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What the fuck is going on?
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What izzat? What izzat noise?
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What in God's name...?
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Gawdammit Jones!
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Can you dragTHUMPthat thingTHUMPsomewhere else?THUMP
"Make me!"
We'll call him... Chief Petty Officer Jones.
Chief Jones is a tough hombre. Tough as old boots. Tough as iron nails. Rowdy Roddy Piper, "They Live" fight scene tough. How can I explain this to you?
Chief Jones is five feet, ten inches tall, and he weighs two hundred seventy five pounds. He is built like a statue of a forgotten Greek god, animated by magic. (Chief Jones is also very, very ugly, and he will be the first to admit it.)
Chief Jones is capable of full-motion leg presses in excess of 700 pounds, in sets of 10, and can lift the front end of a right-hand drive Toyota Corolla, with driver inside, by the front right wheel well and parallel park it under his own power.
Chief Jones' idea of a warm-up is to beat the shit out of a five foot tractor tire with a 20 pound sledgehammer for fifteen minutes. I was half his age at the time, and in excellent shape, and was able to match his pace for five minutes. And for his next trick, ladies and gentlemen, watch as he grabs the ten foot rope attached to said tire, and drags it around the compound a few times (2.45 miles total) at a flat run.
If he got a big Superman "S" tattooed on his chest, I could not find it in myself to think that it didn't belong there.
Chief Jones is known in some circles as "Juggernaut", and if I could have one person in the whole world on my side in a bar fight, it would be him. An apocryphal Jones story says that when he was younger, and somehow even more frighteningly powerful, somebody tried to start a fight with him in a bar. Jones stopped the fellow cold when he said, "Well, that's fine by me. Tell you what, let's make it fair. I'll spot you one friend or two chair legs. Choice is yours."
Juggernaut has been known to end wrestling matches by picking up his opponent (another full grown man) by the waist, and hefting them over his head while screaming "WEEEE! BABY GO AIRPLANE!"
His nickname before I ever met him was "Stay-Puft", because, so the story goes, somebody had once said in regards to Jones:
"You're sitting there, like, like Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, hoping to catch a break, but instead, this GIANT motherfucker wearing a Dixie cup comes to squash you."
Part of it was probably that he was so damned ugly that he did bear a passing resemblance to the 100 foot tall marshmallow creature... But mostly it was the fact that if he wanted to, he could probably wreck a city with his fists.
His name changed when that "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!" video started making the rounds. The dubbed over X-Men cartoons? You know exactly which one I'm talking about.
Juggernaut took two 7.62x39mm rounds right in the center of mass. Now, it's not necessarily miraculous that he survived, because modern body armor is pretty miraculous stuff. What is beyond miraculous, what is outright silly, what is basically unbelievable, is that after checking to make sure that the plate had caught the rounds, he got right back up and kept on as if nothing had happened.
Let me put this into perspective for you. A single such round, impacting at 1,000 meters from the muzzle, hits with an energy of just over 1000 Joules. 1000 Joules will move 100 kilograms 1 meter. Here is a less metric-intensive mental image: Imagine something hitting a 220 pound box hard enough to throw it three feet into the air. That's 1000 Joules.
Now, he was TWICE hit with just such a bullet fired from only about 100 meters, and all of that force was concentrated onto an area of his chest about the size of a dinner plate. And all he did was grunt hard and keep shooting. He told us, "Yeah I mean that was pretty dumb. I was pretty mad about getting shot AT, I don't think they realized how pissed I was about getting SHOT until I killed them."
Later on, he showed us the plate and the eggplant-like overlapping bruises on his torso. "Taliban hickeys," he called them. "Very tacky. At least they aren't on my neck, so I don't have to wear a turtleneck all summer to hide them from my Dad. He wouldn't understand."
So anyway, that video starts making the rounds - Fool your weapons cannot harm ME - and someone said "Jesus Christ, that's Jones!"
And the name stuck.
Jones' only comment was "What a stupid hat. I wouldn't be caught dead wearing that shit."