My Hero Tuesday

K, I'm having a bit of trouble deciding what day Tuesday should be for this blog, so I'm auditioning different days. This week's Tuesday is My Hero Tuesday. Today I will introduce a real live hero. I give you Bishnu Shrestha.

Bishnu Shrestha wasn't looking for a fight on the evening of 2 September 2010. The 35 year old veteran was finally on his way back home, having just retired from his position as a Naik (Corporal) in the 7th Battalion of the 8th Gurkha Infantry – a famous, battle-hardened regiment of butt-kickers that spends their days crushing the skulls of terrorists like tomatoes in the palms of their hands. Gurkha warriors can be found in Iraq, Afghanistan, and probably a half-dozen other locations that may never be declassified. After having spent a good part of his adult life slicing through the enemy his ultra-awsome kukri knife, Shrestha was looking forward to finding a girl and settling down to the monumental task of making mini-Bishnus. 

 

Around midnight, the train he was riding unexpectedly ground to a halt. Without warning, while everyone was still trying to figure out what the crap was going on, from every direction passengers stood up and began to whip out all manner of frighteningly gruesome-looking weaponry – guns, knives, clubs and giant swords (seriously, who robs a train with a sword!) – and started shouting for everyone to sit still, get out their valuables, and prepare to get ripped right the hell off.

From a side door more armed thugs leapt onto the train. Dozens of cranked out thugs made their way down the aisles stealing wallets, tearing jewelry from the necks of old women, snatchin’ laptops and cell phones, and waving knives in the faces of terrified hostages.

At first Bishnu Shrestha just sat there quietly. Not saying anything. Not betraying his emotions. When the goons threatened his life if he didn't hand over his wallet he did what anybody with access to a sane mind would, he handed it over. A Wal-Mart wallet with a few bucks and a nudey picture of  the latest Bollywood tart is not worth dying for.

But then the situation spiraled into the realm of FUBAR. You see, Shrestha was sitting near a sweet, innocent 18 year-old girl, and when this gang of baby-choking terrorists came by her seat they decided it would be an awesome show of their manhood to be the complete freaking slime of the earth and gang-rape her in front of her own petrified parents. As the young woman cried in despair, the terrorist leader ripped her shirt from her body.

That was it. For Bishnu Shrestha, it was so on.

Unfortunately, for the kitten drowning gangsters, when they had robbed Bishnu they'd made one fatal mistake: They didn't take his kukri. This ultra-hard Gurkha warrior, who'd been fed a steady diet of steel tacks and the corpses of his slain enemies, had given up his money, but knew better than to ever relinquish his weapon. Now these wankers were going to see what Gurkha punishment tastes like, and it tastes like dental-grade pain and a roll of nasty old pennies.

Corporal Shrestha jumped to his feet, drawing the ultimate symbol of a Gurkha warrior with one fluid motion. He flew across the train car, grabbing the would-be rapist soon-to-be flailing corpse from behind in a sleeper hold, pulled him up off the girl, and used him as a human shield while he lunged out slashing one of the sword-swinging bandits, sending him spinning off in a vicious tornado of blood and screams. One of the other terrorists, unwilling to stab in the direction of his own boss, instead took the manly man's route and tried to cut the girl, slashing his knife wildly at her neck, but the girl only took a minor wound before Shrestha dropped him with a lightning-quick strike. With the terrorists in the immediate vicinity disposed of, he sliced the throat of his human shield and went looking for more pathetic excuses of human existence to get his blood-rage off on.

The news reports are pretty vague about what happened during this epic battle, where one Gurkha nut-stomper carved his way through a pack of 40 merciless cutthroats (indeed, even the above paragraph is a little bit of pulp fiction editorializing – merely my interpretation of the phrase "he took control of the attacker and killed everyone around him") but the fact of the matter is that after his initial ambush this ex-military cyborg from one of the most over-the-top bat guano-insane military organizations in the world suddenly found himself in the middle of a hostage-filled train crawling with well-armed, highly-organized terrorists. This was Die Hard without the cowboy references. Delta Force without Lee Marvin. Under Siege without the Dramamine and Passenger 57 without the always betting on black thing. 

Over the next twenty minutes, Corporal Bishnu Shrestha raced through the aisles giving those wanna-be punk thugs a first-class ride on the Pain Train to Severed Arteryville, cutting, dodging, and back-alley knife fighting anything carrying a weapon larger than a ball-point pen. He took on the entire train – 40 men – at once, killing three and wounding eight more with a ferocious series of face-stabs and groin kicks the that would guarantee every single one of those eyeball eaters would be coughing up blood and doing an impression of Snow White for the next several decades.  Even after he took a wicked sword blow that severed every major artery and vein in his left hand, he continued carving up slimebags with his kukri, all the while spraying what I like to imagine to be a pseudo-comical amount of blood from his non-killing hand.

The sight of a real man was too much for those weak-willed thugs, and once they realized that they weren't just robbing crippled old ladies of their wedding rings and were instead facing a psychotic Gurkha Mecha-warrior, they dropped all their loot and ran for it like scared little kittens. In just over twenty minutes, Shrestha had neutralized a whole freaking terror cell. When the train pulled into the next station, police and emergency personnel were there to treat the wounded and rush Shrestha to the hospital, where he spent two months recovering from the injury to his hand. When the police searched the dead, dying, and mutilated thugs, they recovered 40 gold necklaces, 200 cell phones, 40 laptops, and nearly $10,000 in stolen cash. Those idiots lucky enough to be left alive were hauled off to jail.

Bishnu Shrestha was temporarily un-retired from the Gurkhas for the purposes of being promoted and subsequently awarded two medals for sheer awesomeness. His former unit also awarded him with a presumably-rightously-looking silver-plated kukri (kind of like how when you beat Goldeneye you unlock the Silver PP7) and a cash bonus of 50,000 Rupees. The Indian Government also awarded him the bounty on the heads of this vicious gang, and granted him discounted airfare and train tickets for the rest of his life. I guess after hearing this guy's insane story they just decided to say,  "Forget those backscatter ultra-invasive x-ray machines, the best anti-terror homeland security measure our country can take is to make sure this guy is on as many flights and trains as possible."

Ultimately, like a truly awesome person of awesomness, Bishnu Shrestha doesn't need any thanks for doing what he needed to do. The family of the girl he saved offered him a reward of $6,500, but Niak Bishnu Shrestha never stopped by to collect. That wasn't the point. The ultra-tough super warrior himself said it best, responding to reporters by saying, "Fighting the enemy in battle is my duty as a soldier.  Taking on the thugs on the train was my duty as a human being."

Bishnu Shrestha