It doesn’t matter that there was a way out, or at least a chance at one, because some guys still went with the more difficult option, knowing that it would save lives.
Only one way out
It started on a rooftop in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on September 29, 2006. A bomb landed near Michael A. Monsoor and three other SEALs, along with Iraqi soldiers. Monsoor was the only one who could’ve gotten off the roof, he was the closest one to the exit, but he didn’t take that choice.
He could’ve moved, he could’ve escaped, but no, he dropped onto the grenade and took the blast himself. He died about 30 minutes later after saving the lives of everyone else around him.
Seeing the worst option and taking it anyway, if that’s not manly, we don’t know what is.
A dentist held the line
Benjamin L. Salomon was a battalion surgeon in 1944, focused on trying to keep the wounded men alive in an aid station on Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands. Hardly the guy looking for a last stand or anything, but that’s exactly what he got.
Japanese troops pushed right into the area. Salomon wasn’t going to take that, no, definitely not, he fought them off and told the wounded to get back. He found a machine gun and started shooting until he died. A dentist who killed 98 of his enemies, just to let others escape.
Small ship, bad odds
Bad luck is one thing, what happened to the USS Johnston is something else. Commander Ernest E. Evans took the destroyer into a fight on October 25, 1944, in the Philippines. His enemies? A much, much bigger Japanese force, complete with battleships and cruisers.
There was no way of winning that. Still, Johnston made smoke, fired torpedoes, kept attacking, he did it all, trying to help the escort carriers behind him survive. Evans was soon wounded. He didn’t let them stop him, he kept giving orders until the ship sank at 10:10 a.m. What a guy.
Nobody needed a speech
The thing with someone like Leonidas is that his story is old, over 2,500 years old in fact, so people started changing his story a little. What we know as a fact is that, in 480 BCE, he was with his Greek force at Thermopylae, totally outnumbered, but with some men left.Â
Yes, Leonidas chose to stay with the Spartans; Thespians, basically with anyone else who was remaining for the final fight. He wasn’t a coward, he refused to give up, and he actually died there. He was a king who saw things were over and stayed in the killing zone.
A coat with a hole in it
Horatio Nelson arrived at Trafalgar in 1805 onboard the HMS Victory worse for wear, missing an eye and an arm. That didn’t stop him. A musket ball from the French ship Redoutable hit him during the battle, and he made sure his soldiers carried him below deck.
Not because he was scared, he wasn’t that kind of guy, but because he didn’t want the rest of his crew seeing him fall apart. Nelson died later while the battle was still going on. He kept his honor, he kept his men fighting, because he wasn’t going to let them give up.
Just outside for a while
The South Pole. Not exactly the most comfortable of places, but that was where Lawrence Oates was in March 1912, along with the rest of Robert Falcon Scott’s party. Oates was in a bad way, thanks to his severe frostbite, and was slowing the rest of the team down.
No medical care, no easy way out, so what did Oates do? He walked out of the tent in the middle of a blizzard, claiming he was just going outside, and he might be some time. Historians believe he sacrificed himself to get the group moving. His body was never found.
He kept walking with them
It would’ve been so easy for Janusz Korczak to save himself. He was living in Poland in 1942, and operating a Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto when the Nazis deported the kids. Friends offered him ways out, but Korczak stayed.
Yes, he remained with the nearly 200 children and the staff as they were taken to the deportation point and to the Treblinka extermination camp. Anybody on board was almost certainly killed once they arrived, Korczak chose to go with the children until the end.
A vote in the aisle
We’re not exactly sure what happened on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, but we have an idea. Hijackers took control of the plane, and investigators believe they were aiming to crash it into the U.S. Capitol. The passengers and crew weren’t going to let that happen.
They talked and ultimately tried to rush the cockpit. The flight recorder actually caught them trying to bust down the door before the plane went down at 10:03 a.m. in Pennsylvania. Everyone on board died, but the passengers and crew will always be remembered.
Back up the stairs
Rick Rescorla was another hero during 9/11, this time, he was focused on getting Morgan Stanley workers out of the South Tower. They’d been told to stay put after the North Tower was hit, but he was determined to get people out.
Estimates say that he saved 2,687 employees, but still, he wasn’t finished, he went back up. Coworkers told him to leave, sure, yet Rescorla refused. He’d only do it once everyone else was out. He was last seen going up near the 10th floor, shortly before the South Tower collapsed.
One hostage came out
On March 23, 2018, a terrorist attacked Carcassonne and Trèbes in France, taking hostages at a supermarket at the time. Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame refused to allow innocent people to die. So, he offered to exchange himself for one of the hostages, it worked.
Beltrame stayed in there and left his phone line open for police outside to hear what was going on. Officers later stormed the store when they heard shots fired, Beltrame was one of the ones badly injured. He died the next morning.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
10 historical figures who took secrets to the grave
Unanswered questions are the worst, and it’s even more terrible when they continue to be unanswered because the people with the answers took them to their graves.
