Cracked has given us lists of heroic wartime figures quite a few times in the past, and now they’ve put together a mega-list compiled from earlier posts, ranking 94 amazing stories of military exploits, all in the colorful language you expect from Cracked. The accounts come from varied times and places, and involve more than the standard valor-in-battle narrative, although there’s plenty of that, too. There are no duds in this list. At #81, Benjamin F. Wilson, who had been a WWII officer, re-enlisted as a private in time for the Korean War. At Hell Hill, he killed seven enemy soldiers and was shot in the leg. But he escaped from his stretcher and went back to the fight -alone, because his unit was retreating.
As everyone knows, a real-life situation where a lone wounded soldier stands against overwhelming odds never ends well for the soldier.
Unless, of course, said soldier features in a Cracked article, in which case he promptly charges the enemy ranks with his rifle, kills three enemy soldiers and scares the shit out of the others. When the enemy physically wrestled the rifle from his hands, he took his goddamn entrenching shovel and annihilated four more enemies.
At this point, the Chinese soldiers decided that Wilson could just keep the damn hill and retreated.
Wilson, in turn, finally allowed the medics to patch him up. Although he did rip his wounds open again the very next day, when he killed 33 enemy soldiers in another one-man assault. At that point, the Army actually had to remind Wilson's wildly medal-recommending superiors that no one is awarded more than one Medal of Honor.
And that story is ranked at #81. In a list this long, there are heroes that you’re familiar with, but there are also a lot of battlefield stories you’ve never heard of that deserve to be remembered this Memorial Day weekend. Read them all (and not all of them are human) at Cracked.