Dipprasad Pun
I seriously don't want to turn this website into Gurkha of the Week. I mean, honestly, I really don't. Sure, I have nothing short of an overwhelmingly unhealthy amount of respect for these Nepalese spike-devouring crotch-wreckers and their uncanny ability to routinely make the world a safer place by inserting their well-sharpened kukri blades into the softest parts of Democracy's enemies, but for the most part I generally prefer a little bit more variety when I write these stories up every week. In a perfect world, I'd like to jump around between daring tales of awesome high seas piracy one week, insane stories of Viking warriors cleaving faces apart with battle axes another, and wash it all down with some murderous gunslingers Swiss cheesing their foes with .45 caliber ammunition and World War II flying aces sending Me-109s spiraling to the turf in a hail of fire and bullets and dead Nazi pieces. That diversity is the sort of thing that keeps this entire process fresh, because if I wrote about the same stuff every single week most rational people would probably eventually get really fucking sick of hearing about the same thing over and over and over, and they'd start checking other sites and/or sending me bitchy emails about how I'm about as interesting as a judo chop to the throat.
What I'm saying here is that the Gurkhas need to stop going out and doing ridiculously badass shit every time I turn around, because that way I'll have a chance to write about something else on this website. Based on the insane story I'm bringing you this week, however, I'm fairly confident this is something that might never happen.
I very badly wanted to just work a bunch of terrible Puns into this article,
but that would only Dipprasad the point of this article.
Also I'm not very good with puns.
It was a long, cold evening in September of 2010 when Acting Sergeant Dipprasad Pun of the Royal Gurkha Rifles was serving as the lone on-duty guard patrolling a small two-story, one-room outpost on the edge of the Afghan province of Helmand. The 31 year old non-commissioned officer, one in a long line of hardcore Gurkha soldiers who had served the British Crown since before World War II, quietly killed time sitting around with three of his buddies, just shooting the shit or playing cards or doing whatever the fuck it is that badass soldiers do whenever they aren't clubbing fools to death with rifle butts or dancing the typewriter while crotch chopping sideways across the countryside. Just another quiet night in lovely Afghanistan. Or so he thought! (DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNN!!!!!)
Suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere and without any warning, a cow reared its head back and mooed REALLY FUCKING LOUD. No shit, folks, that's how this story starts – a cow or a donkey or something honks out some probably-hilarious livestock-y noise outside the guard post where Pun is sitting quietly with his homeboys, and the next thing you know the manure is splattering into the HVAC intake fan. Sgt. Pun instinctively snapped his head over to look at the barnyard noise, presumably thinking to himself hey what the shit is going on with this cow mooing all willy-nilly at this time of the day without any warning, and no sooner did this guy look out the window than his eyes immediately fell onto to two men crouched in the middle of the road fucking around with some kind of weird device. Alarm bells immediately started clanging in Pun's head, and this battle-hardened Gurkha immediately sprang to his feet and rushed up the ladder to the roof of the guardhouse to get a better look. From the higher vantage point he did indeed see that it was in fact two guys fucking with some kind of device, so Pun of course shouted out for them to identify themselves. They did. With bullets.
Seven Taliban fighters with heavy weapons. Pun was up against two or three times this many.
And so, just as suddenly as the mournful mooing of the cow had broken the peaceful silence of the Afghan countryside, now the sky was filled with 7.62 millimeter bullets, epic profanity, and the tell-tale contrails of rocket-propelled grenade fire, as out of fucking nowhere somewhere between 15 and 30 Taliban warriors launched a balls-out attempt to smear poor Sergeant Pun all across the roof of his guardhouse. Gunfire was whizzing in from every direction, rock and smoke was getting kicked up all over the place, and Pun pretty much nearly shit a brick as RPG fire blew giant chunks out of the building he was standing on.
But then, after a brief moment of, "What the fuck did I get myself into?", Dipprasad Pun suddenly and instinctively kicked it into Ultimate Mega Gurkha Freak-Out Limit Break Mode. In a moment of berserker clarity, Pun took one look around, grabbed the heavy machine gun that had been positioned on the roof, and decided that if he was going to die he was going to make goddamned sure that he took as many of those fuckers with him as possible. With a mighty yell, the 5' 7" tall Sergeant shouted "I WILL KILL YOU ALL RARARARGHGHGHHH!!!!!!!" in his native language, ripped the machine gun up off its fucking tripod, and started firing indiscriminately at everything around him in one gigantic Rambo-style clusterfuck of munchy crunchy full-metal-jacketed carnage.
"Who are you?"
"I'm your worst nightmare."
For the next fifteen minutes or so, Sergeant Dipprasad Pun went completely fucking out of his mind batshit insane. Surrounded on all sides in a scene that makes me think of the rooftop finale for Mercy Hospital in Left 4 Dead, Pun fought off assaults from all sides of his fortified rooftop position, somehow avoiding being shot by thirty-plus guys with automatic weapons and explosives launchers as he laid down a curtain of bullets so over-the-top that it would have made John Woo jizz. Firing from the hip like the goddamned Terminator wasting those cop cars with the minigun in T2, Pun held back the Taliban assault on the town, blowing through all 400 rounds of ammunition for the machine gun – every single bullet in the rooftop bunker – in the span of just a few minutes. When the supply of large-caliber heavy weapons ammunition ran out, Pun ditched the MG and started grabbing grenades, two at a time, chucking them in every direction like he was dishing out beads from a Mardi Gras rooftop (only instead of topless drunk babes he was throwing them at terrorists, which is pretty much the exact opposite of topless drunk babes, but whatever). Seventeen high explosive fragmentation grenades cratered the landscape around him, fragging the shit out of anything that did or didn't have a bullet in it, but yet this insane-o-tron motherfucker still wasn't done turning himself into a one-man nuclear explosion – he was determined to put out more firepower than a friggin' Cylon Basestar, and nothing was going to stand in the way of his inexorable desire to massacre the bejeezus out of any terrorists within a twenty-mile radius. With his machine gun and grenade supply depleted, he kicked over the ammo boxes, pulled his service rifle and continued popping caps into any and all deserving asses.
Now, at this point you'd think that the Taliban guys would be like what the fuck, this guy is out of his mind insane, let's just leave him alone and put our bullshit IED in some other village and forget about this place, but apparently this wasn't the case on this particular September evening. One Taliban fighter who, depending on how you look at it, was either delusionally insane or one of the bravest men in the history of warfare, decided that rather than run fleeing from this psychotic Gurkha spinning around in circles dishing out death to everyone in a 360-degree arc, he was going to climb up the tower and try to bum rush the Nepalese berserker off the roof of the guard house.
This, as you might expect, does not end well for him.
This expression is probably the last thing most of those guys saw.
You see, Sergeant Pun's spider sense started tingling as soon as he he saw this AK-47 swinging Taliban soldier scrambling onto the roof of the tower, and if there's one thing you've learned about this guy it's that he did not in any way intend to go down without an utterly epic fight. As the Taliban soldier scrambled to his feet, Pun immediately swung his L85 Enfield assault rifle to bear, sighted down the barrel, and pulled the trigger.
Click.
Nothing happened. Weapon malfunction. So now, with less than a second to fuck around with before this Taliban guy pulled up his AK and smoked Pun straight into the "posthumous medal recipient" column of the Sunday Times, this fearless Gurkha kept his composure, stayed cool, and did what any ultra-insane badass would have done in this situation – he improvised.
Sergeant Dipprasad Pun grabbed the tripod for his machine gun up off the deck, collapsed it down, and chucked it straight into that douchebag's face as hard as he could.
An M122 tripod.
Now, don't go thinking that this is like flimsy plastic digital camera tripod or some shit – this was a serious chunk of metal designed to support the weight of a heavy machine gun, and it's built sturdily enough to survive being dropped out of a fucking airplane. I'm not sure exactly what model of equipment Pun was dealing with here, but the U.S. M122 tripod weighs in at 16 pounds, which is roughly the same as two gallons of milk, so I can only imagine that getting your face rocked with this was kind of like getting pegged in the eye with a goddamned warhammer. The brave (if not misguided) Taliban trooper took it off the face, reeled backwards, and fell from the roof. Pun, unfazed, continued busting asses, single-handedly holding off a coordinated Taliban attack by himself and thwarting a would-be roadside bombing in the process. The Conspicuous Gallantry Cross medal citation he received last month also credits him with saving the lives of the three men inside the tower as well. I have no idea what the fuck those guys were up to during the battle, but I guess the important thing is that it seems to be a pretty agreed-upon fact that all 400 machine gun bullets, 17 grenades, and god-knows how many rifle rounds were all discharged solely by Pun in his ridiculous rampage, so it's probably safe to say those guys were pretty content to chill out and just stay the fuck out of this guy's way. Pun is also credited with setting off a land mine (how that fits into the story I have no idea), and of course pummeling a dude in the skull with the machine gun tripod.
In true badass fashion, when the battle was over, reinforcements had arrived, and the smoke had finally cleared, Sergeant Pun's company commander quietly walked up to him, slowly looked the blood-lusted Sergeant over, patted him once on the back, and simply asked, "You OK?" Pun nodded, dazed, but unhurt. The company commander nodded once and walked away without a word. All in a day's work for the Royal Gurkha Rifles.
