Badass of the week.

[Gracie]

Badass

Scroll down and pick your bad ass to read about.

Interesting website, and the writer doesn't mince words, lol.

Harald Wartooth


"Clad in a red cloak, his hair held by a band tricked out with gold, he advanced on the enemy, quietly trusting to the knowledge of his luck rather than weapons – so much that he seemed dressed for a party, not war. But his mind was unlike his outfit, for unarmored, wearing only his royal insignia, he went before the armed battalions and gave the raging dangers of war a chance. Yet the spears flung at him could no more harm him then if their blades pointed backwards. When others saw this fighter's woundlessness, they were taken aback and shame spurred them to attack him still more fiercely. Harald, unwounded, killed them with his sword or sent them fleeing."


Harald Wartooth was a gigantic fucking Viking Berserker King who, in addition to running into battle completely unarmored and having spears and axes and other bullshit bounce off his fucking skin like his ridiculously-calloused, potentially-cyborged-out hide was constructed out of the titanium plating hand-shredded off the chassis of planet-vaporizing robots, was famous for being one of the first motherfuckers to ever unite all the frozen lands of Scandinavia under the banner of Viking Badassitude, conquering armies from England to Finland with tactics he'd been taught from the Norse Gods themselves, charging head-long into battle during the Viking version of the Battle of Troy despite the notable setback that he was like so fucking old he couldn't see past his epic white beard, and then having his skull gloriously clubbed into explosive shards by Odin while he was standing in a pile of human corpses he'd created with a pair of swords and his own furious death stare.

The Viking equivalent of King Arthur or Tupac Shakur, Harald Wartooth is one of these dudes we like to call "semi-legendary kings", which is a fancy, pseudo-academic way for smartypants tightwads to say, "This dude was almost certainly a real person at one time in history but shit got out of control over the last couple years and now we're pretty sure he didn't actually lop off heads with liquid metal blade arms, transform into Bear Mode at will, hang out with a dude who could transform men into frogs, or project his life essence into the Astral Plane and transfer his existence into hologram form", without sounding like a psychotic dumbass. We are like 90% sure Harald Wartooth was a real person, and if he wasn't, he was at least based on a real guy, because he's mentioned in a couple different places from a couple different Nordic civilizations. We know he lived around the 8th century, probably in the early 700s AD. We know he united the Viking Kingdoms. And we know he KICKED THE FUCKING SHIT OUT OF EVERYONE, because even 1,300 years after the WARTOOTHPOCALYPSE went down we have the bones and wreckage to prove it. Most historians just aren't exactly convinced that he communicated directly with the Norse God Odin, or that he lived to be 150 years old, or that he allowed himself to die simply because he was really fucking old and wanted to go to Valhalla rather than die a coward's death alone in his bed like a chump.





According to the tale of notable 13th-century Viking historian Saxo Grammaticus (the guy responsible for writing the original version of Hamlet that Bill Shakespeare re-made into a play a few centuries later), Harald Wartooth first came into prominence when his grandfather, a Viking explorer/pillager/badass/nobleman/maniac named Ivar the Wide-Grasping, accidentally killed himself while trying to fight a mythical sea monster that, by definition, could only be killed by the Norse God Thor. Ivar, who I'm pretty sure gets his wide-grasping epithet because he was literally able to grope TWO BOOBS AT THE SAME TIME, was like some super-old bastard who got into a Walter Matheau – Jack Lemmon-caliber argument with some other old geezer over something asinine like how to interpret a weird dream, and the way they decided to resolve the conflict was by jumping off a pier into the freezing-fucking-cold North Sea and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the Midgard Serpent, a sea monster so intensely tremendor that it's body circled the entire earth, and a fearsome beast with fangs the size of skyscrapers that were poisonous enough to kill the Gods Themselves. Ivar and his buddy both drowned like dumbshits almost immediately, so 15-year-old Harald, the only surviving male from his family (and a member of the royalty both through Ivar and because his mom was a princess or some bullshit), walked into Denmark and told everyone he was in charge now so you n00b chumps better start getting used to the idea. The assembled Viking beards saw this teenage punk coming in and were all like, "Yeah OK cool story bro that sounds great but how about rather than pay tribute to your dumb ass we SHOVE AN AXEHANDLE UP YOUR URETHRA AND BEAT YOUR MOTHER TO DEATH BY SWINGING YOUR IMPALED-PENISED CORPSE AROUND LIKE A MEAT SLEDGEHAMMER INSTEAD??!?!?!?!11111"

Harald Wartooth, who at this point was just going by Harald, stood there, his expression unchanging. He nodded understandingly, did a couple surreptitious finger-stretching exercises, calmly looked around at everyone before him, and casually unsheathed the Danish two-handed longaxe from the holster that slung it across his back.

Then he DESTROYED THEM ALL UTTERLY.

Parasailing through Northern Europe on a fire-nado of human carnage and tempered-steel implements of , the unstoppable Viking warlord conquered every territory in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, crushed armies and cut huge swaths of territory out for himself in Northern Germany and Eastern England, installed his own kinsmen as jarls of the devastated territories, and forced everyone he'd subjugated to pay tribute to him so that they never, ever forgot who had the biggest nutsack in the North Sea. They agreed.







Harald was famous for being a hardcore Berserker, meaning that he became so psychotically pissed and filled with the furious rage of Odin's killbonerrific spirit that he transcended anything mortal humans should be capable of and became an unflinching, unstoppable murder machine capable of grinding entire battalions of enemy warriors into mulch with a frenzy of blood-soaked deathstrokes. A young, impetuous, hardcore fighter, Harald always led his armies personally, screaming into battle like a madman and refusing to wear armor of any kind because he claimed Odin Himself would blind his foes and blunt their spears against him. When he was in full-on PCP Berserker Beast Mode, mostly naked and slathered in human blood and cream cheese, Harald was allegedly immune to fire and steel, incapable of feeling pain, and utterly unstoppable in combat. He wielded heavy oak clubs most of the time because he was notorious for hitting his enemies so hard that he would break his sword, once gave proof of his bravery by allowing the enemy to stab him with spears just to prove he could take it, and got his nickname, "Wartooth", supposedly from losing two teeth to an enemy sword and then having two brand new teeth SPONTANEOUSLY FUCKING GROW TO REPLACE THEM. I envision this going down in slow-motion with a super-extreme-close-up as he grows huge fangs to replace his busted teeth while a flaming 80s guitar solo wails in the background and the sound effect of a wolf howling at the moon blows the speakers on your TV into screaming shards of superheated shrapnel that embed themselves into your shitty couch and CATCH YOUR FUCKING APARTMENT ON FUCKING FIRE BECAUSE HE'S HARALD WARTOOTH NOW.

In addition to granting secret mutant powers of superhuman carnage-creation, Odin also supposedly personally came to Harald before battles and told him how to win. Typically this involved forming his men in a wedge and having them run straight ahead into the middle of the enemy forces screaming and swinging their axes and spears like their lives depended on it, which seems like a pretty straightforward tactic but apparently wasn't super common at the time because only one person ever used that strategy back against Harald. All the Lord of Valhalla asked in return was for Harald Wartooth to brutally sacrifice all captured Prisoners of War to Odin by hand-cleaving out their screaming guts on a stone altar with a sharp rock and pulling out their entrails. Harald was happy to oblige.







Unsurprisingly, after conquering his foes to shreds, Harald Wartooth ruled unopposed for over 50 years. The only action his warriors saw was when they went on their infamous raids throughout the North Sea and the Mediterranean.

Well one day, when Harald was allegedly 150 years old (this seems unlikely), his nephew, a guy named Sigurd Hring who was related to Harald through Harald's mother's second marriage to a guy named Radbeard (seriously!), decided he was sick of paying tribute and bullshit to the Wartooth. Sigurd Hring had been put in charge of the Swedes and the Goths, and he was getting all butthurt about not being the King of Denmark so he told Wartooth they should fucking fight it out in search of the One True Hring. Wartooth, who was old as hell and just survived an assassination attempt where a couple dumbasses tried to kill him while he was taking a bath, was happy to have the opportunity to die a Warrior's Death, and was also more than willing to take his uppity nephew, turn him inside-out and SHOVE HIM UP HIS OWN FUCKING ASS.







The two Kings assembled every fighting man in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. They recruited mercenaries from Saxony, Germany, England, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Harald Wartooth chopped down two entire forests to build a fleet of dragon ships so massive that if you laid them all out next to each other you could have walked from Denmark to Sweden without stepping on the water.

What went down would be the biggest inter-Viking battle ever recorded, either in history or in the sagas. It's the Norse version of Troy or the Mahabarta. The language used for the battle by Norse skalds closely resembles that of the description of Ragnarok, the battle at the End of the World. And Harald Wartooth plays the starring role.







The two opposing armies stood across from each other. When Harald Wartooth noticed Sigurd Hring had positioned his men in a wedge as well, Harald got a little worried. This did not stop him from wedging up his men, and going point-to-point to hump his foes into submission.

The battle that followed is worthy of the greatest epics in literary history. Harald's warriors, Are the One-Eyed, Dag the Fat, Hothbodd the Indomitable, and many other awesomely-named motherfuckers cleaved their way through the greatest warriors Hring had to offer. Wartooth's greatest champion, Ubbe from Friesland, waded into the meat of the action, covered in blood up to his shoulders, killing 22 men and wounding 11 more "warriors of note" (Saxo differentiates "warriors of note" from "nameless jobber nobodies") with a gigantic waraxe before being gloriously massacred to death by four sword cuts and two dozen arrow wounds. Wartooth's warrior-babe Veborg, a tough-as-shit chick who commanded a battalion of 300 hardass shieldmaidens, sliced Hring's greatest warriors so hard that she bifurcated his face at the jaw and the guy ran off carrying his beard around like a loaf of bread, then double-killed Thorkell the Stubborn after "many wounds and much verbal arguing."

Despite these acts of towering badassitude, the battle was turning against Wartooth, and, rather than sit back and let all his lieutenants have all the fun, the old-as-fuck, half-blind Berserker King decided, fuck it, I'm getting in on this bullshit. Seated in his Royal Chariot, the ancient king pulled himself up onto his knees, drew an iron sword in each hand, spurred his horses ahead, and kneeboarded straight-on in the center of the action, ready to kick fucking asses and then senile-y forget the names.




"When Harald saw the great slaughter among his troops,
he threw himself on his knees on his chariot, being unable to stand,
and took a short sword in each hand; he then caused the chariot
to be driven into the thickest of the fight, hewing and striking on both sides,
in this manner killing many, and he was considered very valiant,
and to have done mighty deeds for his great age."



After eviscerating a swath through the enemy army with an epic drive-by cleaving, Harald Wartooth, the greatest of the Viking Kings, was mortally wounded when, according to the story, Odin Himself clubbed him in the back of the head with an axe, knocking him out of the chariot. When Sigurd Hring saw the empty royal chariot scream past him, he immediately ordered a cease-fire. Both armies stopped in their tracks, and spend the rest of the morning searching for the body of the fallen king to prove the Wartooth was no more. They found him, covered in blood, lying dead under a stack of corpses that were piled so high you couldn't drive a wagon in there because the bodies were stacked higher than the wagon's axle.

That night, a huge funeral pyre was built for the fallen king, and every man and woman on the field threw one item onto the blaze to honor their dead king. Sigurd would take over as King of Denmark. His son, Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, is the guy that History Channel Vikings show is about, and Sigurd's grandson, Ivar the Boneless, is the man responsible for conquering the rest of England in the 9th century.

 

[Gracie]

wolverine


"During the course of the research, which began in 2002 and continues today, I'd followed signals from his radio through remote valleys in the park but never glimpsed him. Oh, he's big, they told me, heavier than his dad, M1 (who lays claim to the center of Glacier and to three girlfriends there). Most wolverines are explosive inside a trap, but they said that M3 went completely nuclear, that trying to jab him with a syringe-tipped pole would demolish your nerves, that it took twice the expected drug dose to knock him down."


There's a reason why Patrick Swayze and his rag-tag band of anti-Communist rebel suburban Russkie-blasting guerillas called themselves Wolverines, and it's not just because their high school intramural class-six-A women's volleyball team had the word emblazoned across their sports bras during competition play – it's because wolverines are some of the most serious, hardcore, face-obliterating badasses of the animal world. Ferocious, two-foot-tall killing machines capable of dismembering all who oppose them in a frenzied torrent of gnashing sharp pointy teeth and adorable malevolence and then trotting off into the snow-covered sub-zero wasteland like a pissed-off cartoon character. And of this particular breed of ultimate organic quadripedal embodiment of vicious destruction, one ferocious hero has arisen, crushed his opposition, and publicly declared himself the most over-the-top sub-thirty-pound asskicker North America has to offer – Glacier National Park's awesomely-named Male Number 3, better known simply by a two-character name that strikes fear into the hearts of all who stand in his ever-widening path of unconquered determination: M3.

The semi-related North American, Arctic Circle cousins of the infamous Honey Badgers, Wolverines are the largest member of the weasel family, which, quite honestly, doesn't sound all that badass – it's like being a Mega Hamster or the World's Biggest Titmouse or something. And honestly, they really don't look like much – these furry critters stand about two feet tall and weigh in at 25 to 35 pounds, making them roughly the same size as a Bulldog or a Beagle, only they kind of just look like stuffed-animal Disney version of giant ferrets:




You might have a hard time believing that this thing is more badass than you.
You'd probably be wrong.



In reality, Wolverines have a tooth that points ninety-degrees straight back towards the inside of their mouths that can be deployed with enough force to crack a moose femur that's been frozen in Carbonite for over a year. Wolverines are 35-pound insane killing machines capable of – and more than willing to – attack every goddamned thing that they see. They've been known to eat fast little varmints such as birds and rabbits, but also routinely devour lynx, coyotes, deer, beavers, caribou, and live moose, running these gigantic, sometimes-predatory beasts down in a flash of brown-furred ultra-kill-fury, ripping them a few new breathing tubes, and then shredding their corpses so goddamned voraciously that the German word for Wolverine translates to "devours much" and the Hungarian word for them means "Gluttonous Badger" (which is pretty damn awesome if you ask me).



It's a nine-foot-tall, 600-pound antler-clad vegetarian eating machine that has been known to be on the wrong side of a car accident, obliterate the front end of a fucking Hyundai hauling ass at 60 miles per hour, and then walk away unscathed while the poor chump driving the vehicle is left wondering whether or not his insurance covers something like a head-on collision with North America's largest and weirdest-looking plant eater.



Yet, somehow, despite the notable setback of giving up a 200-to-1 weight advantage to the moose, the wolverines run those fuckers down and maul the shit out of them in the land equivalent of being de-meated by a Piranha feeding frenzy consisting of a single animal.

When they're not murdering creatures fifteen steps up on the food chain from them, Wolverines generally prey on carrion, eating the corpses of the wussier animals that can't hack the insanely-cold temperatures in the Wolverines' natural habitats. If scavenging doesn't sound all that badass, try this on for size – usually the best way to get a fresh kill is to find an already-dead motherfucker, get pissed as hell, and then fight and chase off the apex predator that brought the dead creature down in the first place. Wolverines don't have a problem with this. They routinely fight of packs of Gray Wolves (by themselves!), kill Cougars, and have been known on several well-documented occasions to fight off Black Bears, Grizzlies, and GODAMNED POLAR BEARS – no big deal, just the biggest fucking bear on Earth, but whatever. Scientists also believe that in prehistoric times, the ancestors of Wolverines routinely fought Saber-Toothed Cats, Dire Wolves, and Mega-Bears. Now, I have no fucking clue what a Mega-Bear is, but it sounds gooddamned terrifying, and you don't expect it being bested in tooth-to-tooth combat with this little guy:







We actually don't really know much about the Gulo Gulo -- they're super elusive, cross ridiculously huge distances in short periods of time, and there are only like 300-500 left in the Lower 48 United States. We do know that their gigantic oversized claws work like climbing crampons (when they aren't dismembering corpses), and that they don't actually go SNIKT SNIKT when deployed. We know they're insanely strong for their size – one of the greatest documented size-to-strength ratios ever recorded, according to the people who record those things professionally. They can resist sub-zero temperatures, and they have anal scent glands that make them smell almost as bad as skunks, a detail that has gained them the awesome-sounding nickname "Nasty Cats". If you were really into puns, you might say they would be truly bad ass, but that would be really terrible.

They're also ferociously hardcore. The most famous story about them, of course, is that when a wolverine gets one of his paws stuck in a bear trap, he's been known to GNAW HIS OWN LEG OFF Aron Ralston-style to escape. Are you kidding me?







A lot of what we do know about Wolverines comes from research that's being done on the wolverine populations of Glacier National Park, and of those creatures studied, none comes come close to Male Number 3 in terms of ultimate badassitude.

It's fitting that M3 has the world "Male" in his official given scientific name, because this Alpha Male beast is a raging cesspool of testosterone production who is so ultra-aggressive that the researchers working on the project simply nicknamed him "Mr. Badass".

Basically the story goes like this: The scientists at Glacier are trapping Wolverines in ultra-heavy traps constructed from eight-inch-thick wooden logs, luring the creatures in by tempting them with a nice fresh beaver carcass, then tagging them and releasing them back into the wild. Plenty of the wolverines trapped this way have been known to break out of the fucking cage by clawing and/or chewing through the walls overnight. M3 is the only one to ever break INTO one that way. Oh yeah, and it wasn't because this apex predator was dying to dig into that beaver carcass either – it was because M3's arch-nemesis (Male Number 6, basically M3's version of Trevelyan from Goldeneye) had been trapped in there and M3 wasn't fucking above cleaving his way through eight solid inches of timber to get a chance to attack his hated enemy and chief rival. Forget mercy. Forget kicking someone when they're down – this guy will shred your damned face off the second he gets the opportunity. He's just hard like that. So don't fuck with him.

He's also so wide ranging, covering an Empire of Badassitude that spans about 500 square miles, and is so adept at evading capture and detecting (even with a GPS chip in his ear) that the following clip is the only footage available of this ferocious killer in his natural habitat – it's a clip of M3 the Wolverine blood-raging after a cameraman and his team of researchers. If this animals' guttural battle-cry doesn't totally fucking terrify you, you are incapable of knowing fear:







Born around 2002, M3 is now the Alpha Male wolverine in Glacier National Park and the ultimate symbol of wolverine badassitude. Not only is he more drug resistant than Ozzy, but in the weeks after being fitted with a GPS tracker by an enterprising, stupidly-brave, presumably-deceased scientist armed with a ten-foot pole and a suit of +2 Chainmail, he summited the highest peak in Glacier National Park – 10,466 feet – covering the last 4,900-feet by running straight up a sheer cliff face in the span of 90 minutes. Through 20-inch deep snow. In the middle of January, when temperatures were in the single digits. His tracker didn't explain why, but we can only assume the answer involves teabagging the summit just out of principle.

Traveling alone, or with his son M23 (kind of like how Logan's daughter was named X-23 I presume?), M3 ranges about 500 miles up and down the Montana/Alberta border, covering a territory that's about twice as large as the predatory range of your average Grizzly bear. He passes river basins, scales ice falls, crosses glaciers, and digs out of avalanches, constantly ranging the North American wilderness in an endless quest for battle, food, and whatever passes for hot wolverine babes these days.

 

[Gracie]

Aki Ra
10.30.2009 255999318805

"I poke my stick in the ground till I find a mine. Then I dig around it, to make sure that it is not booby-trapped. Then, I unscrew the detonator. And the mine is safe."


Aki Ra is a Cambodian guy who goes out into the jungle and disarms landmines with a pocketknife and a really sharp stick. While I feel relatively confident that I can probably just post that sentence by itself along with a picture of this crazy bastard unscrewing a densely-packed bomb of unexploded TNT with his bare hands and a seemingly-endless supply of raw bravery, over the years you guys have come to expect a minimum word count out of me on these sorts of articles, so perhaps a little further explanation is going to be required.

Back in the dark days of the 1970s, when the hypnotic horrors of disco music held much of the world in its terrible, unbreakable death-grip, the Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia was taken over by a group of soulless assburgers known as the Khmer Rouge. These epic totalitarian douchebubbles were totally evil mega bastard-machines hellbent on exterminating pretty much everybody in the country who didn't have a hearty appreciation for mega bastard-machines, and/or who owned either a pair of glasses, a book, or the capability and willingness to construct and vocalize at least one independent thought. These guys flipped out like crazy hard, and in under a decade they successfully managed to kill something on the order of two million of their own citizens for basically no reason at all. This is a significant number no matter what you're talking about, but it carries a little extra gut-punching weight when you realize that there were only like 7 million people living in Cambodia at the time that the Khmer Rouge started these Hitleriffic purges. You probably don't need Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys to tell you that living under Pol Pot's regime wasn't exactly most peoples' idea of a nice relaxing vacation.

Aki Ra's parents were part of the unlucky 28.5% of the population that ended up being brutally murdered with pickaxes (Pol Pot was a strong believer in the doctrine that axe-murdering your own citizens was a much more cost-effective method of executing your enemies, as it allowed him to save money on bullets), and Aki was conscripted as a child soldier in the Khmer Rouge army at the age of five. He was raised in a militaristic jungle training camp, and as soon as he was strong enough to hold a landmine he was put to work setting booby traps along the entire length of the Cambodia-Thailand border. He served the Khmer Army for nearly ten years, working on this massive mine-laying project while dudes jammed AK-47s in his back and ordered him around - a daily regimen that kind of bit a bag of asses. As you can probably imagine, however, it's a little difficult for someone like the Khmer Rouge to run a country when they spent all of their time oppressing their soldiers and executing every literate member of their own citizenry, so eventually in the 1980s Ho Chi Minh just came across the border and conquered Cambodia for Vietnam. Aki Ra was once again conscripted into service, this time in the Vietnamese Army, where he served for another decade. The Vietnamese eventually decided the situation was hopeless and got the hell out of there in 1989, and this time poor Aki went BACK to Cambodia's military.

Putting in twenty-plus years of service as a mine-laying peon in three different conscript armies by the time you're thirty wasn't really as awesome as you might think, however, and by the time the United Nations rolled into Cambodia in 1994 Aki Ra was getting pretty tired of blowing people up and turning his own countryside into one massive cascading explosion. So, when the UN decided to start giving people training in how to safely and effectively remove land mines, Aki Ra jumped at the chance to atone for his previous work and start undoing everything he'd been working on for the past two decades. He accomplished this in a pretty damned spectacular manner:




Just another day on the job,
which seems to involve whacking land mines with a pipe wrench.



The UN trained Aki in the proper application of protective bomb-proof armor, mine detector operation, and sweep-and-clear removal processes for dealing with dense fields of high explosives, but when those guys left town, Aki realized he didn't have very much in the way of money or equipment. Still, this unstoppable powerhouse of mine-clearing insanity wasn't going to be deterred from accomplishing his newfound goal in life simply by something as stupid as "not having access to the sort of minesweeping gear you need in order to not die while removing mines", and just decided to go out and start digging anti-personnel grenades out of the ground with a shovel and jamming sticks in them until they stopped being capable of blowing his arm completely out of socket and depositing the charred appendage in the South China Sea.

The head-smashing ridiculousness of what this guy is doing is only further demonstrated by the fact that this human bomb-clearing robot can dig out, clear, and defuse a standard land mine in about two minutes – a process that usually takes the United Nations bomb teams something more on the order of one to two hours. This guy busts through entire minefields with the same nonchalant attitude that he would have while raking a lawn, plucking mines out without thinking about it and somehow spotting the buried explosives just by glancing down at the ground through a thick underbrush of green jungle crap. If it helps, you can think of Aki Ra as like the guy who comes over to your house once, boots up Minesweeper on your desktop, breaks all of your scores on the first try, and then leaves and you spend the rest of your natural life trying to beat his times until such point that you finally give up and manage to preserve your tenuous grip on your sanity only by ferociously ragequitting and clicking the "Reset Scores" button so hard that it snaps a button off of your mouse. It's like that, except instead of clicking flags and smiley faces, this guy is actually clearing out real-life minefields with little more than his bare hands and what I can only presume is a planet-sized ballsack.




"I will do anything to make my country safe. Sometimes I get nervous, but that is rare.
In 20 years I've never been injured."



From 1994 to 2007, Aki Ra grabbed a shovel, a stick, and a knife and personally went out into the jungles of the densely-populated Siam Reap region of Cambodia to remove Soviet, Chinese, and Vietnamese-constructed land mines. He almost single-handedly cleared out all the explosives surrounding Cambodia's primary tourist attraction – the incredible Temples at Angkor Wat – before turning his attention to local playgrounds and farmlands that had been off-limits for decades. For this guy to do this shizzle without wearing any kind of protective gear (he usually just went out in a pair of sandals and a button-down shirt) is so mind-flayingly insane that I kind of want to vomit a little. Thanks in no small part to the work of this one man, the number of accidental landmine casualties in Cambodia dropped from 3,047 to 1,109 in the three-year span from 1996 to 1999.

Eventually Aki Ra had removed so many landmines that his house was overflowing with the shit, so in 1998 he opened the Cambodian Landmine Museum as a place to displace the unexploded ordinance and educate people on how much landmines seriously suck balls. The place is now a registered NGO, and Aki spends less time personally removing mines and more time training everyone from local villagers to Cambodian Army soldiers in his insane, completely-unlicensed and largely-unapproved-by-any-rational-human-being strategy of digging up and disarming mines with his fists. He now has a team of over 1,000 people working in de-mining operations across the country, and claims that in the 16 years he has been on the job he's personally removed and cleared over 50,000 mines by himself.




A small selection of the mines in Aki's Cambodian Landmine Museum.



When he's not running a successful non-governmental organization, curating the museum, or flexing his pulsating iron ballsack, Aki Ra also takes in homeless, (often-times drug-addicted) local kids who have had appendages blown off by land mines and provides them with adequate food, shelter, and education. Aki provides for his twenty-plus "children" by going out into the jungles and hunting wild boars with a crossbow. I wish I was making this shit up.

Aki Ra is a real hero of Cambodia and a true badass - not because of his service rocking faces on a military level, as so many others on this website demonstrate – but because he has dedicated his life to single-handedly neutralizing Cambodia's once-crippling landmine problem. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he seems to have found the most badass way of accomplishing the feat, either.




"There are still over one million landmines in Cambodia. At the rate they are going now, it will take 50-100 years to finish.
If they give me a license then I could teach villagers to de-mine the way I do. It is fast, easy, and cheap.
I believe we could have the whole country de-mined in 3-5 years."