also one of the top S&R operators in South Africa — hence his selection to join the SARZA team — and has been involved in countless life-and-death rescues all over South Africa.  He’s also a skilled drone pilot, which they use to find people in distress, pinpoint trouble spots and so on.

“Sally” is Mark’s mother, and her husband is New Wife’s brother (who just spent Christmas with us) so Mark is my nephew by marriage, so to speak.

Words cannot express our pride in him and his work.

Four Down, Six To Go

Heroism, History, Literature

Okay, maybe three and seven out of the ten listed.  (I read Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis & Clark expedition, not Lewis’s account, but that should count for something.)

Of the others, Storm of Steel  impressed me the most.  Ernst Jünger must be the greatest soldier who ever lived, if for no other reason that he survived all four years of WWI in the trenches of the Western Front, not as some staff flunky or quartermaster’s orderly, but as a front-line rifleman.  And not a whiny little brat like Remarque‘s Paul, either:  just a man of steel — which could have been the title of his book, come to think of it.

I’ve been wanting to read Last Train  for years, but just never got around to it.  Ditto Death Company, if for no other reason than to fill in the many gaps of my knowledge of the Italian Front.  Both duly ordered.

I’ll get after the rest in due course — it’s an excellent list, so thanks to the folks at Intellectual Takeout  for that.  (If they aren’t on your list of daily reads, fix that now.)