At the pub I worked we had an old Spitfire pilot and I meet siome of the Dambusters survivors… it’s hard to beat that generation for great “close call”-stories.
But that was great.
Yeah, no fair bringing in WW2 stories, unless you were actually there. ;-)
My grandfather and great-uncle were there, though in different theaters; my grandfather in an artillery corps in the Pacific, and my uncle was Army infantry in Europe. One day, somewhere in France, my great-uncle and his unit were picked up by the SS, and lined up in front of a truck with a heavy machine gun mounted on the back. Just before the officer dropped his arm to signal the execution, a German MP drove up, stopped him, and took them into custody.
So, rather than get splattered by the Nazis, he spent a year in Stalag 7A in Moosburg. Alas, he didn’t like to talk about it (understandably), so I’ve only heard his stories second-hand through relatives. He died back in 2000. I’d love to borrow his war diary someday, if my great-aunt will let me.
But, you’re right; no fair if you weren’t there. So forget I mentioned it. ;)
Now awaiting the Jeff Green addition to this thread…
Low blow.
I’m pretty sure that Jeff was way off the front lines by WW2, having done active service in the Crimea.
And yeah, a war story is kind of cheap but I couldn’t help myself. It’s a cracker.
My wife, upon hearing of this thread, wanted to share hers (she’d join but QT3 scares her):
[INDENT]This is one of those stories that scared me a lot more when I thought about it years later. At the time, I didn’t realize how much worse it could have been. I was 6 years old and playing at a neighbor’s house. They had a sandbox built around the base of a large tree in their yard. They also had two swings suspended from the tree branches - the type of swing you get at playgrounds, made up of a large strip of thick rubber held to the chains by thick metal triangles.
Another neighbor boy had come over, and for reasons known only to himself, started pushing one of the empty swings, making it swing sideways. I was playing at the edge of the sandbox. After a few minutes, I happened to look up, and BANG. Thick metal triangle hit me dead in the face.
Let’s pause for a moment to consider how this COULD have gone. It could have knocked out my teeth. Broken my nose. Put out an eye. If it had hit me in the side of the head, it could have broken my jaw, or any of the other bones in my face. If it had hit me in the temple, it could have killed me.
What actually happened is it opened a 3-inch gash in my forehead that went straight to the bone - and didn’t do any further harm. I didn’t even have a concussion. I needed stitches - lots of them - and because my mother is the genius that she is, she insisted on a plastic surgeon doing the sewing. The end result of this is that today, 23 years later, I don’t even have a scar.
I do want to insist that the boy pushing the swing is in no way to blame here. Yes, he was pushing a swing haphazardly very close to a bystander, but he wasn’t trying to hit me. He was just idly pushing the swing. He was the one who rushed me into house when I was hit. So, while it was a stupid thing for him to be doing, me getting hurt was purely an accident. Nevertheless, my mother hated that boy for years.
[/INDENT]
That reminds me of the time when I was around 6 and I was playing touch football with my friend Carl in Virginia on a hot summer day. He had his shirt off, so when I went to slap him on the chest, my fingernail found his nipple and ripped it off.
His mom hated me after that too.
Whenever there’s a QT3 get-together with flag football or something? You’re on my team.
Note to self: If ever you should meet Lunch of Kong, no high fives! (waves only please, form 50 paces back!)
Fist bumps.
But then my hand would probably explode.
Nipple ripper and explod-O dude on the same team? That’s no fair at all.
And that boy’s name was Matt Bowyer. =)
Man I once busted a boys eardrum, but ripping off nipples is HARDCORE.
Motherly hate reminded me of the one time my mother, nurse of 40 years, acted unprofessionally.
Age 17 on new years age a drunk neighbor (40 year old mean guy) attacked my 15 year old friend and I decided to try and stop him which ended with me knocked out and bleeding on the ground.
Six months later the guy was drunk again, the fair was in town and he got too close to one of the wooden swing boats and it knocked him out and broke his nose. When he arrived at the hospital, my mom cleaned him, recognized his face and left him bleeding.
I can’t say if I would have died here, but in my younger days, I crowd surfed at an Anthrax show. Instead of the crowd pushing me forward to the stage, I went backwards and got dropped into the mosh pit. I fell about 6 feet and landed headfirst on the floor.
Another time, crowd surfing, the crowd threw me forward when I was near the stage and I guess the security guard at the front wasn’t prepared for that. I saw the corner of the stage fast approaching me, and was probably about a foot away from cracking my head open before I was caught.
Kids, crowd surfing is not only very dangerous, but it’s also very annoying. Don’t do it.
Hmm, where to start? Was born in 64 very badly jaundiced, doctors told my mom I wouldn’t live. After four blood transfusions I pulled through. Was hospitalized at least once every year for the first 15 years of my life, usually for pneumonia. I remember being maybe 5-6 lying in my hospital bed after a nurse woke me up, next thing I knew I was being hauled out of bed and throw into a tub of ice water as black blankets were wrapped around me.
December of 81 I was working at my father’s drive thru and this man wearing a trench coat walked in. The store manager was between us, but when she turned around with this petrified look on her face I knew something was wrong. The man came around her and put a double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun into my stomach, basically holding me as hostage while he demanded she open the registers. She was shaking so badly she couldn’t get the first one open quickly enough, and he very calmly said, “Don’t make me kill him.” Probably didn’t help her shakes, and I remember just staring down at my blue suede Puma tennis shoes. After getting the money, he took us into the back store room and made is crouch down facing a corner. Those were the worst moments of the robbery, I remember kneeling there waiting for the sound of that shotgun going off. But we heard the door shut behind us. Months later during a lineup we both identified him, but he was later convicted for murder so the prosecutor didn’t bother pursuing the robbery charges.
In the 80s I lived in a small town in PA and occasionally drove my friends to NYC for drugs. One time, we got to the Bronx and my friends locked themselves in the bathroom of this apartment and wouldn’t come out. Tired of waiting for them, I went downstairs to go to the corner bodega and then hung out by my car. A guy I recognized from the house asked me if I would give him a ride into Manhattan and he promised me some drugs. I said okay and suddenly a group of people piled into my car. I felt a little uncomfortable, but decided to roll with it. Somewhere in Manhattan I dropped everyone off but this one woman. I was unfamiliar with driving in the city, particularly where it comes to pedestrian right of way. When all the guys got back into the car, the woman pointed out my driving deficiencies to one of the men. At first this man claimed that it was a better strategy to not drive too pretty, but then while I was making a right hand turn, I nudged through some pedestrians in another crosswalk, and he decided he had better drive after all. He asked me to let him behind the wheel and I balked. He tried to intimidate me by showing me the gun tucked into his pants, but I was nervous about driving in the city and didn’t catch on. He eventually pulled the gun out of his waistband and sort of scratched his nose with the barrel. I pulled over and by then all the guys had pulled their guns and were hooting and hollering. I got in the backseat feeling humiliated. Soon someone started talking “the body” and “what to do with the body.” I couldn’t really follow the conversation, but at some point I understood that they were discussing my body. They made another stop and left me and the girl in the back seat. I felt like the girl was my one good hope. In the glove box I had some pictures of my wife and I at our recent wedding. My plan was to show the girl these pictures, in the hope that she might intercede with the men for me, preventing them from shooting me. As I leaned into the front seat to get the pictures, she started yelling at me and fumbling in her purse. I got the pictures, sat back in my seat, and turned to show them to the girl, who by now was holding a small caliber gun on me and saying “I almost had to shoot ya.” I was sort of in shock. I didn’t know what to say, so I just started showing her the pictures. “And here’s a shot of me. And that’s my mom. And, oh, look, my little brother!” Talk about an uncomfortable moment.
It’s very sobering to realize you have miscalculated so much on so many levels. I had no idea that they would all have guns, especially the woman. I also had no idea that they were kidding with all that talk about the body. I didn’t want to show anyone that I was scared, but in inadvertently doing so, I almost forced the nice girl to shoot me. But I was at least right that the woman would be able to control those men. When the guys got back into the car and started talking about the body and shit, the girl made them shut up. And they did.
Quick question: do nipples grow back?
So my stories are pretty tame: surviving cancer, surviving the Iranian revolution (I was 1 year old) and surviving an automobile accident that smashed my car like a tin can.
My wife, however, has a really amazing story:
So when my wife was a Junior in college, she studied abroad in Namibia for several months. She got to do this really great study program where she lived with 20 or so students from all around the world and worked in a women’s development center, teaching English. She had a great time and did a lot of crazy stuff. For example she got to live in a dung hut in a remote village for two weeks with no other, non-native people there. The other students she was with were very cool (I’ve met a few of them) and they had a lot of fun together (and smoked a lot of pot together). However they were all pretty progressive folks and gave my wife crap about the fact she wore her Nike basketball shoes (Nike was considered “evil” at the time for making shoes in sweat shops). Someone on the trip got malaria and another person got yellow fever. At one point my wife was mugged with a machete to her throat. She ate monkey and goat brains. However those are just bonuses and not the story I’m going to tell you.
After she was done with her study program she was able to stick around and travel for a couple more months. One of the places she really wanted to go was Victoria Falls. At some point, in a hostel, she met a young Australian couple that was headed there and they agreed to take her in the back of their jeep if she paid for some of the gas. She did, wiggled into the tiny back of the jeep and went off with them.
Now to get to Victoria Falls they had to go through a huge game park in Botswana. The game park was so large that it would normally take two days to cross it. However to do it that way they’d have to stay overnight and the only places to stay were very expensive, luxury hunting lodges. So instead of doing that the couple decided that they wanted to leave extremely early in the morning and do the whole trip in one very long day.
So off they go at like 2am in the morning. Now that year Botswana had seen record amounts of rainfall and so much of the game park was flooded. As they traveled they continually ran into various detours and diversions and had to take side paths. My wife has the special talent of being to basically fall asleep anywhere, at any time so she falls asleep while banging around in the back of these jeep. At some point she wakes up and the Australians are arguing. She hears something to the effect of “we can make it” and the next thing she knows, the jeep is filling up with water.
It turns out some point the Australians had decided they could ford a river that was in fact far deeper than the realized. My wife grabs some of her stuff, including her camera, throws it over her head and gets the hell out of there. The couple starts to take off as well, but then start arguing again because of all the stuff they’ve left behind in the jeep. The man is just about to go back to the jeep when my wife notices hippos in the water. Hippos, of course, are among the most dangerous animals in Africa. So the Australian couple gets the hell out of the water. One of the things they’ve left in the car is their shoes (they had sandals) but fortunately my wife is still wearing her Nikes.
So they have to decide what to do. They have no idea where they are. They’re in this massive game park so big that it takes 2 days to cross. They’re fucked. They pick a path and start walking hoping that it will lead somewhere.
Now as they’re walking they can see crocodiles (or alligators, I’m not sure – maybe krazykrok would know) and hippos in the river to one side and wild kudu and zebra to the right. My wife picks up a big stick so that they can at least “go down with a fight” if something happens.
Morning gives way to day and it starts to get hot. It’s been a few hours. The Australian couple is bickering loudly. The man has determined that they have to go back to the jeep because they have no water and it’s all in there. Eventually they do turn around.
Right after they do so … another jeep pulls up with a park ranger. He looks at them and explains that they are extremely lucky. “I would never have gone down this path except that I saw some footprints in the dirt with a Nike swoosh and I figured – either these belong to a really rich native or some lost tourists”. He goes on to explain that there was a tiger seen recently in the area and that if the wind had been going the other direction, there’s a very good chance that they would have been attacked by a hippo.
So, end of the story: my wife gets taken back to a very nice game lodge where she gets to stay for free . They pull the jeep out of the river and it starts up after a couple of days of drying off. The Australian couple decide to continue on and my wife politely declines, hitching a ride back to Namibia with a gay Italian couple. On the way back out of Botswana she is nearly left behind after border guards irately refuse to let her out of the country based on the fact that she’d stayed longer than she had said she would upon entry. Of course she realizes that they just want a bribe and, eventually, gets home.
you know this thread has reached heights when “surviving cancer, the iranian revolution and a car wreck” are “tame”