Despite what movies, video games, and literature sometimes tell us, war is neither glamorous nor fun. What cannot be denied, however, is that war is also where you see regular , everyday people doing extraordinary shit you didn't even know was possible. So here is our latest attempt to salute those who, in the heat of battle, made fictional action heroes look like wet garbage:

5 Lyudmila Pavlichenko: The Mankiller

Via Badass of the Week

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The Soldier:

A Ukrainian-born sniper for the Soviet Union's 25th Rifle Division, who is still one of the top ten deadliest snipers in history.

Via World War II Database

The person who took this photo was immediately hit by a boomeranging bullet

The Badass:

Lyudmila Pavlichenko is the highest-scoring female sniper on record, with a count of 309 confirmed kills, 36 of which were enemy snipers. And while it's unfair to compare real-life soldiers with superhuman Hollywood killing machines like John Rambo, that's actually more people than Rambo killed on-screen -- in fact, it's more people than Stallone has killed in all of his movies combined. That's right -- this woman shot more people in real life than a man who was only pretending to do it with the aid of special effects, editing, and extras who weren't even trying to kill him back. They couldn't show Rambo killing that many, because it just wouldn't have been plausible.

Via Wikimedia

Also, there's no mention of her sounding like she was perpetually mid-stroke.

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Pavlichenko was already an accomplished sniper by the time she was 24 and Hitler decided that Russia was the final boss battle of his world domination game. And where a fictional badass gets his kills by mowing down rows of bad guys running mindlessly into his machine gun, Pavlichenko took hers out one at a time, carefully and patiently. Of her many duels with German snipers, Pavlichenko recalled the longest lasting over three days.