That's three days of waiting, perfectly still, in the cold and the silence, knowing that somewhere out there was a dude doing the exact same thing. Knowing that she'd never hear the bullet that took her out, if it ever came. As Pavlichenko said about the duel, it came to a close when the other guy "made one move too many."
jim pruitt/iStock/Getty Images
"That is why I have a stamp, and he has a bullet."
Finally, Pavlichenko and her spotter Leonid Kutsenko were caught by German artillery. Kutsenko was hit, and Pavlichenko knew he wasn't going to make it. Whereas most people would say "screw it" and flee from the steel raining from the sky, she laboriously lugged him back to camp (he still died, but that wasn't the point).
After that near-death experience, the Soviet Union decided to send her as a diplomat to the USe, where she was the first Soviet Citizen to ever be openly welcome in the White House. She even toured the country with Eleanor Roosevelt, advocating the equal treatment of women. She never got a big war movie made about her, probably because commie war heroes went out of style pretty fast after World War II, and because Hollywood prefers its female action heroes in some kind of tight black leather. She had to settle for being immortalized in a song by Woody Guthrie instead. Hey, that's almost the same thing, right?