On the afternoon of Friday, March 11th, Hideaki Akaiwa was at his job, dully trudging out the final bitter minutes of his work week in his office just outside the port city of Ishinomaki in Japan's Miyagi Prefecture. What this guy's day job actually is, I honestly have no idea, but based on the extremely limited information I have on the guy I can only presume that his daily nine-to-five routine probably falls somewhere between the motorcycle chase scenes from the movie Akira and John Rambo's antics in the book version of First Blood on the ridiculousness/badassitude scale. But that's only speculation.

The one thing we know for certain is that Akaiwa was at work on the 11th, when suddenly, right as he was in the middle of jumping over a giant Gatling-gun-armed robot while riding on a rocket-powered jetbike he'd MacGuyvered together out of vines, tree branches, and a couple thumbtacks, something terrible happened – an earthquake. And not just any earthquake – a mega [LIFTED] brain-busting insane earthquake the likes of which the island of Japan had never had the misfortune of experiencing before. The ground shook, buildings crumbled, lights smashed apart, and the entire population of the country froze in fear as fault line below Japan rumbled for a ridiculous two-plus minutes.

But, amazingly, an 8.9 magnitude earthquake wasn't the worst thing to happen to the town Ishinomaki on that horrible day. No, that was afterwards, when the tremors from the earthquake churned up a raging tsunami that took a bustling city of 162,000 people and suddenly turned it into little more than a ten-foot-deep lake.

For reference, here's a NASA satellite comparison of the city before and after the tsunami. Needless to say, poor Hideaki Akaiwa, concerned for his family, rushed out of his office in time to see his city completely submerged under an obscene ten feet of water that buried everything from houses to businesses. He ran to the high water mark and stared helplessly into the sprawling lake that once used to be his home.

But it gets even worse. Hideaki's wife of twenty years was still buried inside the lake somewhere. She hadn't gotten out. She wasn't answering her phone. The water was still rising, the sun was setting, cars and [LIFTED] were swooshing past on a river of sea water, and and rescue workers told him there was nothing that could be done – the only thing left was to sit back, wait for the military to arrive, and hope that they can get in there and rescue the survivors before it's too late. With 10,000 citizens of Ishinomaki still missing and unaccounted for, the odds weren't great that Hideaki would ever see his wife again.

For most of us regular folks, this is the sort of [LIFTED] that would make us throw up our hands, swear loudly, and resign ourselves to a lifetime of hopeless misery.

But Hideaki Akaiwa isn't a regular guy. He's a [LIFTED] insane badass, and he wasn't going to sit back and just let his wife die alone, freezing to death in a miserable water-filled tomb. He was going after her. No matter what.

How the [LIFTED] Hideaki Akaiwa got a hold of a wetsuit and a set of SCUBA gear is one of the great mysteries of the world. I'm roughly twenty hours into Fallout 3 and I'm lucky to come across a [LIFTED] vacuum cleaner in that godforsaken post-apocalyptic wasteland, yet this guy is in the middle of a real-life earth-shaking mecha-disaster and he's coming up with oxygen tanks, waterproof suits, and rebreather systems seemingly out of thin air. I guess when you're a truly unstoppable badass, you, by definition, don't let anything stand in your way. You make [LIFTED] happen, all the time, no matter what.

Regardless of how he came across this equipment (borrowing, stealing, buying, beating up a Yakuza SCUBA diving demolitions expert, etc.) Hideaki threw on his underwater survival gear, rushed into the goddamned tsunami, and dove beneath the rushing waves, determined to rescue his wife or die trying. I'm not exactly sure whether or not the dude even knew how to operate SCUBA equipment, but according to one version of his story he met his wife while he was surfing (which is awesome, by the way), so it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to say that he already had a little experience SCUBA diving under a more controlled situation. Of course, even if this dude didn't know how to work the gear I'm certain that wouldn't have stopped him either – Hideaki wasn't going to let a pair of soul-crushing natural disasters deter him from doing awesome [LIFTED] and saving his family. He dove down into the water, completely submerged in the freezing cold, pitch black rushing current on all sides, and started swimming through the underwater ruins of his former hometown.

Surrounded by incredible hazards on all sides, ranging from obscene currents capable of dislodging houses from their moorings, sharp twisted metal that could easily have punctured his oxygen line (at best) or impaled him (at worst), and with giant [LIFTED] cars careening through the water like toys, he pressed on. Past broken glass, past destroyed houses, past downed power lines arcing with electrical current, through undertow that could have dragged him out to sea never to be heard from again, he searched.

Hideaki maintained his composure and navigated his way through the submerged city, finally tracking down his old house. He quickly swam through to find his totally-freaked-out wife, alone and stranded on the upper level of their house, barely keeping her head above water. He grabbed her tight, and presumably sharing his rebreather with her, dragged her out of the wreckage to safety. She survived.

But Hideaki Akaiwa still wasn't done yet.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering what the [LIFTED] is more intense than commandeering a wet suit, face-punching a tsunami and dragging your wife of two decades out of the flooded wreckage of your home, but, no [LIFTED], it gets even better. You see, Hideaki's mother also lived in Ishinomaki, and she was still unaccounted for. I think you all know where this is going.

First, Hideaki searched around the evacuation shelters and other areas, looking for his mom among the ragtag groups of survivors who had been lucky enough to flee to higher ground. She might have escaped, and he needed to find her. Now. He ran through the city like some post-apocalyptic action hero, desperately trying to track her down, but when a couple of days went by without any sign of her, he knew what he had to do. The water had only receded a few inches by this point, the rescue teams weren't working quickly enough for his tastes, and Hideaki Akaiwa [LIFTED] once again took matters into his own hands – rushing back into the waterlogged city looking for his mom.

So, once again Hideaki navigated his way through the Atlantean city, picking his way through crumbling wreckage, splintered wood, and shredded metal to find his elderly mother. After another grueling trek, he tracked her down on the upper levels of a house – she'd been stranded there for four days, and would almost certainly have died without the timely aid of her son. He brought her to safety somehow as well, as you might expect at this point.

Now, while most people would have been content in the knowledge that their family was safe, Hideaki Akaiwa isn't the sort of badass who's going to hang up his flippers and quit just because he'd taken care of his own personal [LIFTED] – this guy made an oath to keep going back into the wreckage on his own to find people and help them to safety. Today this 43 year-old Japanese badass rides out every single day, multiple times a day, riding around on a bicycle with his legs wrapped in plastic to keep himself dry. His only equipment – a pocketknife, a canteen, a flashlight, a change of clothes, and a badass set of aviator sunglasses – packed into a trusty trio of backpacks, he rides out in search of people needing rescue, a modern-day, real-life action hero.

Simo Häyhä

In the winter of 1939, the Soviet Union was dicks. Russian Premier Josef Stalin thought it would be really [LIFTED] hilarious if he all of a sudden sent like two million of his dudes over to nearby Finland to start kicking everyone's asses and seizing whatever land he could get his borsch-covered hands on, while simultaneously kicking puppies and shouting profanities at inanimate objects in a vodka-and-caviar induced roid rage. While this may have been a laugh riot for Stalin and his numbnuts cronies, the Finnish people obviously were a little unhappy with the prospect of having all their cross-country skis, Winter Olympics gold medals and salmon fishing boats captured by a rampaging horde of godless commie bastards, so they decided to open an extra-large can of whoop-ass and give the Russkies the ballsack kicking they were apparently looking for.

Now when you think of Finland, the phrase "military powerhouse" isn't exactly the first thing that pops into your head. Likewise, when you looked at Simo Häyhä, a slight-framed Finnish farmer who didn't stand an inch over five feet tall, you also probably didn't think "total [LIFTED] unstoppable badass". Well let's just say that first impressions can be deceiving.

Simo was a member of a Finnish organization roughly equivalent to the minutemen of the American Revolution. He had done his state-mandated one-year term in the Finnish Army, reaching the rank of corporal, and was living a peaceful life in a farming village not far from the Russian border, spending his days farming, hunting, and crushing giant logs into sawdust with his bare hands. When the Soviets crossed the border into Finland with the expressed purpose of busting Finnish heads, Simo was called up into service. He went out to the wood shed behind his house, grabbed his old-school Russian-made Mosin-Nagant M28/30 rifle and headed out to take some commies behind a proverbial woodshed of his own.



Häyhä's specialty was his knowledge of the forests, his enduring patience and his impeccable rifle marksmanship. A sniper by trade, he would dress up in all-white camouflage, sneak through the woods with only a day's worth of food and couple clips of ammunition, and then lie in wait for any Russian stupid enough to wander into his killzone. His first battle-experience came in the hard-fought Kollaa campaign, where a severely outnumbered Finnish force bore the brunt of a large-scale Russian assault. Temperatures at this time ranged from -20 to -40 degrees Celsius, and the entire forest was covered with several feet of snow. While this played havoc on the inexperienced and under-equipped Russian invaders, the Finns were right at home in it because FINLAND IS [LIFTED] COLD AS [LIFTED] ALL THE TIME and they're used to it there. Throughout this campaign, Häyhä basically just ran around doling out head-shots like the ice cream man gives out Dove bars on a hot sunny day in the Sahara desert. His personal best was [LIFTED] twenty-five kills in a single day. That's like an entire baseball team.

Throughout the Winter War (as it would come to be known), Simo Häyhä ran around being what experienced HALO players would call a "camping fag", and scoring enough kill shots to make [LIFTED] RoboCop and the Terminator hide their heads in shame. He would come to be known throughout the Russian Army as "The White Death", and at one point in the war they even went so far as to try and launch a couple of goddamned artillery strikes on locations at which they thought he might be hiding. That's desperation there - like even more desperate than a nymphomaniac babe at a convention for castrated male models.

After hearing about how much ass Häyhä was kicking out on the frozen tundra of eastern Finland with an antiquated bolt-action [LIFTED] rifle, the Finnish High Command decided to give him a special award: a custom-built Sako M2/28-30 Sniper Rifle of Headshots +3. He put this to good use, killing the ever-loving [LIFTED] out of anyone that crossed him. On several occasions the Russians sent their own snipers to take him out, but Simo managed to win those duels every time. You see, Häyhä not only passed out long-range silent death to anyone with a red star on his hat, but he did it without the aid of a telescopic sight. He preferred to use the rifle's regular iron sights because it allowed him to present a smaller target, and because several of the commie snipers he moked out were given away by a glint of light reflecting off the lenses of their scopes. He obviously didn't want to fall to this fate, so he went balls-out and wasted assholes the old-fashioned (and unarguably the more hardcore) way.

Finally, on 2 March 1940, some Soviet bastard got a lucky shot off and popped Simo Häyhä in the jaw with an explosive bullet. Häyhä fell into a coma and was pulled off the field by his comerades. He would finally awake eleven days later, on the same day that the Winter War ended. He would go on to live to the ripe old age of 97.

The Winter War ended as a victory for Finland. The Red Army captured a mere 22,000 square miles of territory and lost close to one million men, more than forty times the number of Finnish casualties. Simo Häyhä received five medals for valour, including the prestigious Kollaa Cross, and was express-promoted from corporal to second lieutenant. Throughout the war, Häyhä raked in a total of 505 confirmed sniper kills (in some sources he is credited with 542). On top of this, he also mowed down two hundred men with a Suomi 9mm submachine gun, bringing his total kill count to over 700 men in under 100 days.

Nobody in history has ever been credited with more confirmed kills than Simo Häyhä. He was an unlikely war hero who used patience, cunning and precision to defend his country, his home, his people and his freedom from communist totalitarian oppression. He was an unstoppable killing machine the likes of which the world has never known before or since.

Awe. Some.