Jacklyn H. Lucas



Everyone with half a functioning brain knows that diving on a live hand grenade to save your friends is one of the single most selfless, balls-out heroic acts of valor that any human being can perform. It takes a special, rare kind of person to come face-to-face with their own destruction, resist every natural impulse of self-preservation, and unhesitatingly give themselves up in a final, purely-selfless feat of bravery, trading in the most precious thing a human has to offer – their life – so that others might live. It's such a paragon of ultimate selfless human sacrifice that nowadays it's the standard go-to analogy for everything from taking all the blame for a team-wide corporate phuk-up to unselfishly talking up the homeliest girl at the bar while your buddy tries to hook up with her best friend (who is invariably about a thousand times hotter than him and wouldn’t spit on him if he were melting in a pool of Hydrochloric acid some twisted bizarro alternate universe where tan silicone-augmented vat-grown bar-hopping college chicks are irresistibly attracted to sweaty neckbeards). It's such a heroic testament to the will of the human spirit that more Medals of Honor and Victoria Crosses have been handed out for this single act than for any other deed in the history of combat.

Unfortunately, despite this being a universally-acknowledged feat of righteous heroic awesomeness, the fact that the entire action is over in three to five seconds combine with some horrifically-tragic consequences for the hero to make grenade-hopping a pretty tough subject to write a Badass of the Week article about.

Unless, of course, we're talking about Jack Lucas of the 1st Battalion, 26th Marines.

Because Jack Lucas jumped on not one but two grenades to save his friends.

And lived.


Your typical grenade explosion.

Jacklyn H. Lucas was born on Valentine's Day, 1928, in some rural town in North Carolina with a population so tiny that if everyone in the entire county showed up at UNC for a basketball game they probably couldn't sell out one section of the Dean Smith Center. Cursed with one of the most terrible first names in history, Jacklyn did the Boy Named Sue thing and spent his entire life training to be so ungodly hardcore that anyone who referred to him by any name other than Jack would end up forcibly swallowing their own genitalia, eventually enlisting as a cadet at Edwards Military Institute in Salemburg, NC.

Things were going fine for a while, but Jack's life changed pretty dramatically on December 7, 1941, when he got news that a super-secret ninja sneak-attack of Japanese fighter-bombers had just craterized the American battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor into a towering inferno of twisted metal.

He kind of took it personally.

So while Lucas' 13 year-old idiot classmates were all hanging around their school doing dip5hi7 teenage boy stuff like slam-dunking M80s into public toilets and superglueing their friends' lockers shut, Lucas just got pissed. Like, super pissed. Like King Kong stopping by on the way home from work after a miserable day at the office only to find that the badass frozen yogurt place down the street is totally out of banana sherbet so he just snorts a line of PCP and goes Falling Down on everyone pissed. He stormed out of his military school (the first of many times he'd be listed AWOL in his professional career), went across the border to Virginia, bribed some notary public to swear he was 17, then hitched a ride to the nearest Marine Corps Recruiting Station, marched his hefty 5'8", 200-pound frame through the front door like he owned the place, forged his Mom's signature on enlistment paperwork, and shipped out to Parris Island for US Marine Corps Boot Camp.

At thirteen.

Lucas made it through the most intense basic training the United States military has to offer, was made a Marine at 14, and was subsequently assigned to work a crappy manual labor job as part of the Training Battalion on Parris Island.

Jack Lucas responded to this unsatisfactory posting by abandoning his station, hitching a ride to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, grabbing the first USMC officer he could find, and telling him there was a clerical error and he was supposed to be stationed on the front lines in a combat arms role.

They made him a truck driver at the Marine Corps base on Pearl Harbor.



Unsatisfied by his current status of "not blowing the 5hi7 out of the enemy at all corners wherever he could find them", and denied in all of his requests to transfer to a front-line infantry unit, Jack Lucas spend the next couple of years raising hell across Honolulu. He was arrested for starting a drunken bar fight. He was disciplined for going AWOL so he could head into town and meet girls. He was busted by a Military Policeman for walking through the barracks with a case of beer, then was subsequently arrested for punching that same Military Policeman in the face when that power-tripping asshole tried to take the beer away from him.

Tired of spending his nights in the brig and worried that the war was going to end without him every hoisting a rifle in battle, Lucas finally decided, phuk it, I'm going to go to war and I don't give a 5hi7 who wants to stop me. He went down to the docks, snuck aboard a military transport ship headed for the front lines, then spent a month living off crumbs hiding from the crew because he was worried if they discovered him they'd ship his ass back to Hawaii for a court-martial.

Of the 40,000 Marines who hit the beach at Iwo Jima on or around February 20th, 1945, 17-year-old Private Jack Lucas of the 1st Battalion, 26th Marines, 5th Marine Division was one of the only infantrymen who assaulted the beachhead without a weapon. He changed that pretty quickly. He grabbed one off a dead man in the surf, racked the slide, and charged into battle.



Rushing through the brutal, endless curtains of strafing machine gun and artillery fire that raked the beach, Lucas grabbed his newly-acquired weapon and charged ahead, undaunted by the explosions and bullets zipping all around. He ran ahead, reached the relative safety of the treeline, and fell in with a four-man fireteam that had already started working their way through the dense jungle, trying to clear out one of the most tenacious and ferociously-hardcore enemies the United States ever faced.

Lucas and his men were making their way through a ravine, fighting every step of the way, when suddenly some bad 5hi7 started to go down. It turned out that the Japanese had dug this ridiculously-intricate series of caverns and secret passages that ran through the entire island, so just as Lucas and his buddies thought they were going to launch their final assault on a Japanese machine gun nest, they came to the horrible realization that all 11 men in that pillbox had gone into a tunnel, crawled underneath them, and popped up directly behind the Marines.

The Marines turned to fire, and in Jack Lucas' much-awaited first moments of real battle his first round went through the helmet of an enemy soldier, killing him on the spot.

His second round jammed in the rifle. I guess that's what happens with rifles you pick up in ankle-deep water on blood-soaked sandy beaches.

It was at this point that Jack Lucas saw the live hand grenade that had just landed at his feet. He threw his body on it without hesitation, screaming for the other Marines to take cover.

When a second enemy grenade landed within arms' reach, Lucas grabbed it and jammed it under his body as well.



The Type 97 Fragmentation Grenade is a 16-ounce metal ball stuffed with 65 grams of TNT and a 5 second timed-detonation mechanism. Now, a common misconception about hand grenades is that they create some huge fiery explosion that blows people into the next area code like they were launched out of a flaming death-catapult, then they proceed to ignite everything in the general vicinity up to and including the Earth's atmosphere. But, while the explosive power unleashed by a frag grenade is certainly not the sort of thing you want to wake up to every morning, what kills the majority of people isn't the bomb but the flying bits of shrapnel. Basically, the explosion is just a catalyst that shatters the metal outside of the grenade and sends tens of thousands of tiny, razor-sharp metal splinters hurtling through the air in every direction, shredding anything in their wake, and killing or maiming anyone or anything within 100 to 150 feet. You ever wonder why some grenades look like pineapples? It's because when the bomb goes off each little section of the pineapple morphs into a bullet firing off into some random direction. It ain't pretty.

And Jack Lucas just had two of those little bastards blow up straight into his torso. Sure, his friends survived thanks to his heroism, but all that metal has to go somewhere, and where it went was straight into Lucas' body.

The rest of the Marine fire team, pumped-up by Lucas' bravery and the fact that they weren't currently all dead, proceeded to fight like demons and push the Japanese back, driving them from the position and capturing that sector.

When they came back to take the dog tags off of their fallen brother, they noticed that not only was Lucas alive, he was actually still conscious.


I don't want to go on the cart.

The true unsung heroes of Iwo Jima – the Navy Corpsmen – were called in on the spot, hauling the severely-phuked-up Lucas out of there on a stretcher while simultaneously using their .45 pistols to fight off a Japanese banzai counter-attack. They fought through the warzone, got Lucas to a hospital ship, and it took 21 surgeries for them to remove 250 pieces of shrapnel from every major organ in his body.

Seven months later, Jack Lucas personally walked up to Harry S. Truman and received his Medal of Honor in person. He'd already made a complete recovery.

He was six days past his seventeenth birthday – the youngest Marine to ever receive the award.

After the war, Lucas went home and fulfilled his promise to his mother to finish school, attending his first day of Ninth Grade with his Medal of Honor around his neck. He finished college, went on a USO speaking tour, was married three times, survived his second wife's attempt to hire a hitman to murder him (she hadn't got the message from the Japanese that this guy was impervious to conventional weapons), and then, at age 40, decided to get over his fear of heights by enlisting in the 82nd Airborne as a paratrooper. On his first training jump, both parachutes failed to open. As his team leader astutely pointed out, "Jack was the last one out of the plane and the first one on the ground."

He fell 3,500 feet through the air without a parachute. He attempted a badass commando roll just as he was about to splat on the earth Wile E. Coyote style.

He not only lived, he walked away unscathed.

Two weeks later, he was back in the plane on his second training jump. That one went better. Four years later he finished his tour as a Captain in the 82nd Airborne Division.

His adventures in miraculously surviving death now complete, ran a successful business selling beef to people outside Washington, DC, wrote an appropriately-named autobiography titled Indestructible, met every president from Truman to Clinton, had his original Medal of Honor citation laid out in the hull of the USS Iwo Jima, and died in 2008 at the age of 80. From cancer, of all things.

[size=85]"The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!" -Eleanor Roosevelt[/size]

June 18, 2010 had already started out pretty miserably for Corporal Clifford Wooldridge of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines.  Not five minutes after leaving the secure Coalition-held perimeter into enemy territory, he’d had his Humvee blown out from under him by a Taliban IED.  Slightly annoyed by this, he’d re-loaded his squad into another vehicle, which was of course then subsequently blown up by another IED (jeez, and you think you’re having a rough Friday!), and now, even though he was leading a convoy of four vehicles through a particularly Taliban-infested valley where enemy ambush was about as common as hipster mustaches at trendy downtown "dive" bars, Corporal Wooldridge was basically just happy not to have to pick twisted pieces of his vehicle's chassis out of the soles of his combat boots.

Saying that the Marine occupation of Musa Qala hadn't really gone as planned would be kind of like saying that being mauled to death by a rabid T-Rex would kind of suck ass.  Located in the middle of Helmand Province, Afghanistan, Musa Qala was prime poppy-growing country, and since the Taliban make most of their coin off of illegal heroin and opium sales, they weren't exactly excited about the idea of a bunch of American and Afghan soldiers rolling in there and setting fire to their favorite cash crop.  The Marines had been sent in to talk with the townspeople in the valley, assess the situation, and try to persuade the local leadership to ally with the Afghan government and stop providing aid to the Taliban.

When they reached the valley, they found every townsperson had (perhaps wisely) fled their homes in fear of the insanity that was about to go down, and instead of walking into a delicious dinner with the locals the 125-man detachment of 3/7 Marines rolled up on 250 well-trained, well-equipped, battle-hardened Taliban fighters entrenched in ambush-friendly mountain bunkers with dozens more troops streaming across the Pakistani border every day.

 

Helmand Province, Afghanistan

 
It was about a week into the Marine offensive when Corporal Woolridge led his four-vehicle mounted patrol on a mission to circle around and capture a critical hill that would be necessary for controlling the region.  Obviously, the Taliban weren't interested in handing it over.  They opened fire from positions in the mountains to the front and the abandoned village to the side, hammering the Marine convoy with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons while the Humvee turret gunners returned the favor with a heavy-handed helping of hot lead from their .50 caliber machine guns.

While the gunners laid down fire, Wooldridge bailed out of his vehicle, grabbed his M-249 SAW (a squad light machine gun), told his fire team to hang tight, and prepared to do something really really insane.

 

Correctly realizing that in previous fights the Taliban would attack, fire all their RPG ammo, then fade back into the mountains to hide and wait for the next ambush, Corporal Wooldridge (seen at the top of this article holding a cigarette in his mouth and looking admittedly badass while doing so) decided that, naturally, the best course of action wouldn't be to return fire, fight for his life, and try not to put himself in a position where he could easily be killed by bullets, but instead to charge across an open field firing his machine gun at the enemy in an effort to flank them and cut off their escape route.

So that's of course exactly what he did.

The 23 year-old from Port Angeles, Washington charged across an open field, gun blazing, hit the treeline, drilled a guy with a white-hot burst of 5.56mm NATO death, then hit the deck and laid down suppressing fire while the rest of his fire team raced across the field to join him.

 

With his four-man squad now assembled in a position behind the flank of the enemy, Wooldridge spotted a team of at least 15 enemy troops armed with heavy weapons and RPGs hiding in the abandoned village preparing to ambush the Marine Humvees.  Not about to let that sort of aggression abide, Wooldridge rallied his team and led them on a daring charge straight across open ground once again, firing his machine gun straight into the crowd of unsuspecting Taliban.  His attack shredded the enemy weapons team, killing 8 of the enemy (including the RPG operator) and sending the rest of them scattering into the village, but as Wooldridge's team prepared to secure the area the Marine Corporal stopped them cold in their tracks.

He'd heard something.  Voices.  And they were close.

Wooldridge was certain they were hostiles – Taliban prepping a counter-attack – and that the voices were coming from behind a nearby wall.  He told his men to hold tight, gripped his weapon, and charged balls-out around the side of the wall.

He came face-to-face with four heavily-equipped Taliban fighters carrying AK-47s, RPGs, and a Soviet-built PKM 7.62-caliber heavy machine gun – and they were all standing within 10 feet of him.

 

Now, the Taliban are definitely – definitely – not a bunch of pu55IEz.  I know I write a lot of stuff on this site about Americans and British and Gurkhas or whoever defeating them in combat, but that's mostly because the uncontrollable Captain America jingo tendencies in me make it excruciatingly difficult to glorify people who shoot at Americans on a daily basis.  But look – these are battle-hardened, well-trained, unquestionably-devoted warriors who live in brutal mountain conditions and descend from men that have successfully fought off everyone from Cyrus the Great to Alexander the Great to Queen Victoria to the entirety of the Soviet Union.  At a range of ten feet, any one of these guys is capable of squeezing a trigger and blowing away even the toughest United States Marine.

Not that this stopped Corporal Clifford Wooldridge from doing this.

 
Semi-related note:  GO SEE THE NEW G.I. JOE MOVIE.

 
That's right.  Staring four men down Old West Wyatt Earp-style, Corporal Wooldridge hoisted his SAW, hammered down the trigger, and didn't let go until he'd fired every last round remaining in the weapon.

Unfortunately, this wasn't enough bullets to kill all four enemy fighters.

Wooldridge smoked the first three guys in the span of roughly a split second, but when he swung the weapon to the fourth enemy soldier – the one packing the PKM heavy machine gun – his mag had run dry.  Wooldridge tried to bluff him, motioning for the dude to drop his weapon, but he wasn't buying it.  The guy raised his gun and fired off a burst, but not before Wooldridge dove back behind the wall, taking cover as bullets ripped the wall up around him.

 

Now, as anyone who likes Call of Duty 4: Modern Xtreme 2 Black Ops 4 Warfare Hyper Championship Special Edition can probably tell you, reloading an M249 SAW isn't exactly a simple operation.  You aren't swapping out battery packs in an Xbox controller, you're securing and then manually feeding a 100-round box of ammunition into a weapon that weighs the same as a fully-grown adult beagle.  Wooldridge threw his back against the wall and went to work trying to reload his weapon, but when he saw the barrel of the PKM slowly peeking around the side of the wall, he knew he was going to have to act fast.

So he dropped his gun, ran over, and grabbed the barrel of the Taliban dude's machine gun.

Huh?

 
Kind of like this, only marginally more intense.

 
Wooldridge grabbed the gun and the dude was like, "uh let go," but Wooldridge was like, "no way", and instead of giving the guy his weapon back he slammed the Taliban fighter up against the wall and before long both men hit the ground still holding the gun.  Now, I'm not sure how big this Taliban guy was, but Clifford Wooldridge was a high school football-playing diesel mechanic who used to repair those things lumberjacks use to chop down forests in the Pacific Northwest, and before long Wooldridge was kind of kicking the crap out of the other guy.  The Taliban warrior, locked in hand-to-hand fist-fight old-school combat with a dude who was obviously beating the hell out of him, decided that if he was going down the Marine was coming with him, and he took one hand off his machine gun and reached up to pull the pin on one of the hand grenades strapped to the outside of Wooldridge's tactical vest.

That was the opening Wooldridge needed.  He ripped the PKM out of the guy's hands and then proceeded to beat the dude to death with his own machine gun.  Which is pretty badass.

 

By the time the rest of the Marines rounded the corner and found Wooldridge standing there amid a pile of dead enemy soldiers, the enemy ambush had been thwarted and the coast was clear.   In the battle Corporal Clifford Wooldridge had personally taken out 13 enemy troops, flanked their position, and, perhaps more importantly, broke their fighting spirit – Afghan interpreters would later relay to American commanders in the region that the story of Wooldridge's hand-to-hand action effectively crushed the morale of the region's defenders.

For his actions in the battle, Clifford Wooldridge would receive the Navy Cross – the second-highest award for valor available to Marines – and was selected the USO Marine of the Year for 2012.