Thanks, WordMan.
You certainly do! :eek:
Wow! Some intense experiences in this thread!
I’ve jumped into the middle of two domestic disturbances, each time keeping a drunk husband from killing his wife. One of those drunks leveled a shotgun at my gut as I shielded his bloody and battered wife. I managed to keep talking calmly trying to defuse the situation and keep him occupied until the cops showed up. I kept mentally picturing the shotgun as a fishing pole in order to keep the ol’ brain in denial while I talked.
I was once a passenger in a car driven by a wild drunkard. He kept purposefully missing parked cars by inches to hear me yell. He would not stop and let me out because it was all too much fun. Eventually, he rolled the car and as we slid down the road on our roof I remember yelling “Man, you’ve killed us!” His response, “I know!” Then we hit the curb and the roof crashed up into us. The car went end over end down an embankment to end up in a parking lot, on its smashed roof, twenty yards from a parked police car! I actually managed to walk away with just bumps and bruises.
About two years ago I was driving back to Davis from Sacramento in my teentsy little '84 Nissan Sentra. There’s this stretch of freeway just before you hit town where it’s just straight going for about six miles. I was cruising along in the center lane about four miles over the limit and coming up on a giant SUV, a Ford Leviathan or whatever they’re called in the slow lane. Suddenly, he decides to make a lane change without a) looking or b) signaling. I slammed on my breaks, but his back bumper would still have nailed me, so I swerved hard into the fast lane, which put me into a spin. I made one complete counter-clockwise spin, I remember seeing the median wall flash in front of me and thinking quite clearly I was going to die, and one quarter-spin so that I ended up stopped perpendicular to the fast lane in rush-hour traffic. There was a car stopped about two and a half feet from my driver’s side door. I looked down, took a deep breath, started the engine, put my car into gear, and drove home. Nobody got touched. The Leviathan never even noticed.
I went home and got very drunk.
I am, on consideration, a lucky man…
Age 7: walking on the sidewalk in Cologne, a rear cover came loose from a passing truck. It missed me, killed my mother who was walking next to me.
age 9: We were playing in the dunes in Holland, found a WWII phosphor grenade. My friends try to detonate it by throwing it against a hard surface :eek: I started running, but had they succeeded that’d been it
age 9: Pulling out of a (parallel) parking spot in southern Germany, we get hit head on by a drunk driver in a big mercedes - he was going over 100kmph (a little over sixty mph) My stepmom was hurt a litle, the car was totalled, and I learned on an intimate level the importance and working of seatbelts.
age 14: Trying to cross a busy intersection in Holland real quick before approaching traffic, the handlebars of my bicycle snapped off. I fell to the pavement, hit my head - in the middle of the intersection. Next thing I remember is about 10 seconds later: looking up at the underside of the front-end of a tour-bus. Had he hit the brakes a second later, that would at least have resulted in very serious injury.
age 18: I got shot at, ineptly.
Age 20; I’m drunk in Amsterdam, having literally spent by last cash on beer. Guy pulls a knife on me, wants my money. I smile at him, suggest we start looking and split what we find (I was very drunk). The guy eventually walked off.
Age 23: I’m in Maryland in my Pontiac Sunbird (With Turbo! I loved that car!)
Making a left turn on an intersection, I get sideswiped by a truck. Car is totalled (in fact, some pieces ended up in Delaware - no kidding). I walk away - having learned the importance of seatbelts earlier -see above
age 25: Meeting with a customer, in his office in a scrap yard in rural Georgia. He pulls out what I now know to be a 9mm, points it at me, and states: “let’s talk about them prices you’ve been quoting me” . Turns out he feels that my handling of his business aggrieved him greatly, and made him feel disrespected. I use some choice profanities when telling him to put the gun away - which he does - and of course, he was “just kidding”. Later I found out that he was “known” to have killed at least 2 people. Not sure of the truth of that, but regardless, this freaked me out.
Age 32: I’m in a meltshop of a steel mill. A white hot shock-absorber comes flying out of the furnace (some remaining liquid in it got superheated when the absorber hit the molted steel bath, expanded rapidly, and propelled this thing most impressively) It missed me by a good 20 yards - but it scared me silly.
It is amazing how little time I managed to spend in steelmills since then for someone with my job…
Oops, make that three-quarter spin, I was perpendicular to traffic but facing the meridian wall.
About 5 years ago or so, I was driving my little Honda Civic hatchback to the airport to pick up then boyfriend, now hubby DeathLlama. I had just gotten over into the right lane to take the next exit.
Traffic stopped suddenly in the lane (police report later showed there was a large tire tread–people were stopped to try to swerve around it), and I had to brake hard to avoid rearending anyone. I figured it was just airport traffic and didn’t think much of it, except we were stopped for such a long time. To my right was a concrete construction wall, and to my left traffic continued to whiz by me at 70-80mph. I felt very nervous being the last car in a long line stopped cars, and with good reason–more than once someone came flying up behind me and swerving suddenly to the left.
At one point I heard a sound–I don’t remember if it was a loud air horn or the sound of screeching brakes–but when I looked in my rearview mirror, I saw a 55 ton 18 wheeler skidding toward me. He’d seen me too late, and all I had time to think was, “He’s not going to be able to miss me.” Thankfully, he’d braked in time enough to spare my life. The trailer scraped alongside the left corner of my Honda–essentially taking that corner off, as well as taking out the tires, windows, bumper, etc, and leaving about 6 feet of blue paint on the trailer.
My car was totaled, but I was fine. The only mark on me was a sizeable bruise on my hip from the seat belt buckle.
The somewhat amusing part was that the back end of my car basically had a bite taken out of it, but the front end dutifully kept on running…the engine was purring, the a/c I’d just spent $600 repairing was doing its job, and Sheryl Crow was still playing on the stereo.
Nice sheltered suburban life, here. I’ve been in a few auto accidents, but nothing seatbelts couldn’t handle. I did get shot in the head in Berkeley, but it was a BB gun, and didn’t penetrate (freaked out the lady who cut my hair, though – the damn thing stuck).
As a motorcycle commuter for 20 years, I’ve come within a split second of death a handful of times, sometimes through my own misjudgement, more often by the stupidity of others. I’ve also been chased by road-ragers a couple of times, but I lost them easily.
It actually took me a few minutes to figure out what it meant to arend someone, let alone do it again. 
(Get it? re-arending)
And;
I’ve been rearended. Saw it coming, like you. Takes a long time, huh? I wasn’t hurt, but my nether valve still puckers, just thinking about it.
Excellent stories. Life’s a kick, ain’t it? 
Peace,
mangeorge
Had some tube artillery dropped on our [tank] platoon’s position, don’t know the exact caliber but it was probably Soviet 122mm, or thereabouts.
Throw (I mean, really THROW) a handfull of uncooked popcorn into a big metal pot and that kind of approximates the sound of shrapnel hitting the side of a tank.
One of the arty rounds took out the radio antenna’s on one of our platoon sergeant’s tank; he followed standard NBC protocol for arty barrage and immediately buttoned up and kicked on the Overpressure System.
Which immediately spewed a hellacious cloud of dust, causing his platoon leader to jam the company net screaming over and over, “RED 4’s HIT! RED 4’s HIT!” Red 4 could still recieve in spite of his antenna damage, but realized that he wasn’t transmitting. SO he pops his TC hatch, rummages through the TC sponson and starts popping off green star clusters to get his LT’s attention and let him know they were okay.
But them star clusters attracted the attention of every friggin’ T-72 in front of our company position. Had some T-72’s shoot at us, and some 100mm Anti-Tank Guns, too. Soviet 125mm makes a wooshing noise as it goes by kind of like high-speed fighter jets make in the movies; oddly, the 100mm rounds had kind of a droning buzz, like the world’s largest supersonic bumblebee.
Only time I was really nervous, we had some A-10’s eye-balling us reaalll hard, trying to figure out if we were fish, fowl, or goode red meat. Nothing like a bunch of fully-loaded A-10’s circling you like buzzards to get the old ticker pumping. Fortunately, one came in for a close eyeball; he waggled his wings and they all flew off looking for someone else to blow up.
Note: Those of you with thrilling tales of modern urban life, please forward the names of the cities where you had these experiences, so as I know where NOT to live.
A Note To The Young’uns Contemplating Uniformed Service: “Adventure” & “Excitement” are what happens to people in extremely deep shit a very long way from home.
ExTank, a point of order:
A Note To The Young’uns Contemplating Uniformed Service: “Adventure” & “Excitement” are what happens to OTHER people in extremely deep shit a very long way from home.
I dont’ know if my stories compare to some of the ones already told but here goes…
I was 20 or 21 and living in Athens, GA when I was temporarily without car. So I walked up to the grocery store one afternoon and this guy started following me. In broad daylight. I specifically remember his bad Michal Jackson jacket. He kept following me and flashed a knife at me. (I’m not totally positive about this. I was really rattled but he had something in his hand he held down low.) Finally, some cars pulled up to the stop sign and I walked over to them. They looked at me like I was crazy but the guy stopped following me and I got home. Sounds minor but I don’t know when I’ve been more scared. The guy was acting totally nuts.
Three years ago, we were out rowing in the evening in January. It was really dark on the river but we were in an eight with a coxswain. When you row, you face backwards and I was in the bow which means the front of the boat. Here’s an example; that’s actually me in the bow of this boat in San Diego. We were in the middle of a full-pressure piece when I hear shouting behind me. I turn and fifteen feet off the bow of the boat, I see a large, sight-seeing paddle boat (specifically, this one, the picture is small). I yell to check the oars (hold them square in the water perpendicular to the boat) but nothing stops on a dime on the water. The paddle boat is actually a pontoon boat and we were going to slide under (with no clearance) so I turned in my seat and caught the impact with my shoulder. My feet were still strapped in and my foot was crushed. But we didn’t go under. To this day, I wake up with nightmares about what would have happend if the site-seers hadn’t seen us. The coxswain and the paddle boat captain didn’t have a clue. I would have taken the impact across my lower back and have been paralyzed or killed…
Jeeze, I keep remembering these wierd happenings.
I was heading to Berkeley in my old VW Rabbit (loved that car) one night in the wee hours, going past the San Leandro area, when a cop red lighted me. I was doing maybe 5 over, so I prepared to stop. He hollered at me to take the next ramp, which some cops do when it’s busy(it wasn’t), so I did. At the first street he told me to take a right and turned off his major lights. Now I’m getting kinda jumpy, 'cause he was directing me to a desolate area. Cops don’t normally do that, so a flipped a U and got my ass back up on the freeway. He didn’t come after me, which is a bad sign right there. Cops are control freaks. They always come after you. I don’t know for sure what he was up to, but it was no good. I followed the news for months afterwards to see if any strange things happened involving a rogue cop.
I feel a little guilty even today for not reporting it, but I’d have had to ditch some recreational herb, plus I don’t always trust cops I don’t know. I caught a lot of flak for reporting a cop in Kern County many years ago, but that’s another story.