( Humans aren't the world's only war heroes. Get The De-Textbook for inspiring tales of dogs saving platoons, fighting alligators, and running back and forth across no man's land. )

It's not just that the people on this list were brave, or even crazy. It's that they seemed to be fighting a real war with the same selfless abandon with which you'd fight in a video game. The difference being, if you saw any of these happen in a game you'd call bullshit:

As always, the point of these articles is not to glorify war, which is horrible, but to appreciate the men and women who, in the midst of the horror, became superhuman.

6 Michael J. Fitzmaurice Jumps on a Grenade, Keeps Fighting

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The Man:

A specialist fourth class (U.S. Army) who was tasked with guarding an airstrip at a Marine base in Khe Sanh, South Vietnam.

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The Badass:

Michael Fitzmaurice had just returned from guard duty and was settling in to his bunker when the base came under heavy artillery and mortar fire. This was followed by the attack of charging North Vietnamese suicide bombers (or "sappers"), quickly turning the base into a pretty darn convincing imitation of Hell.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Fitzmaurice and his men had barely managed to fire off a few rounds at the enemy before the Vietnamese sappers threw three grenades into his bunker. Fitzmaurice grabbed two of the grenades and tossed them back outside, but knew he was running out of time on the third. So he jumped on it and covered it with his flak jacket. Yes, just like Captain America.

Nick Del Calzo via MSNBC

If he was played by Mr. Belvedere.

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You have to realize that no one dives on a live grenade with any expectation of life afterward, and Fitzmaurice was no exception. Incredibly, though, he did survive, although not unscathed (See: fucking grenade). The flak vest kept him from becoming a Jackson Pollock painting, but he still suffered severe shrapnel wounds, partial blindness, and partial deafness due to ruptured eardrums.

His immediate reaction to becoming violently deaf and blind was to have a word with the people responsible, and that word was the sound of enraged gunfire. Fitzmaurice jumped out of his hole and began firing on the enemy, aiming with the help of a nearby soldier who shouted target locations to him. He fired until the enemy threw yet another grenade at him.