Actually, yes. It turns out the history books are full of stories of soldiers doing things so badass they'd hesitate to put them into a film for fear of killing the realism. Like these five, for example.

We all understand that action movies are cheesy escapism. After all, could one commando really take out a whole compound full of bad guys?

5 Simo Hayha

Who Was He?

Simo Hayha had a fairly boring life in Finland. He served his one mandatory year in the military, and then became a farmer. But when the Soviet Union invaded his homeland in 1939, he decided he wanted to help his country.

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Since the majority of fighting took place in the forest, he figured the best way to stop the invasion was to grab his trusty rifle, a couple of cans of food and hide in a tree all day shooting Russians. In six feet of snow. And 20-40 degrees below zero.



Can you spot Hayha? Neither could the Russians.

Of course when the Russians heard that dozens of their men were going down and that it was all one dude with a rifle, they got fucking scared. He became known as "The White Death" because of his white camouflage outfit, and they actually mounted whole missions just to kill that one guy.

They started by sending out a task force to find Hayha and take him out. He killed them all.

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Then they tried getting together a team of counter-snipers (which are basically snipers that kill snipers) and sent them in to eliminate Hayha. He killed all of them, too.

Over the course of 100 days, Hayha killed 542 people with his rifle. He took out another 150 or so with his SMG, sending his credited kill-count up to 705.

Since everyone they had was either too dead or too scared to go anywhere near him, the Russians just carpet-bombed everywhere they thought he might be. Supposedly, they had the location right, and he actually got hit by a cloud of shrapnel that tore his coat up, but didn't actually hurt him, because he's the fucking White Death, damn it.

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Finally on March 6th, 1940, some lucky bastard shot Hayha in the head with an exploding bullet. When some other soldiers found him and brought him back to base, he "had half his head missing." The White Death had finally been stopped...

...for about a week. In spite of having come down with a nasty case of shot-in-the-face syndrome, he was still very much alive, and regained consciousness on March 13, the very day the war ended.

The Best Hollywood Could Come Up With:

Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) from Shooter:

In Shooter, Mark Wahlberg plays a reclusive, worn-out ex-sniper trying to escape the ghosts of his past. Bob Lee is called in by the FBI who want to know if he (hypothetically) wanted to murder, let's say, the president, how would he (hypothetically) do it? They claim that he's "the best there is" because after years of training with long-distance shooting, he successfully killed 70 men in the desert with one of these:

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Why it doesn't Compare:

Aside from the obvious fact that Hayha killed over 10 times as many men after only the most basic military training, he did it in 40-below weather, in the middle of the forest. And he did it all with one of these: