War! You know what it is good for? Stories of unfathomable badassery, that's what. Over the years, we at Cracked have gathered a formidable collection of these stories, and we've put the very best of them here so that a whole new generation of readers can feel inadequate about their life choices. Read on and you'll learn all the military history too pants-burstingly awesome to make it into your history books.

94 Commandos in Fake Boobs and Blackface

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What if you had to disguise some commandos who were going to be walking right past enemy guards? You'd have to come up with something amazing -- lives are at stake here.

Or, you could come up with something so stupid that the enemy finds it too awkward to make eye contact. Such was the thinking of Israeli special forces commandos who infiltrated Beirut in 1973 to kill three leaders of the PLO. To not arouse suspicion, they took several hulking special forces guys and dressed them up as women, complete with wigs, high heels and fake boobs.



"Uh, guys, the mission's been over for like a month ..."

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Pairing up with men dressed as men, they walked along in each other's arms like they were on dates. They walked right past police, bodyguards, etc. without raising any questions, such as why that woman had a five o'clock shadow and an Adam's apple, or what that lump was that looked like an Uzi hidden under their clothes.

When they got to the Palestinian leaders' bedrooms, they kicked in the doors, whipped out their guns and killed everyone.

Oh, and lest you think this was a bad career move, one of the "women" was Ehud Barak, who later became Prime Minister of Israel and is currently Defense Minister.

Robert D. Ward

We repeat: People died because they mistook this man for a woman.

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The Israelis hardly invented this technique, by the way. In 1943, 11 Australian commandos, all white, disguised themselves as Malay fishermen by dyeing their skin brown and boarding a fishing boat. They sailed through 2,000 miles of Japanese-controlled ocean from Australia to Singapore. At one point they even traveled right alongside a Japanese warship without them noticing anything strange (which was good, because none of the commandos could speak Malay). They then took canoes right into Singapore Harbor, where they blew up seven Japanese ships before escaping.