Badass Page 24

  In 1973 Bruce Lee died suddenly and unexpectedly when he suffered an adverse reaction to a prescription medication. As is the case with many badasses, Bruce Lee had become too awesome for his own good and suffered from an early passing at the age of thirty-two. In his short life he established himself as the biggest name in martial arts cinema history and one of the most complete and total King Fu masters (or dick-breakers) to ever walk the planet. His legacy still lives on.

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  Mas Oyama was a Korean-Japanese martial arts master who was famous for killing bulls by punching them in the face. He trained alone in the mountains, hardening his knuckles by smashing pine trees with his bare hands and strengthening his fists to the point where he could break twenty-pound rocks by whacking them with a single punch. If you’re interested, there are a couple of kung fu movies based on his life: Champion of Death and Karate Bear Fighter.

  Bruce Lee’s given name was Li Zhen Fan. His family name utilizes the same Chinese character as that of Jet Li, even though the Americanized versions of their names are spelled differently. The character—(pinyin: li )—literally translates to “plum” or “plum tree.”

  Nunchucks, like medieval flails, were originally farming tools designed for threshing grains such as rice, wheat, and corn. Much like the modern-day chainsaw, these implements were eventually adapted into weapons by civilians who didn’t have access to high-tech gear such as swords, spears, or pump-action shotguns.

  Bruce’s favorite trick was to have you hold a dime in your open palm. He would stand about three feet from you and tell you not to let him take the dime from you. Then, in a quick flash of awesomeness, he’d swoop in and snatch the coin from your hand before you could close your fist. When you reopened your palm, you’d find that he’d left you a penny.

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  40

  JONATHAN NETANYAHU

  (1946–1976)

  To kill at such very close range isn’t like aiming a gun from a hundred yards away and pulling the trigger—that’s something I had already done when I was young. I’ve learned since how to kill at close range, too—to the point of pressing the muzzle against the flesh and pulling the trigger for a single bullet to be released and kill accurately, the body muffling the sound of the shot. It adds a whole dimension of sadness to a man’s being.

  IF I WAS GOING TO MAKE A LIST OF ORGANIZATIONS I DON’T WANT TO SCREW AROUND WITH FOR ANY REASON, THE ISRAELI SPECIAL FORCES WOULD BE VERY CLOSE TO THE TOP—PROBABLY SOMEWHERE BETWEEN POST-APOCALYPTIC SUPERMUTANTS AND BEAR CAVALRY ON THE SCALE OF “GROUPS THAT COULD SNAP YOUR NECK IN HALF AND DETONATE YOUR ENTIRE BODY LIKE A GIANT MAN-SIZED BEEF GRENADE WITHOUT UTILIZING THEIR OPPOSABLE THUMBS.” The face-smashing commandos of the elite counterterrorist unit Sayeret Maktal are the sort of hardcore bastards who eat Uranium isotopes for breakfast and crap out nuclear warheads, and their over-the-top method of brutally and efficiently taking down terrorists is kind of like going deep-sea fishing with intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  It’s pretty safe to say that the Israelis and the Arabs pretty much hate each other’s faces off with the realness. They’re up there with Greeks-Turks, Hutus-Tutsis, and Yankees–Red Sox in terms of vicious, undying blood feuds that can apparently only be solved by excessive violence, hit-batsmen, and Don Zimmer face-plants, and as a member of the Israeli paratroopers, Netanyahu was right in the middle of that endless violence on several occasions—during the Six-Day War he combat-dropped behind Egyptian lines in Sinai, destroyed their fortified positions from the rear, and faxed their commanding officer a message saying, “All your base are belong to me.” When Syrian paratrooper commandos assaulted an Israeli headquarters building during the Yom Kippur War, Jonathan escaped a carefully laid ambush and single-handedly annihilated a twelve-man Arab Special Forces team with nothing more than an Uzi and his giant ball sack. He also won a medal for infiltrating deep behind enemy lines in the middle of the night and rescuing a wounded Israeli officer from certain capture and death while successfully evading and fighting off a convoy of Arab tanks in the process.

  Basically, this guy was like a crazy Jewish ninja, and not a traditional ninja in the black pajamas—a badass, Snake Eyes–style flying death machine with twin Uzis and twelve-inch combat knives who somersaulted over spiked pits, shot red barrels that exploded into giant towering spires of burning oil, and chopped rhinos in half with a booted roundhouse kick. When he had his entire arm smashed by AK-47 fire in the Golan Heights, he army-crawled two miles across the war-torn battlefield on a shattered elbow with explosions, artillery shells, and bullets zipping past his face. He took a few months off to study at Harvard, and as soon as he regained feeling in his fingertips he went right back and reenlisted in the Israel Defense Forces to continue busting terrorist nut sacks.

  As a field officer in the Israeli counterterrorism unit Sayeret Matkal, the kosher Jack Bauer was responsible for keeping insurgents out of Israel, prematurely exploding suicide bombers before they reached their intended targets, and assaulting secret terrorist training camps in Syria and Lebanon. This tough government assassin also took part in Operation Spring of Youth, when he was sent to personally inform the masterminds behind the tragic massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics that it wasn’t cool (or very smart) to screw with Jewish athletes. His team accomplished this unenviable task by amphibiously landing on the shores of Lebanon in the middle of the night in an inflatable raft, driving to the apartment building where the terrorist leaders were living, blowing the doors off their hinges with plastic explosives, and filling the room with a salvo of 9 mm automatic weapons fire. After gunning down their targets, Jonathan and his men took the local SWAT team on a high-speed car chase through the streets of Beirut, smashed through a couple of police barricades, traded fire with the Lebanese army, and somehow escaped back to Israel in one piece.

  Now, all of this is seriously wicked, but, somewhat amazingly, it’s not even the primary reason why all students of badassitude should be aware of Jonathan Netanyahu. It was after he assumed command of Sayeret Matkal that he organized, planned, and executed one of the most daring and balls-out operations in the history of counterterrorism—the raid on Entebbe.

  On June 27, 1976, Air France flight 139 was hijacked by jackasses on its way from Tel Aviv to Paris. Palestinian and East German terrorists armed with pistols and grenades fought their way into the cockpit, took over the plane, and forced it to land in the Ugandan city of Entebbe for some reason. The men, women, and children on board were then herded into the main terminal, where Ugandan government soldiers armed with assault rifles separated the Jews from the Gentiles. The non-Jews were allowed to leave unharmed, but the others were kept as hostages. The hijackers demanded the release of several known terrorists held in Israeli prisons. Failure to comply would result in a pretty spectacular bloodbath.

  Well, Israel has a pretty inflexible position when it comes to hostage situations. They don’t negotiate with terrorists—they destroy them.

  Sayeret Matkal commander Jonathan Netanyahu was selected to lead the rescue operation, and this dude certainly wasn’t going to miss out on an opportunity to take out Palestinians, Germans, and Communists all at the same time—I mean seriously, if you threw in the Philistines, you’d have had the superfecta of traditional Jewish archnemeses. So on the night of July 4, 1976, a small group of C-130 transport planes landed on the runway at the Entebbe airport. Out of the lead vehicle, a convoy of black Land Rovers bearing Ugandan flags rolled off the loading ramp and slowly made its way toward the main terminal. When the urban assault SUVs reached a guard post manned by battle-hardened Ugandan troops, the heavily tinted windows rolled down and Jonathan Netanyahu opened fire, dropping the startled defenders with a surprise Uzi-gram.

  Thirty-eight IDF commandos bailed out of the vans and sprinted the last thirty yards toward the doors of the main terminal. Netanyahu was the first man inside, flying side-kicking through the doors and blasting the ass out of anything that moved. The commandos charged th
rough the terminal, wasted more tangos than a Tom Clancy novel, eliminated all the terrorists, and reached the hostages within three minutes of the beginning of the gunfire. The terrified yet relieved passengers were quickly escorted from the building, loaded into a C-130 outfitted with medical supplies, and took off for home.

  Unfortunately, Jonathan Netanyahu didn’t survive to be recognized for his daring actions in the service of his people—as he was loading hostages onto the plane he was hit by a sniper round fired from the airport control tower and died of his wounds en route back to Israel. The mission, however, was an epic success. The final tally of the raid (later dubbed Operation Jonathan in honor of the fallen commander): six terrorists dead, over a hundred Ugandan military casualties, 103 hostages rescued, one IDF operative killed in action.

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  Jonathan’s younger brother, Benjamin Netanyahu, was the prime minister of Israel from 1996 to 1999, and was reelected again in 2009. In honor of his brother, Benjamin established the Jonathan Institute, a government-sponsored think tank dedicated to the study and prevention of international terrorism.

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  KRAV MAGA

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  Krav Maga is a neck-breaking close-quarters fighting system developed by a fearless Hungarian martial artist named Imi Lichtenfeld. Imi was a world champion boxer, wrestler, and gymnast, but when the Nazis rolled into town during World War II he quickly realized that his training hadn’t adequately prepared him for a no-holds-barred street fight against hate-filled Teutonic thug dumbasses. So Imi developed Krav Maga—a merciless self-defense style that combines back-alley street fighting with ruthless testicular trauma, and includes numerous techniques to defend against knives, pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and hostage situations.

  Krav Maga operates under the assumption of no quarter, meaning that you have to expect that every encounter will be fought to the death. Your objective is to control the situation, neutralize your enemy by kicking him in the balls until he coughs up his prostate, break every major joint on his body, steal his weapon, kill him repeatedly with it, and escape. There are no dojos, no multicolored belts, no uniforms, no holds barred, no illegal strikes, and no such thing as excessive force. Your only objectives are to survive and to kick this guy’s ass so hard that his grandchildren are born without functioning colons.

  Lichtenfeld used his home-brewed fighting system to defend the Jews from roving gangs of anti-Semitic Fascist thugs on the streets of his hometown. After successfully escaping the Nazis, he served in the Israeli military and dedicated over thirty years of his life to training the people of Israel in the fine art of thumping their enemies unconscious by smashing them in the back of the head with a skateboard and then doing a kickflip over their half-dead carcasses. His techniques are still taught to every new recruit in the Israel Defense Forces and are currently employed on a regular basis by elite Special Forces, police, and counterterrorist organizations across the globe.

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