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"Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?!"
Georges Scott
The Situation:
At five feet, six inches tall and 132 pounds, Sergeant Major Dan Daly was like a real-life Steve Rogers, if Steve Rogers had pooh-poohed the super soldier project because his balls pumped out all the super soldier serum he could possibly need. A former Commandant in the Marine Corps once called him "the most outstanding Marine of all time," and he's one of only two Marines to ever earn the Medal of Honor twice for separate actions -- the other of whom, Major General Smedley Butler, called him "the fightin'est Marine I ever knew."
His first Medal of Honor came during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when he singlehandedly defended a bastion wall swarming with Chinese snipers using only a bayoneted rifle. His second came 15 years later in Haiti, when he retrieved a lost machine gun (which weighed more than he did) from the bottom of a river and proceeded to use it to rain hellfire on the 400 Haitian insurgents who'd ambushed his patrol. That's right: At an age at which most people start to seriously think about switching to wheat bread, Dan Daly was renewing the nation's highest award for extraordinary heroism as if that sucker expires.
Underwood & Underwood
"I needed a new medal anyway. The ribbon on the old one kept breaking off during sex."
This brings us up to Daly's role in World War I and the Battle of Belleau Wood, where the then-First Sergeant risked his life to extinguish an ammo dump that had been struck by enemy fire. Two days later, with his unit pinned down and outgunned by the Germans, Daly walked up and down the line, cheering on each of his machine gun positions and straight-up daring any German bullets to hit him. When he judged it time to launch a counterattack, Daly leapt toward the enemy and shouted, "Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?!"
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