Made Of Iron / Real Life

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• Jacques Rollinger, an American Civil War-era Union soldier who petitioned a US Army board for a pension after the war was over. As such, he was required to show proof of his injuries. The list must really be read to be believed.
  • The longest-lasting effect from all these injuries? A stiff knee.
  • The Army board asked Rollinger what he intended to do now that he had been granted his honorable discharge and pension. His response?
    When the catalogue was ended this surgical museum politely apologized for his haste, saying that he was on his way to the steamer, intending to join Garibaldi’s army, at that time campaigning in the Yaltelline.
• Evel Knievel, the man spent decades pulling off motorcycle jumps and crashing. He's the record holder for most bones broken.
• Audie Murphy. There's no way to list the ways in which this man was made of adamantium without repeating everything on the linked page.
  • During the battle of Holtzwihr in France, Murphy's company (of which 19 out of the original 128 men remained in fighting condition) was attacked by tanks and infantry. He ordered his men to withdraw while he remained and directed artillery from his forward position. When the Germans got close, he climbed onto a still-burning tank destroyer and opened fire with its .50 caliber machine gun. Almost totally exposed to enemy fire, he nonetheless single-handedly held off tanks and infantry — for an hour (during which he was shot in the leg) until the phone line connecting him with artillery got cut and he ran out of ammo. He then made his way back to his company, refused medical attention, and organized his company in a counterattack, which forced the Germans to withdraw. At the time he had just recovered from being shot in the arm and the day before had been hit by shrapnel from a nearby mortar strike that killed two members of his squad. Keep in mind he was also suffering from malaria the whole time. He received a Medal of Honor for his actions during this battle, and this isn't even the most ridiculously badass thing he did during WWII. Not bad for a guy who was 5'6" and 130lbs and lied about his age to enlist.
  • His life was also made into a film, but was toned back at the behest of Murphy himself because he thought no one would believe he was telling the truth.
• Shaolin monks practice a rigorous regimen known as "Iron Body Technique", allowing wooden clubs to be broken across their bodies, limbs, and heads with little effect, as well as great resistance to piercing weapons. One of the most extreme examples involved a single monk bending two spears (with metal heads) almost double against his throat and having a baseball bat broken on his back at the same time.
  • Those clubs are weakened to avoid breaking bones. (They still hurt like hell, though.)
  • Most of those impressive feats are basically tricks that any moderately athletic individual could perform if they know the right technique. They're impressive in their own way, similar to magic tricks, but no great display of toughness.
  • Well then let me introduce you to the technique iron balls. Yeah, it's actually testicles of steel. And that's not even counting their body temperature controlling feats, and much other crazy shit they do. You do not mess with the Shaolin.
• Dr. Liviu Librescu, Romanian-born Holocaust survivor, scientist, and academic professor. During the Virginia Tech massacre, Librescu personally kept the door shut to prevent gunman Seung-hui Cho from entering the classroom while his students escaped out the windows. He was shot through the door five times before finally succumbing to a shot to the head. Of course, he had a history, since surviving the Holocaust takes a Determinator in itself...
• The famous death of Grigori Rasputin was subject to some amount of mythology. According to most accounts, he was poisoned, shot, stabbed, and finally thrown into the icy Neva River, where he ultimately drowned. In truth, an autopsy found he was shot three times, twice in the back of the head and once in the forehead. There were knife wounds on him, but the doctor concluded they were post-mortem, and no poison was found in his system, nor water in his lungs.
• Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard. A brief autopsy after his defeat revealed that he had taken five bullets and over twenty sword wounds before he went down. He was able to swordfight and almost defeated Captain Robert Maynard despite Maynard shooting him at point-blank and Blackbeard was also very drunk at the time. Luckily for Maynard, a fellow soldier ambushed Blackbeard and sliced the back of his neck, and even then Maynard ordered Blackbeard to be beheaded to confirm his death.
• Truth in Television:
  • It's possible to survive being stabbed in a non-vital area because the damage is mostly localized, so first aid and adequate medical care can allow someone to live without any detrimental effects (beyond the time it takes to heal). Bullets that are not designed to expand upon impact also can be survived, since the wound cavity is only as large as the bullet is.
  • This is why guns have "stopping power" as it's rarely the gun wound that kills, rather the resulting trauma from the wound or blood loss thereafter. People who are full of adrenaline (due to fighting against a lethally armed person) can shrug off even fatal bullet wounds unless they are physically knocked down by the shot.
• In February 2008, British marine Matthew Croucher jumped on a grenade, was blown across the compound, and then got up with only a concussion. His backpack apparently took "most" of the blast, but still.
  • Oh, but it gets better: after literally standing up from said grenade blast, the lithium battery in his destroyed backpack caught fire and the medic recommended that he be evacuated. He refused on the grounds that the Taliban would come looking to investigate the explosion and that would give the Marines an opportunity to ambush them. The dude got blown up and then deliberately stayed behind to get back at the ones who did it.
  • The USMC's Jacklyn Lucas smothered two grenades (one was a dud) with his body on Iwo Jima in 1945. The 17-year-old had no body armour. He died in 2008.
    • Lucas also survived jumping out of a plane when both his parachutes failed to open on a training exercise.
• While running for his third term of office, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a would-be assassin as he was on his way to deliver a speech. Roosevelt, never one to be deterred by something so trivial as a bullet wound, went on to deliver the entire fifty-page speech while bleeding from the gut, bothering only to add the following preface:
  "I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose."
  • Bear in mind that TR delivered the speech from memory, as the bullet had gone through the speech, folded in his pocket. This slowed the bullet enough to probably save his life, but left the speech with a hole through it and soaked in blood. He also claimed that he would be giving a shorter speech than intended. He went on to speak for 90 minutes.
  • Surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly, given who we're talking about), he went on to place second in the election.
    • Note that he placed second in the election... but he was running as a third party at the time. He is the ONLY candidate to beat a major party as a third party, solely on his personal charisma and influence. Even more impressive, the major party candidate he beat was Republican William Howard Taft, the incumbent President.
  • Real-life subversion: True to his image, TR practiced bare-knuckled fisticuffs in the White House. On one occasion, he took a blow that struck him permanently blind in one eye. This was carefully kept secret during his remaining time in office.
    • That's why he didn't get killed when he was shot. Because of his poor eyesight, he had to make the letters in his speech very big with plenty of space between. Consequently, this was one thick wad of paper he was carrying in his breast pocket.
    • He was a black belt in judo, carried a loaded pistol with him around the White House, and kept a fully-grown lion and bear as pets.
    • He also kept a badger as a pet. Not a trained one, considering most people complained of it running around savaging visitors' ankles.
    • According to some, he took up judo after he was blinded boxing because it wasn't as rough.
• Sai Wing Mock, also known as Mock Duck, the leader of the Hip Sing Tong in New York, was nicknamed "The clay Pigeon of Chinatown" because he survived so many assassination attempts. He is featured as one of the mob bosses in Empire of Sin.
• During the Hundred Years War between England and France, English King Henry V was supposedly hit in the face with an arrow. He not only survived both the impact of the arrow and the surgery to remove it from his face, he proceeded to get right back up and return to beating the hell out of the French until he seized the Crown of France.
  • It was at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 when Henry was 16 and still only a prince. John Bradmore, the doctor who removed the arrow, wrote about it — "struck by an arrow next to his nose on the left side"; "The which arrow entered at an angle (ex traverso), and after the arrow shaft was extracted, the head of the aforesaid arrow remained in the furthermost part of the bone of the skull for the depth of six inches." The aftercare took several weeks. Henry won the battle, which was against English rebels.
• Henry V has nothing on the circus strong man Joe Greenstein, a.k.a. the Mighty Atom. He was shot in the face with a .38 revolver from 30 feet away. The bullet was flattened by the impact with his skull and caused no serious injury. He was out of the hospital that evening. This is in addition to a career based on feats like bursting multiple chains at once by flexing his chest, bending 1/2 steel bars, and driving nails through several sheets of metal with his hands.
• Xiahou Dun of Wei did the whole "take an arrow to the face" thing first when one of Lü Bu's men shot him in the eye at the Battle of Xiapi. Anyone else would have been on the ground moaning in pain, but he got back up, then proceeded to rip the arrow and his own eye out, swallowed the eye in one bite, found the poor bastard who had the audacity of plonking him, and ended him in rather brutal fashion.
• Another example from Romance of the Three Kingdoms involves Guan Yu, who once took a poisoned arrow in his arm — the best surgeon in the land was forced to cut the wound wide open, remove the arrowhead, and remove every shred of poisoned tissue, to the extent of scraping the poison off the bone. What did Guan Yu do all this time? Go a few rounds of Go with his good arm.
  • Note that these stories are from Romance of the Three Kingdoms which is not necessarily historically accurate, but instead a somewhat romanticized version of history.
• Any skydiver or paratrooper. Ever. Twisted or sprained ankles, broken ribs, and other injuries on rough landing or mid-air collisions are commonplace. Bruises are daily. Even the sudden jerk of an opening and developing canopy can get you bruised under your leg harness.
• Richard Hammond, who crashed a jet-powered racecar at 288 miles per hour and not only survived the incident (which many say would have decapitated a taller man), but recovered from all his injuries with no lasting damage (though he did joke about a new and inexplicable fondness for celery attributed to brain damage) and made a triumphant return to the show Top Gear (UK) the following season.
• Marcus Cassius Scaeva. To quote:
  He was getting nailed from all sides during the fight — his helmet was destroyed, his shield was bristling with arrows, he was stabbed in the shoulder with a javelin, hit in the thigh by a sword, and fucking shot in the left eye socket with a goddamned arrow. Amazingly, this only made him more ripshit pissed off. He pulled the fucking arrow out of his own eye, threw it down, and resumed with the ass-kickings like a blood-lusted cyclops.
  • The result of him both surviving and winning that engagement was (besides buying the time for Julius Ceasar to regroup his forces and win) was that Ceasar promoted Marcus Cassius to the rank of Primus Pilus, the highest-ranking Centurion in Ceasar's forces. Kind of like if Master Chief held the rank of Captain.
• Mr Harishchandra Shiverhankar, one of the survivors of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, had a blade slit his neck. Obviously he is still around to tell the tale. So neck-slitting is no guaranteed kill, despite what fiction may have convinced us.
• Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who was impaled by a steel bar through the head, removing about 1/3 of his brain. He survived for twelve years afterward. Popular legend claims that he suffered from severe personality change after the injury, but the reports are vague and contradictory (for example, on source claiming he became an uncontrollable womanizer while another stated that he lost all interest in sex) while no actual records of his personality from people who knew him well before the accident exist. What is known is that he survived having an iron rod blasted straight through his mouth and out the top of his skull, never even lost consciousness, and was able to walk (with assistance) to an ox cart to be taken to a doctor. The doctor's treatment consisted of sticking his bare fingers in both sides of the hole to poke out the bits of bone, skin, and brain tissue lodged in the wound, while Phineas repeatedly vomited due to the blood and brain matter he was swallowing as a result of this. Then he got a fungal infection in his brain and nearly died, requiring surgery through his nasal cavity to relieve the pressure (which still left him permanently blind in his left eye).
• Marcus Luttrell. The details are a bit involved, but suffice it to say he was a Navy Seal who survived four days behind enemy lines while concussed, bleeding, dehydrated, and exhausted, with three broken vertebrae, a bullet in one leg, and a shitload of burning-hot shrapnel in the other before managing to get help.
• A canine example of this trope: Dosha the miracle mongrel. Said dog survived being run over, shot, and spending two hours in a freezer before being found sitting up in the dog equivalent of a body bag.
• Tsutomu Yamaguchi, having survived both WWII atomic bombs and living into his nineties, is Made of Lead. You think you had a bad week? Try getting nuked. Twice. Unfortunately time has finally caught up with him. However, after multiple nuclear weapon strikes, he lived until he was 93 (whereas the average life expectancy of humans is 80).
• In 2017, a man named Simon Smith was out for a walk in the Berkshire town of Reading in the UK, when a bus driver made the stupid mistake to press the accelerator instead of the brakes, lost control while rounding the corner, mounted the pavement and hit Smith with full force, launching him across the pavement and into the path of flying debris thrown into the air by the bus hitting buildings on the side of the road. Miraculously, Smith was almost completely uninjured, and simply got up and walked into the nearest bar.
• Andrew Jackson, 7th president of the United States, dueled quite a bit. In one duel, he actually allowed his opponent to take the first shot, then shot and killed his opponent while he was reloading. Repeat: in a contest where the object is to kill your opponent, Jackson volunteered to be shot at first. Apparently, his opponent had such a reputation as a duelist that he saw no purpose in trying to draw faster, so he accepted the rapid-but-badly-aimed first shot in order to retaliate with an aimed (and therefore lethal) shot. Keep in mind, Jackson got shot in the ribs, with the bullet so close to his heart no doctor would try to remove it for fear of killing him. Yet he walked away from the duel, acting like nothing had happened. Also a real-life example of Rank Scales with Asskicking.
  • Jackson actually had several bullets, a few arrowheads, and a bayonet tip lodged permanently in his body. It was said that he "rattled like a bag of marbles" when he walked around. (There's a story about Jackson digging a bullet out of his own arm during a Cabinet meeting, no form of pain relief, then mailing it back to a former duel opponent with a note along the lines of "I believe this belongs to you". This could be apocryphal, but given who the story is about....)
    • Jackson never had any of them removed, probably because that would fall under the category of "Time not spent dueling", Jackson's least favorite time.
    • Also under the category of "get post-op infection and die". Not a small concern, as a post-op infection actually did kill another President (James A. Garfield) some decades later.
  • Then there was the time Richard Lawrence tried to assassinate then-President Jackson. Two pistols misfired, and Jackson promptly beat Lawrence so thoroughly with his cane that his aides had to physically restrain him. Jackson was 67 at the time, and reportedly having respiratory problems.
    • The respiratory problem is the only reason that the two aides were able to stop him before he added another name to his kill tally.
• Otto von Bismarck, at the time the Minister President of Prussia, was attacked and shot from behind twice at point-blank range. Bismarck whirled around and seized his assailant by the throat^note Bismarck was about 6ft 5in tall and just as strong as expected, who then shot Bismarck another three times. Bismarck held on to his would-be assassin until the King's Guard arrived to arrest him. Inspecting the damage afterwards, Bismarck discovered all of the bullets had been deflected by his heavy clothing and just grazed him or bounced off his own ribs.
  • Bismarck was an avid sword duellist in his student years. He had 29 sword duel scars on his body.
• Adrian Carton De Wiart... just look him up.
  • To quote Wikipedia: He fought in the Boer War, World War I, and World War II; was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear; survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp, and bit off his own fingers when a doctor wouldn't amputate them. He later said "frankly I had enjoyed the war."
• Colonel John Stapp, Ph.D., was the human precursor to crash test dummies. In his life conducting tests for human endurance in acceleration and deceleration, he subjected himself to over 50 potentially lethal experiments. He shattered conventional wisdom of thinking people would be subject to lethal injury at 18 g-forces when he walked away with temporary blindness and some bruising after sustaining 45 g-forces for over a second. His research was prime material that led to better car and aircraft safety the world over. He was also a good friend and colleague of Chuck Yeager
• Speaking of Chuck Yeager, he walked away from an airplane crash after beating a fire out on his face with his bare hands. He made his record-setting supersonic flight with a broken arm that he had to hide from his superiors so they wouldn't either scrub the mission or replace him.
• Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot point-blank through the head. Of people with similar wounds, 90% die on the spot and another 5% die before getting to the operating room. She was communicative when she arrived at the trauma center 38 minutes later. Seven months after her surgery, she was back on the job, coming on to the floor of the House to cast a critical vote on a debt-ceiling measure. She was greeted with a standing ovation and not a few of her colleagues in tears.
• William George Barker of the RAF citation for the Victoria Cross says "On the morning of the 27th October, 1918, this officer observed an enemy two-seater over the F'oret de Mormal. He attacked this machine, and after a short burst it broke up in the air. At the same time a Fokker biplane attacked him, and-he was wounded in the right thigh, but managed, despite this, to shoot down the enemy aeroplane in flames. He then found, himself in the middle of a large formation of Fokkers, who attacked him from all directions; and was again severely wounded in the left thigh; but succeeded in driving down two of the enemy in a spin. He lost consciousness after this, and his machine fell out of control. On recovery he found himself being again attacked heavily by a large formation, and singling out one machine, he deliberately charged and drove it down in flames. During this fight his left elbow was shattered and he again fainted, and on regaining consciousness he found himself still being attacked, but, notwithstanding that he was now severely wounded in both legs and his left arm shattered, he dived on the nearest machine and shot it down in flames. Being greatly exhausted, he dived out of the fight to regain our lines, but was met by another formation, which attacked and endeavoured to cut him off, but after a hard fight he succeeded in breaking up this formation and reached our lines, where he crashed on landing."
• Nicholas Alkemade was a tail gunner for the RAF during the Second World War. On the night of 24 March 1944, his Lancaster was attacked and set on fire by a Junkers Ju 88. Alkemade — whose parachute had been consumed by the flames — chose to jump rather than burn to death. He fell for 18,000 feet, eventually crashing through pine trees and coming to rest in a snowdrift. Despite the fall and the sudden stop at the end, he suffered only minor injuries. His captors refused to believe that he was not a spy until the wreckage of his Lancaster was found. He spent the rest of the war as a POW and died of natural causes in 1987.
• The Red Baron, Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, was shot in the back of the head with an aircraft machine gun in late 1917. The bullet ricocheted off his skull, doing no permanent damage... at least physically. Those who knew him said he was a changed man after that day though and may have led to his death in April 1918.
  • His eventual demise was also notable. The .303 machine gun bullet that hit his chest ruptured his heart and severely damaged his lungs — a wound that should incapacitate a man instantly and lead to death within a couple of seconds. Not if you are the Red Baron. He managed to land and bring his Fokker plane to a full stop safely before moving on to the next world.
• Everyone from the following Cracked articles: 7 Fatal Injuries That People Somehow Survived and 7 People Who Cheated Death, Then Kicked It in the Balls.
• A couple of years ago in California, a man emptied his revolver into his lawyer at point-blank range in front of the courthouse. Not only did the lawyer not die, but he was even able to casually walk away when the gunman ran out of ammo. The tail end of the incident was caught on video and circulated around on the internet. The lawyer was not wearing armor and he was indeed hit several times (including being shot through the neck), but you wouldn't know it from the way he seems to shrug it off in the video.
• This guy. When your first reaction to getting stabbed is to call not an ambulance but the police, and then your second is to walk a mile to go and order a coffee...
• This is a common trait of wombats, probably the tank of Australia. It is one of the few animals where you are advised to swerve to avoid because hitting one will generally wreck the car.
• Similarly, moose. If you're driving anything smaller than a loaded transport truck in the Canadian Shield and hit a moose, it will walk away. You will need a new car. They've been known to walk away from collisions with transport trucks too, but less often.
• Airman First Class John Levitow, USAF, lowest ranking airman to ever win the Medal of Honor. He was a loadmaster on an AC-47 Gunship over Vietnam when his plane was hit by a stray artillery shell. Riddled with shrapnel, he saw a similarly wounded crewmate at risk of falling out of the open cargo door of the damaged plane. He crawled over to the crewmate and dragged him to safety, only to realize that a magnesium flare, used for night-time illumination of the battlefield, had fallen from its rack and begun to ignite while rolling around on the floor amidst the cans of ammo used for the guns aboard the plane. Levitow threw himself upon the flare and body-dragged it to the door, where he threw it free of the plane. He died more than thirty years later of cancer.
• Simo Hayha, a Finnish sniper in the Winter War (and current page image for Cold Sniper) spent months in severe winter conditions (-20 to -40 degrees Celsius) hiding in snow killing Russian soldiers and officers using his bolt-action rifle with iron sights and a sub-machine gun. The Russians dubbed him the White Death and often employed artillery fire, tanks, and counter snipers against him to no avail. His confirmed kill count was 705 when he was finally hit with a headshot by an enemy soldier. He recovered and died of natural causes by the age of 97.
  • He woke up the day that the truce was signed. People only half-joke that the Russians signed it when they heard he woke up.
• These bacteria are immune to radiation. Several other animals are capable of surviving crazy high and low temperatures and pressures that would kill most anything else; these are known as extremophiles, and the most famous may be the tardigrade.
  • Tardigrades, also known as "water bears," are the toughest animal on Earth. The tiny critters (usually not more than one millimeter long) can be found in the Antarctic, on the summits of the Himalayas, in the deep sea, and your backyard. The list of conditions it can withstand includes near absolute zero temperatures (1 Kelvin) as well as temperatures well over water's boiling point (373.15 Kelvins), pressures ranging from 0 (vacuum) to 1,200 atmospheres (for reference, Venus has a mean surface pressure of 92 atmospheres and the bottom of the Mariana Trench is 1,086), radiation levels that would kill a healthy adult human a thousand times over, and more than ten years of dehydration (as in complete dessication). In 2007, tardigrades were flown to the Earth's orbit and exposed to outer space conditions for ten days. They survived. And had sex. In space.
    • And they've been frozen for 30 years. And survived!
• Another honorable mention goes to the nematodes (roundworms) of the species C. elegans, for being the only animals ever to survive a space crash. The microscopic worms were on board when the Columbia space shuttle exploded during reentry. When their capsule was found and opened weeks later (there were other priorities at the time) there were living worms inside it. Due to the length of their life cycle, it's unknown in what shape the original space-traveling worms were after the crash, but they did manage to reproduce. Despite there being several different animal species on board the shuttle during the crash (for different experiments), the nematodes were the only ones that made it out alive.
• As dramatized in 1974's Miracles Still Happen, Juliane Köpcke, the 17-year-old schoolgirl who was the sole survivor when her plane broke up in mid-air above Peru. She fell more than two miles but only broke her collarbone. She then trekked for 9 days through the rainforest to find help. Some scars remain though.
• Cpl. Matt Garst stepped on an IED, which blew up, sending him flying 15 feet. Immediately standing up, he yelled at his squad, "What the fuck are you looking at? Get on the cordon!" Exaggerated when his anger got spiked. "It pissed me off."
• There was a newspaper article about a cute little kitten that liked to play in the laundry basket, hiding beneath the clothes. One day, it was laundry time and the kitten ended up inside the washing machine. The poor thing spent the whole cycle in there before its owner heard the screams and came to the rescue. What happened to the little kitten? Absolutely nothing, just the shock.
• In 2010 a Frenchman fell over 75 feet into the Grand Canyon but somehow survived.
• Subverted with the RMS Titanic. It was claimed to be "unsinkable" by its owners. Pretty Ironic, huh?
  • Subverted again with her sister ship HMHS Britannic, sunk by either a mine or torpedo.
  • Played straight with her sister ship RMS Olympic, justifiably known as "Old Reliable". Several months before the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Titanic, she collided with the warship HMS Hawke, which was specifically designed to sink enemy ships. Two compartments flooded while her stern and a propeller shaft were severely damaged. She did not sink. In fact, she returned to the shipyard in Belfast under her own power. Olympic would later go on to show her ill-fated sister ships how it's done, as she was converted into a troop transport for World War I. Not only did she survive the war, she sank a German U-boat by ramming it — the only civilian ship to ever sink an enemy submarine, and Olympic did it in style. After the U-boat was rammed, Olympic kept on going, running over the submarine and cutting its hull to shreds with its gigantic propellers! The Olympic would eventually come to rest when her owners decided to decommission her, after 257 successful trips across the Atlantic. Even then she wouldn't give, as it took two full demolitions to completely destroy her (the first one only destroyed the superstructure, the hull itself would be destroyed in a separate explosion after being towed there).
• World War II Airman Henry Erwin. A phosphorus flare exploded prematurely in his aircraft, leaving him blinded and burned. He knew that if the flare stayed where it was, it would burn through the floor of the aircraft and set off the bombs in the cargo bay, killing all 11 people on board. So he picked up the burning flare with his bare hands, crawled into the cockpit with it, and threw it out the window, saving everyone. He received the Medal of Honor for his bravery. Doctors expected him to die from his horrific injuries, but he recovered and lived to age 80.
• Colloquially, NHL players who make it through a season without an injury are referred to as "Iron Men".
• Bret Michaels from Poison. You don't survive an emergency appendectomy, a brain hemorrhage, AND a hole in the heart all within six weeks if you're not this.
• RAF pilot Group Captain Sir Douglas Bader lost both his legs in a fairly horrific aerobatics accident, but recovered and tried to return to work as a pilot on the grounds that his two tin legs were perfectly good for the job. He was retired on medical grounds, but returned to the service as a fighter pilot in World War II, becoming a recognized fighter ace. When he was forced to bail out over occupied France and captured as a prisoner of war, he made so many escape attempts that the Germans actually threatened to take away his prosthetics unless he stopped. He didn't stop.
• Leon Trotsky took a blow to the head with an ice pick; that is, a steel spike designed to break up blocks of ice, usually three or four inches long. And he was still able to fend off his assassin until his bodyguards were able to take him into custody. He died of blood loss a day later.
• Sue Shiomi was this during her heyday as an action star in the '70s, according to Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, who directed her in three Sister Streetfighter films.
  Kazuhiko Yamaguchi: [She] did all sorts of dangerous stuff without a single special effect or stand-in. She'd get injured all the time but never made one peep. She was totally bruised up during all of the Sister Streetfighter films.
• Most phones made by Nokia. The king, however, is the 3310. Anyone who has owned one (yours truly) has seen that nothing but There's No Kill like Overkill can finish it off. This phones quickly become a Fountain of Memes because their toughness.
• Ozzy Osbourne is a sort of biochemical version of this, enough to be studied as an unprecedented medical case. The amount of alcohol and other, stronger drugs this man has consumed should've killed him several times over, but he survived without problems, not even aging.
• Brisbane Lions captain Jonathan Brown was hit by a car. He only needed stitches, while the car was towed off for repairs.
• Planes are usually comparatively fragile, due to the need to keep them light. By their own standards though, we get some definite standouts.
  • The P-47 Thunderbolt, one of the toughest fighters fielded in World War II. Heaviest combat aircraft ever lifted by a single non-jet engine. In one famous incident, a stricken P-47 was returning to base when it was ambushed by a German fighter that proceeded to dump all its ammunition into the American plane. The P-47 continued flying and returned to base (the pilot tried counting the number of hits he'd taken, but lost track around 200. He hadn't even moved from the wing section.)
    • The F6F Hellcat has been known to absorb punishment and keep on flying, to the point that pilots have been noted to return to their carriers with several bullet holes and missing and falling parts throughout the plane.
    • The F4U Corsair is often noted to possibly have been even tougher.
    • Notably, these planes used the Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp engine. Radiators and coolant hoses were something of an Achilles' Heel on water-cooled inline engines, but these air-cooled radial engines had one less critical weak point.
  • The A-10 Thunderbolt II (AKA the Warthog) inherited the name with good cause. Able to keep flying and land with a fairly good portion of itself missing.
  • Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik, nicknamed the Flying Tank by its designers and Concrete Plane by its enemies.
  • The B-17 Flying Fortress was so named for good reason. Seriously, not even another plane crashing into it was enough to guarantee bringing one down.
  • The P-40 Warhawk, while overshadowed by some of the more high-performance fighters of the war, was known for being very ruggedly built compared to many other fighters, and would play this advantage when dealing with the more agile and more fragile Japanese fighters.
• Alison Botha. In December 1994, she was kidnapped by a pair of men known as the Noordhoek Ripper and brutally raped. She was strangled, stabbed 30 times in the stomach, and disemboweled. The men finished by slitting her throat, nearly decapitating her in the process. After they left, Alison gathered her intestines up in her shirt and crawled to the road to find help. She survived the brutal attempt on her life, confronted her attackers in court, became one of the first South African rape survivors to speak openly about her ordeal, and is now a motivational speaker and author. More amazingly, her attackers stabbed her with the intention of destroying her reproductive organs, but in 2003 she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Her doctors believe a series of amazing events allowed her to survive her attack — the slitting of her throat after being strangled provided a rush of oxygen to her lungs, the shirt thrown over her by her attackers allowing her to gather up and carry her intestines, the weather was unseasonably warm and prevented the onset of hypothermia, the full moon allowed her to find her way to the road, and finally the person that discovered her on the road was a vet tech, and therefore able to begin providing immediate medical assistance.
• There is a YouTube video of a man putting a deer in the trunk of his car after accidentally running it over. When a policeman makes him open the trunk, it jumps right out and runs off. Yes, a young deer survived getting run over by a car!
  • On a related note, it's generally agreed upon that the fastest way to put down most game animals (deer, boar, and coyote) is to hit them right behind the shoulder. If you don't hit at just the right angle or you're off just by a couple inches, then good luck finding a +100 pound animal with twenty minutes of light left in the day.
• Joe Grim, otherwise known as the Human Punching Bag. He actually allows his opponents to pummel him & knocks them out when they get exhausted. Unfortunately, he can't deal half the pain to his opponents that he can receive.
• This man can dip his hands in deep-frying oil with little to no burns or pain, after an incident involving a squirrel who was eating a mango that fell into his wok, resulting in oil splashing all over his body. The next day after getting up from bed, he was amazed to discover that there were no residual burns on his skin. Originally intending to consult with a doctor, the man instead went back to frying chicken.
• A Reader's Digest story touched on this. A teacher wrote in about how she used to work at a school and warned the kids that they were climbing a little too high in the tree. Not long after she turned around to watch the other kids, she heard screaming because one of the kids had, sure enough, fallen a good six meters (twenty feet) out of the tree, landed on his back, then stood up and ran over because he hurt his finger. When he was alerted to the numerous cuts on his leg, he simply said "Oh. That."
• Tanks, of course. But even then, some tanks are more indestructible than others. The famous M1 Abrams is known for handling quite a ton of punishment, but the design that takes the crown is the British-made Challenger 2, which shrugs off RPGs like pebbles and suffered its first combat loss to enemy fire in 2023 during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 25 years after it entered service; one of them ran right across a gigantic IED trap consisting of several artillery shells wired together under the road, and survived in one piece.
• Most cars are a literal example, but special mention must go to the mid-60s Imperial (division of Chrysler). This is a car so tough, it's been banned from demolition derbies. Problem being that since it doesn't break the force instead transfer to the passengers. Which is why most modern cars aren't this trope anymore. SAAB and Volvo also gained quite a reputation for safety and/or durability. Take this Top Gear test, for example. It was said that the pillars on SAABs were so strong that it negated the need for a rollcage in rallies, though regulations forced them to do so anyway.
  • And then there's this Volvo station wagon that kept on going despite being battered beyond recognition.
• The US Navy sailing frigate USS Constitution was a heavily built 48 gun frigate that entered service at the end of the 18th century. During the War of 1812, Constitution was in an engagement with the 38 gun HMS Guerrière. So the story goes, when the ships exchanged fire, the British cannonballs bounced off the sides of Constitution's hull, causing one American sailor to remark "Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!" Guerrière ended up surrendering after she was de-masted, and the Constitution would continue to have a long on-and-off career, serving to this day as a museum ship in Boston Harbor (and officially on the US Navy's roster of serving ships, although obviously she doesn't see combat anymore). Constitution picked up the nickname "Old Ironsides" from that battle.
  • When the US Navy built its first ships whose sides were literally Made of Iron, they decided to name one of the ironclads after Constitution. Faced with the problem that Constitution was still in commission and thus the name was unavailable, they named the new ship USS New Ironsides. New Ironsides proved to be durable even by ironclad standards, taking cannon fire hundreds of times over the course of the Civil War without suffering any damage or having any crew so much as injured. The only casualty in the New Ironsides crew over the entire course of the war was one man killed when the ship was hit by a spar torpedo, which also caused only minor damage to the ship. She certainly lived up to her namesake. Unfortunately, New Ironsides caught fire in port after the war and thus could not be preserved like Constitution.
• In a non-human example, the baby buffalo depicted in the famous "Battle at Kruger" video. The baby buffalo was chased, bitten, and dragged by several lions, before being bitten by a crocodile and nearly pulled into the water. The witnesses to the event were convinced the baby was dead, until it stood up and rejoined the other buffalo, completely unharmed.
• The "Durable" Mike Malloy, as explained here. As part of a life-Insurance Fraud scam, some bootleggers tried to murder him by repeatedly serving him enough alcohol to kill him several times over, then spiked his drinks with a succession of antifreeze, turpentine, horse lineament, rat poison, rotten oysters in wood alcohol, and finally sardines mixed with carpet tacks. After that didn't work, they got him drunk, stripped him naked, poured gallons of cold water over him, and dumped him in a snowdrift in midwinter New York. Then two separate attempts to fatally run over him in a taxi failed. He only died after they shoved a gas hose down his throat and gassed him to death.
• During World War I, Benito Mussolini had a bomb going off on his face (and we mean it literally: it was the munition of his bomb thrower, and it misfired). He was put in hospital, but he wasn't even scarred and had the gall to complain that the war ended while he was in hospital, unconvinced that War Is Hell.
• John Vereker, the 6th Viscount of Gort. His career was made out of being an iron Leeroy Jenkins Determinator. He was awarded the Victoria Cross, an honor you are more likely to receive dead than alive. Under heavy artillery and machine-gun fire, while wounded, he led his battalion to the "forming-up" ground, directed a platoon to proceed down a sunken road to make a flanking attack, went across open ground to obtain the assistance of a tank and direct it, get wounded severely again, only to get up from the stretcher for an I Can Still Fight! situation. He continued his command until the point of collapse, and even then refused to leave the field until he had seen the last success signal go up. He went on to lead the British forces early on in WWII, before becoming governor of Malta and leading the people through the relentless bombings. He was also one of the very last men to leave the beach at Dunkirk.
• From the real-life section of the Taking the Bullet page, Alexis Goggins. A learning-impaired seven-year-old girl dived in front of a gun to save her mother when her mother's ex-boyfriend carjacked them and then shot her mother twice. She was shot six times as a result—once in the arm, once in the chest, and a staggering four times in the head. Though it cost her an eye and a good number of surgeries afterwards, she managed to survive, and the man who shot her has sixty very long and doubtless very uncomfortable years in prison to look forward to. Considering that a single gunshot wound to any of the locations she was struck could kill an adult, the fact that Alexis took no less than six potentially lethal wounds all at once and survived without any subsequent diminished mental ability means that she has to be made of some mighty stern stuff.
• Hard to believe that Tyrannosaurus rex would need anything to make it more badass, but evidently it was Made of Iron as well. Pretty much every sizable T. rex fossil ever found has exhibited signs of broken limbs, bone-deep scars, crushed ribs, and massive festering wounds. Most of these wounds show signs of having partially or entirely healed over before death, suggesting these creatures remained capable of feeding themselves, even if their injuries included a crippled foot, fractured hip, crushed shoulder, or bitten-off tail.
• Anatoli Bugorski, a Russian scientist, was working at the Soviet Union's largest particle accelerator, the U-70 Synchrotron. On July 13th, 1978, as he was leaning over to check some malfunctioning equipment when the safety mechanisms for the accelerator failed. Bugorski was struck through the head by a proton beam traveling almost at the speed of light, which completely burned through his skin, skull, brain tissue, and came out the other side. He said he didn't feel any pain, but saw a flash "a thousand times brighter than the sun." When his face swelled up beyond recognition and skin started peeling off, he was rushed to a Moscow clinic. Bugorski's brain had been exposed to more than 200,000 rads.^note Radiation poisoning sets in at 100-200 rads, and is unpleasant, but usually survivable. 200-1000 rads cause serious illness and is more lethal with higher dosages. Anything about 1000 is almost universally fatal. Doctors believed there wasn't much they could do for him. Miraculously, not only did he survive with no damage to his intelligence and relatively minor side effects (deafness and paralysis on the left side of his face, tinnitus, fatigue, and occasional seizures), but he went back to work and completed his Ph.D.
• In 2006, railway switchman Truman Duncan fell off a moving train car, was pulled into the undercarriage, and sliced completely in half. Amazingly, not only did he survive that, but he remained conscious and calm enough to call 911 and his family before passing out from extensive blood loss, After spending three weeks in a coma and undergoing more than twenty surgeries over four months, he was confined to a wheelchair, but completely alive.
• In 2006, a high school teacher in Illinois attacked his teenage girlfriend, beating her and breaking her neck, among other things. After 30 hours, he led the police to where he left her body, except she was still alive. Oh, yeah, she was there in freezing temperatures and pouring rain, and also had insect bites all over her body that caused her to have a high fever, on top of her injuries.
• In 1987, Dayton Ohio resident Ahad Israfil, then only 14 years old, was working at a convenience store when his boss accidentally dropped a gun and blew off most of the right portion of his head and brain. He was immediately rushed to the hospital and, after a 5-hour operation, regained consciousness and even tried to speak. Though wheelchair-bound, Ahad retained his mental faculties and later went on to graduate with top honors.
• Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez, United States Army. He stepped on a Vietnamese landmine in 1965 and was told he might never walk again. He subjected himself to an agonizing unsanctioned physical therapy regimen until he walked out of the hospital in July 1966. He got back in country in 1968 and experienced his "six hours of Hell" on May 2, when he suffered a cartoonish amount of punishment^note First he was shot in the leg, then the thigh, then in the stomach and shrapnel when a grenade exploded behind him (which knocked him out for a while), shot in the other leg, hit in the face with a rifle butt (which broke his jaw), then stabbed with a bayonet (he proceeded to repeatedly stab his attacker with his own knife). When they finally evacuated him the shot to the gut had opened up and his lower intestine was falling out when rescuing a Special Forces patrol from a battalion of NVA. After evac, he was declared dead and the medical examiner was zipping up his body bag when Roy spat in his face. His CO only submitted him for a Distinguished Service Cross because he thought Roy might not live long enough to receive the Medal of Honor. It didn't get upgraded until 1981 and required a special exemption from Congress and an eyewitness account to the Army Decorations Board due to the statute of limitations. Roy took his rightful place in Valhalla in 1998.
• When one hears the words "tough warship" one usually thinks of something like a dreadnought-type battleship, and for good reason. However, there are some rather small ships that are nonetheless extremely tough. Enter the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate, which are rather small as warships go at a modest 4200 tons and not even 500 feet long; the average person could walk from stem to stern in about 3 minutes at a casual stroll. However, these ships are uncommonly tough even for their size. After being used as the target for a live-fire exercise, USS Thach was struck by the following:
  - 4 Harpoon missiles
  - At least 3 and as many as 9 Hellfire missiles
  - A Maverick missile
  - A 2000-pound bomb
  - A laser-guided 500-pound bomb
  - An Mk-48 torpedo
  Whereupon it took 12 hours for the Thach to sink. The 2000 pound bomb, Mk-48 torpedo, and each individual Harpoon missile should have been enough to sink a frigate-sized vessel, and the sheer number of missiles launched at the ship should have shredded its hull and let in seawater quickly... and yet the Thach still took half a day to properly sink.
• Imperial Japanese Heavy Cruiser Kumano survived several attacks which would be considered fatal to most battleships. Her bow was blown off, she was targeted by several airstrikes and American submarine wolf packs (one submarine ran aground trying to deal the Coup de Grâce), and finally sank at Santa Cruz after one more airstrike. Kumano was a ship of "nine lives," alright...
• Keith Richards, who has done every drug known to man, has been electrocuted, fallen out of a tree, arrested numerous times, and is still alive and kicking as of 2023.
• Marshal Jean Lannes, he was one of Napoleon's most able commander and survived many injuries which should have crippled or killed him including 1796 at Bassano was shot twice in the chest and leg several days later he rode in to battle to aid Bonaparte's assault on the bridge at Arcola where he was shot twice more in the chest and taken to the field hospital once he woke up and charged back into the fray a third bullet finally took him out of the fight, note he recovered fully after this. In Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign at the siege of Arce Lannes was short in the throat and left untreated for several hours he recovered fully with only some stiffness in his neck. The at Aboukir he was shot in the leg at point-blank range with no damage to the bones. However his luck was finally broken at the battle of Aspern-Essling when a cannonball shattered both his legs and he died from the wound and surgery, still a pretty impressive list of injuries especially considering late 1700-very early 1800s medicine.
• Combining this trope with Beauty Is Never Tarnished, in December 2010 a man named Jamie Hart was shot in the eye by his mentally ill ex-girlfriend. Even though he lost his eye, had to undergo reconstructive surgeries, and is still going through therapy from the trauma, he is otherwise as healthy as before and is still very handsome.
• Stuntman and actor Kane Hodder, famous for playing the Made of Iron immortal Slasher Jason Voorhees from part VII to Jason X, is actually as Made of Iron as Jason was before he became a zombie. The man has been on fire twice in his career. The first time a fire stunt gone wrong early in his career left Kane with massive third-degree burns on half his body. The scarring wouldn't have been so bad had the hospital treating him not been completely inept. The second time was the famous scene from Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, the one where Jason is lit on fire. That wasn't supposed to happen, the suit caught on fire due to a spark, and Kane was on fire for over a minute because he didn't want the scene to get ruined by the fire extinguishers.
• As depicted in the sports biopic Rush (2013), Niki Lauda could've been killed in that accident that left his face scarred for life and his lungs badly damaged from all the noxious fumes he inhaled. His doctors and his then-wife Marlene were certain that he was a lost cause and would succumb to his injuries at any moment, prompting Mrs. Lauda to have a priest administer the Last Rites to him. Turns out that said rites were given too soon, as Niki fought for his life and went on to mount a comeback, won two more championships, managed an airline company, and lived for forty-three years before passing away peacefully in 2019.
• World War II Japanese ace fighter pilot Saburo Sakai. He was able to return to base with his damaged Zero after having had paralyzed the left part of his body and being left blind of his right eye during a dogfight, flying for four hours that way and after almost crash-landing insisted on giving the mission report before receiving medical help. He also had to endure later on a long surgery with no anesthesia to be treated for his wounds and lived a total of 84 years.
• In France during the Ancien Régime, money counterfeiters were boiled, naked, bound from head to toe and thrown head-first into the water (not oil). In fact, the boiling always happened after the executioner strangled the condemned (a legal procedure called "retentum", to spare the criminal from the excruciating pain). On February 11th, 1488, a jeweler called Louis Sécrétain was boiled alive in Tours to deter others. After he was thrown into the cauldron, he emerged twice, screaming. The public thought the punishment was so horrifying that it provoked a riot. The executioner was beaten to death and the condemned saved from the cauldron. Secrétain received medical attention, survived, and was pardoned thanks to the King believing his survival was an act of God. Some versions of the story held that the 26-year old, already a father of two, would go on to have eight more kids with his wife!
• British aircraft carriers during World War II; intended to fight in close quarters regions like the Mediterranean and the North Sea, they were built with armored, metal flight decks and fairly small aircraft hangars (compared to wooden decks and large flight hangars of their American and Japanese counterparts). While this obviously meant they could put fewer aircraft into the air at any one time, it also meant they could take far more punishment. One American Admiral observing HMS Implacable during the attack on Okinawa noted that if a kamikaze hit an American carrier, it would mean several weeks in dry dock to repair the damage, but if it hit a British carrier it would be forty minutes and a couple of brooms to get the flight deck cleared and back to launching planes.
• During the 2020 George Floyd protests against Police Brutality, federal agents controversially sent to Portland (against the wishes of the city and state governments) engaged in some Police Brutality of their own. 53-year-old Navy veteran Christopher David became famous when a viral video showed him stoically standing in place while repeatedly getting beaten with the agents' clubs and also pepper-sprayed in the face, seemingly unaffected by it all, then Flipping the Bird at the agents as he walked away. It was revealed the next day this beating had broken several bones in his hand, but this didn't seem to phase him.
• Gary Busey, as of 2021, had survived a motorcycle crash that resulted in surgery (and a hole in his skull the size of a 50-cent piece) and recovered most of his fine motor control (that said, he does have brain damage that affected his mental filters), beat an addiction to alcohol and cocaine after overdosing due to a relapse, and got a tumor removed from his sinuses that caused him nosebleeds.
• British Airways Flight 5390 was going to be a routine flight for Timothy "Tim" Lancaster and his crew as they were bound for Málaga Airport in Spain. But shortly after takeoff, one of the BAC One-Eleven's windscreens separated from the plane, causing an explosive decompression which sucked Lancaster partway out of the plane, his body pinned against the window frame for twenty minutes all whilst Alastair Atchison, the co-pilot, was fighting to get the plane to safety while his comrades hold on to Tim's body. 300-mile-per-hour winds and frostbite battered Tim to a pulp, leading his colleagues to assume that he was certainly. They did contemplate letting his body fall away from the plane, but ruled it out as not only would throwing Tim's (seemingly dead) body out be a disservice to his relatives, there was a good chance his body would've ended up striking one of the engines, making the situation even worse had they done so. Atchison managed to land the plane with all of the passengers unharmed, but the crew were understandably sorry for whatever fate Tim had gone through. To the crew's surprise and relief, Tim somehow managed to survive the ordeal of having to ride face-first into violent winds and sub-zero frost, with frostbite, bruising, shock, and fractures to his right arm, left thumb, and right wrist. And after less than five months of recuperating from his injuries, Tim went back to service, piloting until he retired in 2008.
  • Credit also goes to Flight Attendant Nigel Ogden, who held onto the Captain as he was sucked out of the window. He suffered frostbite, damage to his eye and a dislocated shoulder, and he still didn't let go of the Captain's body until other crew members came to help him.
• Sir Roger Moore. Throughout his life, some of his many illnesses and disorders included several bouts of pneumonia (including a double bout that almost killed him at the age of five and another bout that momentarily left him unable to walk several decades later), being accidentally shot in the leg at the age of 14, which developed into a lifelong fear/hatred of guns, repeated kidney stones (both before and during his time as James Bond), diabetes, having a pacemaker put in and undergoing treatments for prostate and skin cancer. He did eventually pass away from liver and lung cancer in 2017, but just five months shy of his 90th birthday.
• Some neurological differences or disorders might cause people to seem like this, giving them a higher pain tolerance. This can backfire when they're seriously injured or hurt - for example, patients with leprosy (or Hansen's disease) can lose parts of their extremities from repeated injuries or infection due to unnoticed wounds.
• Figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu has racked up an impressive list of injuries, many of which have ended other skaters' careers. He collided with Yan Han during warmups at the 2014 Cup of China and proceeded to skate disoriented with a bandaged head and chin (both would require stitches), falling five times, and was still able to win the silver medal. The crash also gave him a bladder problem that necessitated surgery, during which he found out that he's allergic to alcohol. He has sprained his right ankle repeatedly, and damaged his Lisfranc ligament in his left foot. He successfully defended his title as champion in men's singles figure skating at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, while on painkillers for his ligaments and other unspecified injuries. He is also a survivor of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. On top of all that, his average ice practice time is noticeably shorter than fellow skaters because of his asthma (diagnosed at age 2). His ultimate goal is becoming the first man to land the quadruple axel in competition, a jump that has never been landed, and falling from an attempt at a quad axel "feels like being hit by a bus". At practice for the 2021 World Team Trophy, he tried to jump the quad axel eleven consecutive times and repeatedly fell. A testament of how durable Hanyu is can be seen in podium pictures: most skaters who medaled alongside him in his senior career has since retired, yet he has consistently remained on the podium (read: among the top three skaters in any given competition) since 2012, mostly winning golds and silvers.
• Albert Stevens despite being injected with a lethal dose of plutonium in 1945 and have the left lobe of his liver, his entire spleen, most of the ninth rib, the lymph nodes, and part of the pancreas removed, he survived and when on to live another 21 years and die of heart disease at the age of 79.
• Tsetse flies are much tougher than common house flies. They can survive being hit by flyswatters and it takes a lot of effort to crush them.
• Neanderthals were extremely tough. They had thicker bones, a larger ribcage, and stronger muscles than modern humans, giving them a considerable resistance to blunt force trauma. Multiple Neanderthal skeletons show fractures that healed, indicating that injuries like this were common. It's been theorized that this durability was needed for Neanderthals to tackle their much larger prey without being seriously injured, and if they were they had family members to help them. However, this adaptation came at the expense of various physical diseases like arthritis.
• Captain Carlos Dardano, the Captain of TACA Flight 110 that landed on a levee at NASA's Michoud assembly plant in New Orleans only has one eye. How did he lose one eye? Before flying for TACA, he worked at a small regional airline and got caught up in the crossfire during a gunfight in a civil war in El Salvador. He got shot, yet still managed to fly his plane and its passengers to safety with a bullet in his face.

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