5 Heroic Sacrifices By Real-Life Action Heroes

The train probably should have had some measures in place to prevent that from happening, and definitely should have had some means for putting out fires once they start, but the engineer on this day had just one instruction for the crew: "Jump for your lives!" Everyone obeyed except for the brakeman, who realized that letting the train roll into a population center and explode wasn't the ideal solution to this particular trolley problem.

So the brakeman stayed aboard. He threw open the throttle to get the locomotive moving as fast and as far as possible. When the fire reached the powder and the train blew up, he wasn't totally out in the wilderness, and the ensuing destruction of some barracks did kill a dozen or so laborers. But the explosion, which was big enough to shatter every window in town, was far enough away that he'd saved hundreds of lives. Then again, of course this guy was ready to lay his life down to save others. His name was Jesus Garcia. Jesus. (Pronounced differently, but still.)

They crashed because the captain was trying to impress his girlfriend, and thanks to that same kind of incompetence, the ship had skipped on the traditional disaster drills, and thus delayed any kind of evacuation. It took a full-fledged mutiny from the crew to overrule the captain and start filling the lifeboats. In the meantime, some passengers assessed the danger themselves and abandoned ship. Among them were a married couple, 60-year-old Nicole Servel and 71-year-old Francis. Francis had a life jacket, but Nicole did not. He handed his to her. Then, when Nicole still seemed reluctant to jump, he jumped first. Sans life jacket.

Typical Hollywood theatrics. How could they not have enough life jackets for everyone? Even airplanes manage to give each passenger their own life jacket, despite space being so scarce that they don't have enough room for legs. A giant cruise ship should be able to stock a hundred life jackets for each person. And, well, maybe this ship did. But the whole evacuation process was a shitshow, so passengers were scrambling and hurrying into desperate acts they never should have had to contemplate.

Francis drowned. Nicole jumped after him and lived, though she wasn't picked up by the lifeboats which ended up carrying away most of the surviving passengers. Instead her life jacket kept her afloat, and she drifted all the way to Isola del Giglio in Tuscany. There the locals helped her out of the water and got her into a church so she could warm up. News reports don't say whether for a brief period after, they made her their chief, but I'm not ready to rule anything out.

The flight never left the ground. The pilots slipped out through the cockpit escape hatch, which is a thing that exists. This left the hijackers with Plan B: Keep all 400 passengers aboard as hostages until they could figure out what Plan C was. One hijacker, deciding this called for some stagecraft, took to patrolling the plane stripped to the waist with a string of grenades across his chest. Then the murders began. The terrorists ordered flight attendants to collect everyone's passports so they could round up the Americans. They ended up killing every one they identified.

Which wasn't that many. Because every time the attendants collected an American passport, they hid it under a seat or dumped it in the garbage. Finally, 17 hours into the standoff, authorities stormed the aircraft, and the hijackers resorted to just killing everyone. The attendants opened the exit doors and started getting passengers out. The rest of the crew evacuated, but these stayed behind to help as many passengers escape as possible. One, Neerja Bhanot, died. Some people check out of their jobs. Some stay and do it 'til the end.

We see a monk running over a mountain path to a monastery in the Himalayas. He rings a giant bell, raising the alarm for some unspecified danger. Then we see the danger: a rising wave so big that it climbs over the highest mountains in the world. The monk keeps ringing stoically as the wave destroys the building with him inside it. It's a good trailer. In fact, it's a better film than the movie it advertises.

Anyway, that actually happened.

No, really. In March 11, 2011, eastern Japan was thoroughly shaken by one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded. But it was Tohoku's follow-up tsunami, an inevitable consequence of underwater earthquakes, that was responsible for some the worst effects, from the Fukushima meltdown to a fair chunk of the 20,000-person death toll.

Fujio Koshita was a firefighter in the village of Otsuchi, which had a system for warning people of tsunamis. It involved an alarm on top of the fire station blaring loudly and telling everyone to flee for higher ground before the wave came in. But when Koshita bolted into the station building to turn the alarm on, he found that he couldn't -- the quake had knocked out the power. So he retrieved a giant bell from storage, hauled it up to the roof, and rang. People heard and ran.

Koshita was 57. A younger firefighter made it to station as well, but Koshita dismissed him, telling him to leave and save himself. The water came in and reduced the building to splinters. A few days earlier, Koshita had given a speech to the station about how one shouldn't sacrifice themselves, but when his own life was on the line, that view seemed to change. But then again, his body was never found, so there's always the possibility that when Tohoku II hits, he'll just up and reappear, bell in one hand, triumphant middle finger to nature in the other.