Michael Groves
Somali pirates are pretty fucking badass. First off, they're pirates. With assault rifles, rocket launchers, and outboard motors. Secondly, they net some pretty goddamned big prizes these days. Sure, there aren't Spanish galleons loaded with gold doubloons floating around all over the place just asking to be pillaged and plundered, but, then again, capturing a goddamned container ship filled with Russian tanks can be more lucrative than you'd think. According to that article I just linked to (the one with all the blue letters up there), these pirates basically capture ships, ransom them for something on the order of $2 million a pop, and then go home to their mansions, bang their supermodel mistresses, and buy all the newest video games the day they come out. It's yo ho, yo ho, a pirates' life for these scurvy bastards, and business is good - they make a ton of money, terrorize the seas, and sailors pretty much everywhere fear them.
Well, there's one man who isn't impressed.
In November 2005 Michael Groves was the master-at-arms aboard the luxury cruise ship Seaborne Spirit, cruising about 100 miles off the coast of Africa, when all of a sudden he received a report on his radio that two speedboats were tearing ass full-speed towards the ship. Groves ran out onto the deck to see what the fuckballs was going on, and was promptly greeted by a hail of bullets. Roughly a dozen badass, murderous Somali pirates were on their way to fuck Seaborne Spirit's ass up, and Groves, a British ex-cop, now found himself in John McClane's shoes - one man, up against a small, well-organized group of balls-out motherfucking terrorists with machine guns.
The only difference: Michael Groves didn't have a gun. Also, this was real life.
The Seaborne Spirit, being a high-end, id="mce_marker",000-a-night luxury ship, didn't exactly leave port outfitted with depth charges, surface-to-surface torpedoes, and heavy machine guns mounted on the deck rails every hundred yards or so, and it certainly wasn't one of those crazy-ass sci-fi ships that can transform into a giant surfing robot with plasma missile launchers on its shoulders that smashes battleships into driftwood by swings Humpback Whales around like baseball bats. But Michael Groves knew that he was the only line of defense between these bloodthirsty buccaneers and the 300 men and women aboard his ship, so he improvised - he grabbed the first thing he could get his hands on, which just so happened to be the ship's fucking high-pressure fire hose, charged to the railing while AK-47 fire zipped around his head, and let those motherfuckers have it:
"You get to drink... from the FIRE HOSE!"
Groves blasted the pirates' speedboat with a high-velocity stream of water so powerful that it's capable of stripping paint off a ship's hull. Getting nailed by a cruise ship fire hose is kind of like having your buddy pump a SuperSoaker BFG 9000 like eight million times and then shooting you in the face with it from about six inches away. This stream blew the shit out of the pirates, driving them back, but Groves knew this wouldn't be enough to contain the badassitude of some non-parrot-wearing nautial terrorists. He ran back to the ship's armory to grab another tried-and-true Anti-Pirate Device - an apparatus known as a Long-Range Acoustic Device. Also known by the clever acronym LRAD, this badass futuristic non-lethal weapon emits a brain-crushing wave of sound louder than roughly two thousand Ozzfests taking place inside your skull at the same time.
Well, the pirates weren't fucking around any more either. When the salty sea-dogs got finished peeling their faces off the sides of their motorboats, they fired a broadside of rocket-propelled grenades at the feisty cruise ship. An RPG smashed into the ship, knocking Groves to the deck. His fellow security officer, and ex-Gurkha named Som Badhur Gurung, ran up, grabbed the LRAD, set it up on the railing of the ship, and promptly got shot in the fucking face by an AK-47.
That was fucking it. Groves got ultra giga ripshit cheesed off, jumped back up to his feet, grabbed his seriously-wounded comrade, pulled the dude to safety, and immediately headed back to operate the LRAD. Around this time, a SECOND fucking barrage of rocket-y crunchy death cockslapped the cruise ship, sending everybody to the deck again and probably making the terrified passengers completely seasick in the process. Michael Groves didn't give a shit. He ran over to the railing, and from his completely-exposed position he blasted the pirates with a solid wall of sound -- 150 decibels of ear-splitting, hysteria-inducing screeching. The Somali pirates had their hair blown to the back of the auditorium pretty much immediately. They weren't funky enough to handle the hot beats of a constant stream of sound ranging somewhere between "Pain Begins" and "Death of Hearing Tissue" on the decibel loudness comparison chart, so they bugged out and headed home.
Michael Groves was a badass motherfucker who defended the innocent people of his ship from modern-day pirates by brown-noting their asses until they packed up their shit and fucked off. For his selfless heroism and insane fearlessness rescuing a wounded man and single-handedly running off two ships loaded with rocket launcher-toting African terrorists usting nothing more than a couple of improvised non-military weapons and some really foul language, Michael Groves was personally awarded the Queens Gallantry Medal at Buckingham Palace by the British monarch herself. He's a modern-day civilian hero of the War on Terrorism, and the most recent in a long-line of hardcore, scrotum-crushing, pirate-killing motherfuckers.
A photo of the pirates, taken by a passenger aboard the Seaborn Spirit.