Gurkha ignores knife wound to trap his mugger for 15 minutes while blade was stuck in his arm

One handed too! Hero husband and father.

The knife wasn’t stuck in his arm - it was buried in his arm.

Brave man!

I love the old joke about the Ghurka squad that was briefed on a low drop from an aircraft... The Brit officer explains in detail the direction they will come over the target, the altitude, the expected disposition of enemies, and fight etc... and then moves on to begin to explain how the parachute will be employed.

Sensing a sudden release of tension, the officer asks the Ghurka SGT what that was about, and he responds: "We weren't sure we were going to get parachutes".

People I want in my end of the ditch: Ghurkas, Sikhs, and Samoans.

/johnny

I did say, "You need to know who I am".

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you."

Agreed.

Love that movie.

‘We can negotia...BAM!’

The perp was lucky Mr. Phlamachha didn't have his Kukri on him. Bad guy would have been reduced to luncheon meat.

England is a very violent country.

Former Chief of staff of the Indian Army, Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, once famously said[2] about Gurkhas:

**If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or is a Gurkha.**

I’m surprised he didn’t pull the knife out of his arm and use it to carve the perp into small chunks.

Pulling the knife out might have caused more bleeding.

Gurkhas, Sikhs and Marines. The holy trinity of whoop ass.

I’ve said for a while we should have recruited Gurkha and Sikh regiments in the wake of 9/11.

Here is an old FR thread you might find interesting: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2663935/posts

It would have been over in a week.

http://www.hindu.com/2008/06/28/stories/2008062856540100.htm

Stirring send-off to ‘Sam Bahadur’

Special Correspondents

SOLDIER’S GENERAL: Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw at a military parade on October 23, 2004 in New Delhi.

Samspeak: “If anyone tells you he is never afraid, he is a liar or a Gurkha!”

NEW DELHI: Field Marshal S.H.F.J. Manekshaw was given the final salute in a state funeral with full military honours in the Nilgiris on Friday. He died at the age of 94 early on Friday at the Wellington Military Hospital where he was battling lung disease.

He was considered one of the country’s great war heroes. The victory over Pakistan in the 1971 war that he masterminded helped create Bangladesh.

The body was buried in a Parsi graveyard in Udhagamandalam, next to where lay buried his wife Silloo, who died seven years ago.

Union Minister of State for Defence Pallam Raju placed a wreath on behalf of the Prime Minister and the Central Government. State Khadi Minister D. Ramachandran placed a wreath on behalf of the Tamil Nadu Government.

Representatives of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, the Royal Bhutan Army and the three forces of Bangladesh, the Southern Command and local wings of the forces placed wreaths.

Around noon, the body was kept at the Madras Regimental Centre parade grounds, Wellington, for about three hours to enable the public to pay homage. Thousands of people, ranging from officers of the armed forces and civil officials to members of the public, filed past. The queue seemed endless.

The body was then placed in a coffin and taken in a flower-bedecked military truck to the graveyard, 20 km from Wellington. The last rites were performed by Manekshaw’s family members in a private ceremony under Zoroastrian customs.

‘Sam’ Maneskhaw was a soldier’s General who led daring military assaults, planned his moves meticulously, read his enemy’s mind well and backed his men even when the political leadership was bearing down on him. He was a great motivator.

The list of his awards is long, beginning with the Military Cross he got during the Second World War. A fortnight before his retirement, Manekshaw was made a Field Marshal.

He was the second Indian to be thus decorated after K.M. Cariappa. In between, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1968 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1971.

But more impressive was his personality — handsome, self-assured, with a trademark handlebar moustache. These were backed by raw courage, determination and a sharp military mind.

He could stand up to politicians while losing none of his wit.

Sam ‘Bahadur’ was so called because of his long association with the Gurkha regiment after his parent force, the Frontier Rifles, was allocated to Pakistan.

One of his sayings, which has passed into Gurkha regiment legend: “If anyone tells you he is never afraid, he is a liar or a Gurkha!”

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/shrestha.html

Badass of the Week.

Bishnu Shrestha

"It is better to die than be a coward."

- Gurkha motto

Bishnu Shrestha wasn't looking for a fight on the evening of 2 September 2010. As his express train roared through the darkness of the jungles of West Bengal, this Nepalese ex-soldier sat quietly, looking out the window into the calm stillness of the night sky above. The 35 year old veteran was finally on his way back home, having just retired from his position as a Naik (Corporal) in the 7th Battalion of the 8th Gurkha Infantry – a famous, battle-hardened regiment of ass-whompers that had produced balls-out awesome war heroes like Lachhiman Gurung, and a unit in which Shrestha's own father had served during Vietnam. One in a long line of warriors, Bishnu himself had seen plenty of combat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and probably a half-dozen other locations that may never be declassified, and now, after having spent a good part of his adult life crushing his foes with the stock of his assault rifle and charging enemy positions armed with a bayonet and his ultra-badass kukri knife, he was looking forward to finally seeing an end to the constant fighting, settling down, and building a family in the quiet mountains of his homeland. On this evening he rode the Maurya Express, a passenger train appropriately sharing it's name with historical badass Chandragupta Maurya, enjoying the serenity of the Indian night.

But there would be no rest for the weary. Around midnight, the mighty locomotive ground to a halt unexpectedly, sending passengers lurching forward in their seats. Without warning, while everyone was still trying to figure out what the crap hell was going on, suddenly from seemingly every direction passengers stood up and began to whip out all manner of frighteningly gruesome-looking weaponry – guns, knives, clubs and fucking giant swords(seriously, who robs a train with a sword!) – and started shouting for everyone to sit still, get out their valuables, and prepare to get ripped the fuck off.

As if that wasn't bad enough, from a side door more armed thugs leapt into action, pouring into the train from the jungle beyond. Dozens of unscrupulous goons began making their way down the aisles, shaking down everyone for their shit, stealing wallets, tearing jewelry from the necks of old women, snatchin laptops and cell phones, and waving knives in the faces of terrified hostages.

Despite the chaos around him, Naik Bishnu Shrestha just sat there quietly. Not saying anything. Not betraying his emotions. Even when the thugs took his own wallet, he remained silent. Like a true badass, he knew that this wasn't his fight. Just be quiet, give them what they want, and survive. It's just a few hundred bucks. It's not worth dying over.

But then shit got out of hand. You see, it just so happened that Shrestha was sitting near a cute 18 year-old girl, and when this gang of baby-kicking terrorists came by her seat they decided it would be awesome to be the complete fucking slime of the earth and gang-rape her in front of her own terrified parents just for shits and giggles. The terrorist leader cut open her shirt while she cried for help.

That was fucking it. Bishnu Shrestha couldn't just sit by any longer.

Unfortunately for the douchebags of West Bengal, when the thugs had robbed Bishnu they'd made one fatal mistake: They didn't take his kukri. This ultra-hardass Gurkha warrior, one in a long line of head-cleaving soldiers battle-hardened by centuries of hand-to-hand combat (and a steady diet of steel tacks and the corpses of their slain enemies), had given up his money, but knew better than to ever relinquish his weapon. Slowly, effortlessly, he eased the hilt from its hiding place. Now these fuckers were going to see what it felt like to get a taste of their own steel-tipped medicine, and it was going to taste like dental-grade pain and a roll of nasty old pennies.

Corporal Shrestha leapt to his feet, drawing the ultimate symbol of Gurkha badassitude with one fluid motion. He flew across the train car, grabbing the would-be rapist from behind in a sleeper hold, pulled him up off the girl, and used him as a human shield while he lunged out and slashed one of the sword-swinging thugs, sending the hapless dude spinning off in a vicious tornado of blood. One of the other motherfuckers, unwilling to stab in the direction of his own boss, instead took the manly man's route and tried to cut the girl, slashing his knife wildly at her neck, but the girl only took a minor wound before Shrestha dropped him with a lightning-quick strike. With the terrorists in the immediate vicinity disposed of, he sliced the throat of his human shield and went looking for more fuckers to get his blood-rage off on.

The news reports are pretty vague about what happened during this epic battle, where one balls-out Gurkha face-wrecker carved his way through a pack of 40 merciless cutthroats (indeed, even the above paragraph is a little bit of pulp fiction editorializing – merely my interpretation of the phrase "he took control of the attacker and killed everyone around him") but the fact of the matter is that after his initial ambush this ex-military mecha-hardass from one of the world's most over-the-top batshit-insane military organizations suddenly found himself in the middle of a hostage-filled train crawling with well-armed, highly-organized terrorists. This was Die Hard without the cowboy references. Delta Force without Lee Marvin. Under Siege without the Dramamine. and Passenger 57 without the always betting on black thing. And, worse yet, it was happening in real life.

Over the next twenty minutes, Corporal Bishnu Shrestha raced through the aisles giving those wanna-be punk-ass thugs a first-class ride on the Pain Train to Severed Arteryville, cutting, dodging, and back-alley knife fighting anything carrying a weapon larger than a ball-point pen. He took on the entire train – 40 men – at once, killing three and wounding eight more with a ferocious series of face-stabs and Limit Break Whirlwind Slashes so badass they would make Jet Li proud. Even after he took a nasty sword blow that severed every major artery and vein in his left hand, he continued carving up douchebags with his kukri, all the while spraying what I like to imagine to be a pseudo-comical amount of blood from his non-killing hand.

The sight of a real man was too much for those weak-willed thugs, and once they realized that they weren't just beating up schoolchildren and robbing crippled old ladies of their wedding rings and were instead facing a goddamned psychotic Gurkha with balls so gigantic they barely fit through the doorway of the train car, they dropped all their look and ran for it like fucking pussies. The whole thing was over in about 20 minutes. When the train pulled into the next station, police and emergency personnel were there to treat the wounded and rush Shrestha to the hospital, where he spent two months recovering from the injury to his hand. When the police searched the dead and dying thugs, they recovered 40 gold necklaces, 200 cell phones, 40 laptops, and nearly $10,000 in stolen cash. Those idiots lucky enough to be left alive were hauled in to jail.

Bishnu Shrestha was temporarily un-retired from the Gurkhas for the purposes of being promoted and subsequently awarded two medals for bravery and awesomeness. His former unit also awarded him with a presumably-rightously-looking silver-plated kukri (kind of like how when you beatGoldeneye you unlock the Silver PP7) and a cash bonus of 50,000 Rupees, which is enough to buy like 200 Blue Rings in The Legend of Zelda. The Indian Government also awarded him the bounty that was on the heads of this vicious gang, and granted him discounted airfare and train tickets for the rest of his life. I guess after hearing this guy's insane story they just decided to say, "fuck those backscatter ultra-invasive x-ray machines, the best anti-terror homeland security measure our country can take is to make sure this guy is on as many flights and trains as possible."

Ultimately, like a true badass, Bishnu Shrestha doesn't need any thanks for doing what he needed to do. The family of the girl he saved offered him a reward of $6,500, but the dude never stopped by to collect it. That wasn't the point. The man himself said it best, responding to reporters by saying, "Fighting the enemy in battle is my duty as a soldier. Taking on the thugs on the train was my duty as a human being."

Links:

Republica News

Times of India

The Himalayan Beacon

Watch that movie every time its on. Just last week was about my 5th time.....

Badass of the Week.

Lachhiman Gurung

"I had to fight because there was no other way. I felt I was going to die anyway, so I might as well die standing on my feet. All I knew was that I had to go on and hold them back. I am glad that helped the other soldiers in my platoon, but they would have all done the same thing."

There are plenty of seriously hardcore warrior associations out there, but as far as I'm concerned it doesn't get a whole lot better than the Gurkhas. From as early as the 19th century, these sack-tearing hardasses from rural Nepal have been like Britain's personal detachment of borderline-sociopathic serial killers. They're so disarming it's unnerving – they've got big, easy smiles, they're quiet, incredibly polite, respectful, and never really bother anybody. They just want to chill out and drink some beers. While none of this really screams badass through a truck-mounted megahorn, it's the deadliest, most insane motherfuckers who don't need to get all up in your face and talk a bunch of shit about how awesome they are. These are guys who know they can turn you from a rampaging dumbass to an eviscerated carcass in about two seconds if they want to, and they're confident enough in their abilities that they don't need to go all macho-man about it just because they're secretly worried that other people think they have small dicks or something. Despite the cool, calculated exterior, though, when it comes time to flip out, the Gurkhas are some motherfuckers who seriously FLIP THE FUCK OUT:

Every couple of years, the Gurkhas fighting in Afghanistan
get in trouble because they're always beheading the corpses of Taliban fighters.
That's not even a joke.

On the night of 12 May 1945, Lachhiman Gurung of the 8th Gurkha Rifles was part of a small forward platoon dug into trenches defending a position in Burma, when all of a sudden his tiny unit came under a massive attack from a couple hundred Japanese soldiers looking to punch through these defenses and then punch a few holes into his torso so that they could tear out his large intestines and strangle him to death with them. The idea of this was not very appealing to Lachhiman.

The marauding Japanese first decided to soften up the Gurkha positions by chucking three full dickloads of hand grenades and various explosive materials into the Allied trenches and then face-shooting the bejeezus out of anyone who tried to dive out of the trench or otherwise escape their imminent fragmentation-related demises. Gurung summarily developed an ingenious third option – one which didn't blow him up and didn't result in exposing himself to an enfilade of enemy fire – he just snatched the fucking live grenades up from the floor of the trench and chucked them back at the Japanese. His tactic of hurling insults and incendiaries at the enemy whenever the opportunity presented itself worked out well for a while, and he sent two flying explosive middle-fingers back at his assailants, but the third time proved to not be the charm for Lachhiman – his timing was a little off and the grenade ended up detonating in his hand. In the military, this is what they refer to as, "bad".

The frag blew off a couple fingers, destroyed his right arm, and nearly took off half his face. He was left bleeding, partially blinded, crippled, and seriously fucked up in general, but despite having half of his body blown into something vaguely like Two-Face from Batman, Lachhiman Gurung was sure as fuck not going to stop resisting this onslaught as long as he was capable of sustaining basic life functions. Half-dead, bloody, and badly wounded, Gurung drew his kukri knife – the ultimate symbol of Gurkha badassitude – jammed it point-first into the ground before him, and defiantly yelled into the darkness, "No one will pass here today!"

Then he grabbed his rifle, chambered a round, and shouted, "Now come and fight a Gurkha!"

There are very few occasions in which drawing a line in the sand is not badass.

With every other man dead or dying around him, Lachhiman Gurung never stopped shooting every Japanese person he could see. This dude, by himself, loaded, cocked, and fired his fucking bolt-action rifle for four hours of non-stop combat, fighting off wave after wave of attackers like a wounded wolverine tearing his own leg off with bullets. His tactic for success was to lie down in the trench, not get shot, wait until he could hear the enemy soldiers nearly right on top of him, and then pop up like a murderous, rifle-toting whack-a-mole and smoke some dude in half at point-blank range with his left hand. Then he'd reposition the rifle, chamber a new round (lefty), shift it back, and blast another guy apart. How the fuck he managed to hold off 200 gun-toting, battle-hardened Japanese soldiers using this technique is completely beyond me, but the authors of the Victoria Cross citations aren't usually in the habit of making shit up off the tops of their heads.

By the time the smoke cleared the next morning, Gurung had been fighting for over four hours straight. 31 Japanese soldiers lay dead in the field before him. He'd single-handedly kicked all their asses, and I of course mean single-handedly in every possible meaning of the word.

A Lee-Enfield SMLE Mk III bolt-action rifle similar to the ones carried by 8 Gurkha.

Gurung obviously had to be hospitalized, mostly for for extreme blood-hysteria and obscenely high levels of deathtosterone, but also because half his arm had been blown off by a grenade and explosive shrapnel had blinded him in the right eye. He never regained use of his right arm, but this guy ripped so many balls with his off-hand that they let him stay in the service and finish out the war with his unit. He refused to be sent home anyways, and if there's one thing about Lachhiman Gurung, it's that you can't fucking make this guy move anywhere he doesn't want to go, so his superiors were just like, "forget it dude, whatever you want is bitchin' with us."

After the war, Gurung moved back home to Nepal for a while, but then eventually emigrated to Britain. Even into his significantly more decrepit years, this guy continued staying true to his people and never forgot his roots – in 2008 when Gurkha soldiers were told they weren't allowed to live in Britain because they had "failed to demonstrate strong ties to Britain", the 91 year-old Gurung hauled ass out to the High Court out there decked out in about a million medals and told the judicial system to take their bullshit law, crumple up the paper it was printed on, and jam it up their own urethras. Everyone was so impressed that they ended up repealing the stupid law. Damn straight.

Links:

Wikipedia

The Independent

The Telegraph

The Times

Victoria Cross Citation