June 13, 2023 • 42 mins
On this episode, Author Ben Thompson and Professor of History Dr. Patricia Larash discuss some badass vehicles that hauled ass into warzones to try and bring humanitarian aid to people who needed help. It's the story of Helge Meyer and his Ghost Camaro, an armor-plated muscle car that burned rubber through the war-torn streets of Sarajevo to bring food and medical aid to children, as well as the story of Big Wind, a heavily-modified T-34 tank fitted with MiG jet engines that was used to help put out Kuwaiti oil field fires during the aftermath of Desert Storm.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
The streets of Sarajevo are pitch black. All lights have
been extinguished for fear of snipers or air strikes. Strict
sound discipline is maintained at all times. Enemy forces lie
in wait, unseen in the darkness, waiting to strike. That
quiet is violently ripped apart by the roar of a
(00:21):
four hundred and forty seven horsepower V eight engine and
the squealing of tires. Taking a tight turn at high speeds,
the Matte Black nineteen seventy nine Camaro is almost invisible
in the darkness. It accelerates quickly down an empty street,
running with no headlights, relying on the massive steel dozer
blade welded to the front of the vehicle to deflect
away the rubble, razor wire and land mines that line
(00:42):
the war torn Bosmian streets. Gunfire responds almost immediately, muzzle
flashes from building windows and dark alleys, followed quickly by
sparks and ricochets as their bullets strike the armour plating
covering the speeding vehicle's windows and chassis. In the driver's seat,
his face obscured by military great night vision goggles. Danish
Special Forces operative Helga Meyer flinches slightly as another enemy
(01:06):
round strikes the steel plate covering the passenger side window.
Meyer hits the clutch Dale, shifts the second, spins the wheel,
and peels out down the side street into the darkness beyond.
He carries no weapons, his vehicle is unarmed, but it
is full of food, clothing, and medical supplies and he
won't take his foot off the gas until he's delivered
(01:27):
them to the children who are still trapped in this
war torn wasteland.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
So then the other night I was meeting a friend
for dinner at the sushi restaurant, and they had this
robot going around bringing people their drinks, kind of like
R two D two on Job of the Huts boat
thing the bar barge. Yeah yeah, that barge in Return
of the Jedi, but with a less self aware motion.
(01:57):
It was actually more like a room.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
But honestly, I do love the idea of a that
brings you drinks. I do wish I had something like
that in my house. It could happen.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
And the drink's roombot actually got stuck in the waiting
area because it was surrounded by people and they were
just sitting around and no one was moving out of
its way, but it was just a sad little It
was kind of it was trying its best, you know,
and there's people just like you know, having human conversations
and this robot was just sort of kind of going
back and forth over the same three yard stretch.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Or this is why we have to fear the singularity,
because that thing's going to have its revenge, yes.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Unless you tip it. Well, but that got me thinking,
this is a thing that people do. You know, this
particular robot was custom made. It had little shelves built
into it and everything. But this is a thing that
people do. They mod their rumbas. Sometimes they hack the
software to make the software work better, and sometimes it's
just a cosmetic thing like sticking googly eyes on top.
(02:53):
And sometimes people mod their rumba to add actual functionality,
like adding a paintbrush so it can graffiti up your
living room, or duct taping a phone to it and
then running zoom so your remote friend can follow you
around in this kind of weird telepresence thing that reminds
me of this one Doctor Who episode.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
But whatever, that's the million dollar like idea here. We're
we're spending all this time researching things for this podcast.
But the million dollar idea is to just tape a
phone to your rumba and live stream it and then
people can like follow it on Twitch or whatever. And
I feel like somebody is going to make a million
dollars or has already made a million dollars off of
this idea.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, it's like putting GoPro on your cat, except it's
a room book.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Now that I would watch on Twitch. For me, where
I go with that because people do that, they jill
break their phones and they they you know, they recycle
old pieces to kind of put things together. And you
know where I always go with that is to think
kind of Mad MAXI kind of things. I've been playing
this game called thunder Road recently, which is like a
board game version of Mad Max, where it's like low
(03:56):
budget forty K Warhammer. You buy like a two dollars
model and then you mess it up to make it
look old and beat up, and then you play this
board game with it. It's very fun. But yeah, I
love the you know, like beat up muscle car with
machine guns strapped to it, aesthetic like a.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Di y batmobile or a DIY night Writer for those
of us who remember night Writer.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Yeah, Night Writer was great. That's but that's actually a
perfect segue into our story this week, because you're talking
about a car that's basically the Night Writer car.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah. Actually yeah, only real life and somehow even more
badass than.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Fiction, more badass than Hasselhoff, well at.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Least as bad ass as Hasselhoff.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
But real life. So we'll take it and we'll.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Talk about it after this word from our sponsor for children.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
No sokola, no, no nothing.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
The year is nineteen ninety two, and somewhere in Denmark,
Helgemeyer is sitting in front of his TV watching the news.
What he sees on his screen horrifies him. He's looking
at the aftermath of the Bosnian War, the horrors of
the former Yugoslavia. This was the first war in European
soil since World War Two. There's been ethnic cleansing, massive
(05:28):
civilian casualties. The cities of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia have been
devastated by this action.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
If you look at the shildboard, we need somebody who's
gonna make peace here, not the keep peace. You have
to live together again.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
There's tracer fire service to air missiles, artillery craters, you
name it. What he sees on his screen is the
civilian cost. Houses destroyed, shops destroyed, tusks destroyed, churches destroyed.
There's no rule of law. There's brutal street warfaring. It's
racially charged, it's ethnically charged. You know, gangs are taking
(06:11):
over and there are people just fighting each other in
the streets, and then there are dangers that you can't see,
their land mines. The whole thing is declared a war
crime by the UN. And the gangs, the rebels, the outlaws,
the bandits that are roaming in the cities in the countryside.
They even go after UN humanitarian aid trucks that had
(06:31):
tried to go in. They tried to go after Red
Cross vehicles, They intercept them. They steal the humanitarian aid
before it gets to the starving, suffering civilians. The rest
of the world heard about this, but they didn't go in.
The political situation was too complicated. They didn't want to
make their humanitarian crisis worse. After a certain point, what
(06:53):
are you going to do. Even the actual literal humanitarian
aid workers even given clearance to go in, it was
that bad.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Look at the shoulder, we need somebody was going to
make Bee here.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
What would most people do? Most people would give money, right,
call their elected officials, have a bake sale, send thoughts
and prayers. But Helga Meyer was not most people. Helga
Meyer had trained with the Green Berets, the Danish special Forces,
and he was also, in addition to all that, the
(07:33):
proud owner of a nineteen seventy nine Camaro.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Pat I don't want to kill the vibe of that
because it was awesome, But I have to interject and say,
do you know who else owned a late twentieth century Camaro?
Speaker 2 (07:47):
I don't know, Ben, who else did own a late
twentieth century Camaro.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
I had a nineteen ninety two Camaro Z twenty eight
and I loved it. It was my favorite car I've
ever had. I named her Black Ice. She was awesome.
For a decade, that car was the most important thing
in my life, I think, or top three probably. So
when we're talking about this type of car, this nineteen
(08:13):
seventy nine Camaro. You mentioned night Writer earlier, and night
Writer was a Transam and the Camaro is a similar
body style. They're both general motors. This is the generation
before the Iraq and the trans Am, but this one
is kind of a very similar body type to if
you want to picture like Smokey and the bandit those
(08:35):
firebird cars with like the big bird on the hood.
It's like that style of car.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
So with that visual in our minds, let's picture Helga
and his camaro.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
I don't think he.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Had them attle at this point, but I don't want
to make any assumptions. He was furnished with the camaro
and the courage of his convictions. I actually said in
some interview later, he said that God had called him
to do this, was.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
The brothers, like, you're on a mission from Dad exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
So he goes to the United Nations and he says
to the United Nations, hey, folks, looks like people in
that part of the world need help. I would like
to provide help. I have a plan. They said no, okay.
He was undaunted. He approached other governmental agencies, he approached
other militaries, he approached other non governmental agencies. They all
(09:25):
said no, no, too bad, nope, Helga. Sorry, So what
does he do? He tootles on over to Germany. Well, toodles,
I don't know, tootles not the right word. He speeds
on over, he dashes on over.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Yeah, yeah, as a fellow Camaro owner, I'm not comfortable
with tootle being the verb here. I think he'd cruise.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
There we go, he cruises, he drives.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
I do think it's worth mentioning here that, like it's
literally just some guy. Is some guy in Denmark with
the nineteen seventy nine Camaro, which we've established beyond the
shadow of a doubt is cool and I don't think
we have to believer that point any longer. But it
is just a two door car from the late seventies,
(10:07):
and he's just some guy from Denmark and he's driving
that car over to the United Nations and being like,
I want to help with the war in Yugoslavia and
they're like no, and he just doesn't want to take
that for an answer.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
No, he is just some guy. But he is also
some guy who was in the Jaeger Core, which is
kind of the Danish equivalent of the Green Berets. So
he wasn't just any some guy. He was a very
particular some guy with skills, moxie, confidence in his own abilities.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I'm just going to say that if Hasselhoff showed up
at the UN with the Kamara and was like, I
want to help in Sarievo. They might have said, yes,
he was cool.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
But alas he was not David Hasselhoff, so he had
to pursue alternate roots. So he drives, he drives, he drives,
and I'd like to think that the autobon was involved
for at least part of his journey, because Germany is involved.
He goes over to Germany. He goes to the fine
Mine Airfield, which is a home to a US Air
(11:10):
Force base, and he drives his Camaro onto the tarmac.
He says, hi to the folks there, and these are
US Air Force guys, and he tells them what he
intends to do. Well. He wants to say, Hey, US
Air Force guys, I want to go to war torn
Sarajevo and drive around and hand out food as humanitarian aid.
And the US Air Force guys are like, yeah, you
(11:33):
mean like a post apocalyptic Santa Claus. Maybe not quite.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Those words, but maybe those words.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Maybe those words yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
And the Air Force guys are in They're down with
just some guy driving his Camaro onto the tarmac of
Rhinemain Air Force Base and being like, hey, can you
guys fly me to Serbia so that I can start
passing out candy to children.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yeah, candy and stuff with actual nutritional value and yeah, medical.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Aid, you know all that stuff too, but mostly the candy.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
So honestly, Ben, I think badasses recognize other badasses.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
That's true. That does happen.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
They say to Helga, hey, hey, how can we help,
And Helga says, can you pimp my ride? And they say,
hell's yeah, we can pimp your ride.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I mean, I guess it's probably kind of an awesome
question for these guys, like, hey, what can you do
to like mad Max my seventy nine Camaro? And they're
just like, oh, yeah, dude, I got some armor plating
around here, somewhere we can put this year, Like, let
me get my rivid gun and like we'll figure something
out here.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yeah. So they're like, let me check in the back.
They bring all sorts of stuff out of the back.
They do their thing, and Helga, even though he had
had this whole litany of no, no, third time no,
seven times no, ten times no from all these other big,
presumably powerful organizations, he and his new best friends, his
(12:58):
buddies in the US Air Force, they trick out the
Camaro and if you imagine the camaro such as Ben described,
which is just sort of the ordinary, like baseline badass
camaro such as a mere mortal might drive. Sorry, Ben,
I'm considering you a mere mortal, for.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
I'm extremely mortal. It's totally fine. I'm not offended by this.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Well, okay. When you think of humanitarian workers driving around
handing out supplies, helping people, I usually just picture like
a big, boring van, maybe with a red cross logo
on the side or something like that.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Yeah, a big white truck packed up with as many
supplies as you can get in it. But that's what
they were driving in there before, and those trucks were
getting ambushed and looted, and they were getting all their
supplies jacked by these warlords and all this stuff. So
you know, maybe that's not the right move to go
in with the vehicle that people are expecting to be
full of things that people who are in a war
(13:51):
zone might need.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
The Scooby Doo van or whatever you want to call it,
it's maybe not the best option. So you need something
maybe a little more aerodynamic, and you need something that's
suited to this really dangerous context. You need something maybe
a little less obviously visible. So you take this muscle car,
and Helga's priority was speed and speed and more speed
(14:14):
and ideally not getting fatally shot.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Right, And yeah, the stealth is the good is a
good option here, because yeah, they are looking for humanitarian
trucks and it's not great to be kind of sitting
in one exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah. Yeah, he wants to get in get out, so
he and his US Air Force buddies strip everything down
as much as they possibly can. They get rid of
the back seats, They armor plated as much as possible,
They kevlar the heck out of it. They painted the
whole thing matt black. The enemy, enemy, ambush brigands, robbers,
(14:48):
bad guys would not be able to see it on
thermal imaging or radar or whatever. They took out all
the lights, and I have to confess, I'm just freaked
out at the idea of driving at night without lights.
But on the other hand, I am not Helga Meyer.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Yeah. They say that he wore night vision goggles and
just looked at his GPS, and he's driving through like
when he gets into Sarajevo. He's driving through streets that
our mind with land mines and barricaded and blockades and
barbed wire, and he's never driven in Sarajevo, he's never
been to Bosnia before. And yeah, he's driving this car.
(15:25):
And I'm not gonna lie to you. I loved that
ninety two Z twenty eight Camaro, but that thing broke
down on me all the time. It was not super
reliable and to kind of I mean, he's painted it
with this aircraft like stealth aircraft paint that like absorbs light,
and he's driving it with the lights off in the dark,
trying to navigate by night vision goggles and not not
(15:48):
the like awesome night vision goggles that we have today,
but the night vision goggles from what is this nineteen
ninety six, like the first gen night vision goggles, which
are like, you know, not as good.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, so he's got all that. He's got a military radio,
he's got a front blade, which I'm picturing is kind
of like a cowcatcher but much cooler, so he can
kind of plow through or just kind of shove away
whatever or whoever needs to be shoved away.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Yeah, it was. It was still like push debris out
of the road and stuff like the blockades we were
talking about, And when you read interviews with him, he
said it was to a you know, he thought that
maybe having that blade out front just a big shovel
like a snowplow, and he was like, oh, maybe having
that out front would set off land mines before they
went off, so that they wouldn't blow up underneath my car.
(16:38):
That seems extremely ill advised, but it apparently worked out
for him.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
How big is this thing? It can't be more than
a few feet away from his car, So, okay, okay,
you do you helga.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
It's not blowing up directly under your ass, Like, yeah,
it's blowing up more in your face, which is probably better,
I guess.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, it's blowing up adjacent to your ass.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah, Be that.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
As it may. It apparently worked out for him.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
He survived.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Oh oh was that a spoiler?
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Yeah, spoiler alert for this Also the car had a
spoiler on it, so I don't know if that's.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
A uh huh I did there?
Speaker 1 (17:14):
I regret it? Regret nothing, No, that's it. And you know,
this car looks like something out of Mad Max. It's
just it's black. It's got the roll cage on the interior,
it's got a front blade, it's got armor plating. On
all the windows. All the side windows are armored out.
It's just the front window, which is tinted like crazy.
The main difference between this and a mad Max car, though,
(17:37):
is that he didn't put any guns on it because
he's not a warrior. He's not a soldier. He's not
trying to kill anybody. He's not looking to shoot his
way out of a out of the situation, which in
some ways is almost more bad ass that this guy didn't.
He didn't even carry a side arm he didn't carry
a pistol into this war zone because he wasn't there
to fight. He was there to help people, and like
(17:58):
that takes some serious right. I will say, though, that
my favorite upgrade to the car is that he put
like a little rubber ducky in the grill.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Wait what then, you're kidding about the rubber ducky right?
Speaker 4 (18:09):
No?
Speaker 1 (18:10):
No, no no. So if you go and look up
pictures of the car, he called it the ghost Camaro
because it was all blacked out and you couldn't pick
it up on thermal imaging and it was really hard
to see it at night. But if you look up
pictures of the ghost Camaro on Google, or if you
go to our site and check it out. There you
can see like just the little eyes and beak of
this little plastic yellow rubber ducky like you'd see in
(18:33):
a bathtub.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
That must be the baddest ass rubber ducky of the
twentieth century.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah, that rubber ducky has probably seen some shit. And
Helga Meyer, it's important to remember that he's doing this
without any approval by anybody, right, I think it really
needs to be said that it's like everybody told him, no,
you can't go. It gets in his car and he
is making sorties every night. He's driving his Camaro, however
(19:00):
many miles to whatever school or location he needs to
go to. I mean, it's amazing, right in a way.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
He's got all of this equipment, but he's basically using
the force to go through Sarajevo and he's getting up
to like ninety miles an hour. Does that sound about right?
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, that's right. Like there's a several stories of him
being ambushed. There's stories where he's being chased by a
car full of dudes with AK forty seven's shooting at him.
The armor plating is bouncing bullets and like it's constant
danger for him. And I had enough mechanical issues with
my Camaro that I wasn't comfortable getting it up too
far above ninety on a flat terrain, not in a
(19:40):
war zone. For this guy, like he installed like nitrous
oxide into the car, which is crazy. It's not the
kind that gets you high, it's the kind that you
inject into your engine. I don't know if you remember
like the Fast and the Furious movies that used to
be about racing, and that was the thing that you
always see in those movies where there's the little red
button on the dash and you push it and you
(20:01):
go super fast. So he already has a pretty juiced
up car between what he has done to the car
beforehand and the Air Force guys, you've got this four
hundred and forty horsepower V eight and injecting NOS in
there is going to give you a little bit of
extra acceleration. Kind of think of it as like an
after burner for a fighter plane.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah. Over roughly a decade, he made over one hundred runs,
He delivered nearly a thousand pounds of food, and he survived.
He took a bullet off of his helmet. The car
itself took a lot of heat, but both Helga and
the car and the rubber ducky were so well protected
that they were otherwise unscathed and they survived the war,
and also, honestly, so did many of the good residents
(20:42):
of Sarajevo, because they had access to the supplies that
Helga the renegade delivered to them. And so yeah, that's
that's Helga Meyer.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Yeah, and there's some great pictures that you can find.
We'll post some of them on badassodweek dot com and
it's part of his article. But if you searched Ghost
Camaro and Helga Meyer, he drives this car through Sarajevo,
through the streets of Bosnia and Serbia, and he's just
basically unloading these big cardboard boxes of cotton candy for
(21:11):
school kids. And you know, like you said, like there's
some more important things that can be delivered, but you know,
there's this psychological, like morale bonus of hey, you know,
we got candy. We're in the middle of this war
zone and this nice thing is happening today. I think
it's hard to put a value on how much that
contributes to the happiness and the morale of people who
(21:34):
are going through one of the most horrible wars we've
seen in a very long time, the worst the world
had seen since World War Two.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, and especially since normal humanitarian aid wasn't getting through.
The residents of Sarajeva are thinking, Hey, someone out there
is actually thinking about us.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
And he still has the Camaro, which is cool. At
least as of the time of the article I wrote
about him, which was a few years ago, he still
had the Camaro, which is cool. And so that's the
story of Helgemeyer and the Ghost Camaro, and that's pretty awesome.
From there, we are going to transition into another story
of similar repurposing, and we're going to do another modded rumba.
(22:14):
When we come back from this, we're going to be
talking about a group of guys who took a tank
and a jet fighter and duct taped them together and
used it to fight oil fires. We'll be back after this. So,
(22:36):
if you turned on the TV in the late nineties,
you were seeing the horrors of the Yugoslavian War, But
if you turned on the TV in the early nineties,
you were seeing the horrors of the aftermath of the
Gulf War. So in nineteen ninety one, Saddam Hussein owed
a bunch of money to Kuwait and instead of paying
them back, he invaded and conquered their country, and a
lot of people said, no, maybe you shouldn't do that,
(22:58):
and they formed this big co of various countries around
the world attack Saddam Hussein and the Desert Storm War
as we know it in the US. Saddam had the
third biggest army in the world at the time, only
behind the United States in Russia, and that army was
destroyed in I think like a week to ten days. Honestly,
within a few hours. Most of it was kind of
beat up, and by the end of the war it
(23:20):
was mostly annihilated. So Saddam decides, okay, maybe this might
have been a mistake, and he leaves Kuwait. But he says,
you know, if I can't have all this oil, no
one can. So he sets all of the Kuwaiti oil
fields on fire on his way out the door, and pat,
I'm sure you've seen the pictures of this and the
footage of this like towering fireball, like the inferno, like hellscape.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Oh yeah, it's scary to look at. And what's also
scary is thinking about the environmental damage.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Of all this.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yeah, the environmental damage of these oil fires is catastrophic, right,
The ecological impact is staggering. It's like one step removed
from basically being an extinction level event like a nuclear winter.
You know, it depends on how long these fires were
going to burn for. But you're still looking at literally
hundreds of oil fires. All of these oil dereks were
(24:09):
lit on fire, they say six to seven hundred of them.
They're two hundred foot tall pillars of flame burning at
this huge heat. They're just spewing black smoke into the atmosphere,
like millions and millions of gallons of crude oil or
just burning every day forever, NonStop. So you know, I
mean oil wells are pressurized and the oil shoots up
(24:30):
out of them and as soon as it contacts the air,
catches on fire and they're not going to stop burning.
And when you look at that from an ecological perspective,
you're looking at like gas raining, like gasoline spraying everywhere
and raining down on things. You've got acid rain that
comes out of this thousands of miles away. You're seeing
these pillars of fire, and if they burn too long,
there's a chance that, you know, you get this kind
(24:52):
of nuclear winter conditions where it's going to you know,
lower the temperature of the Earth by a degree, which
is just you know, doesn't sound like much, but it's
a real bad deal. And basically every firefighter on Earth
is watching this on TV and is like, we gotta
do something about this, this big problem.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah, it's a huge problem. Hundreds of oil, of fires
of honestly biblical proportions. How does a firefighter deal with
something of that magnitude?
Speaker 1 (25:20):
I mean, I have no idea, right Like, I look
at these images of these humongous fires and it's just
like like you're literally shooting a flamethrower in the air
from underground, is what it looks like.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Have no idea how you would begin to even deal
with something like that, let alone seven hundred of them.
And at first a lot of engineers were like, yeah,
we don't know what we're gonna do. I don't know
if we're gonna be able to put these out fast
enough before it does, you know, cause some very serious
problems globally, and they want to get firefighters from all
over the world out there to help. And so just
(25:51):
as Helga Meyer was watching Yugoslavia on his TV. There's
a group of guys in Hungary watching their TV. They
work for a company called MB Drilling. They're based about
thirty miles south of Budapest in Hungary. These guys are
watching and they're like, we have what might be a
solution here and now is when we need to talk
about big Wind.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Big Wind that's either a really cool name or the
punchline to a fart joke.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Yes, it is a really cool thing. It might be both.
I don't know if they have any big Wind jokes
about it. It's an old style like Russian engineering thing.
It's kind of came out of, you know, the Cold War,
which is like, hey, in Siberia, we have a bunch
of airfields that are covered in snow eleven months out
of the year, and we have to clear the snow off.
(26:41):
So I don't know what do we do. How about
we just strap a jet engine onto a flatbed truck
and turn it on and use the exhaust of the
MiG engine to like blow like snowblower the snow off
the runway.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
So they mcguyvered a huge ass snowblower.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yes, that could work very like Russians style. I definitely
like have an image in my head of what these
guys looked like when they came up with this solution.
But apparently it works. I don't know how efficiently, but
it worked. And then they decided like, okay, well, how
do how do we google ie room by this version
of it? And how about we take two jet engines
(27:19):
and we mount them onto a tank. And that's what
Big Wind is. Big Wind was built by MB Drilling
Company in Hungary and it is two jet engines from
a Meg twenty one fighter mounted onto the turret of
a World War two Soviet T thirty four tank. And
it looks awesome.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
It does. I've seen pictures. It's painted. I am not
making this up fire engine red. You could kind of
say it looks like a railgun, but I think calling
it a railgun doesn't do it justice. This thing is
honestly surreal. It looks like rejected Star Wars concept art.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Yeah. The engines are ten feet long, which is roughly
like a short school bus, and they are filled with
jet fuel. They'll forget.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
So you've got these large cylinders things filled with jet fuel,
and they're coming out of the front and I'm looking
at these photos and I'm thinking this is sort of
like some weird oversized Oh hey, you know Wally, the
little robot character. He's got those kind of big round eyes.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah, that's a great analogy for what it looks like.
It looks like Wally except a tank.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Except a tank. Yeah, much much much bigger than Wally.
And these big round things come out the front, and
these huge cylinders or eye stalks or whatever you want
to call them. That's where they shoot the air out, right.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yeah, that's where the air comes out.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
And they're on these mounts so they can beget this
angled around, they can shoot air in different directions. And
then each of these two eyestalk cylinders have these three
like long rigid eyelashes coming out at the top, making
it look even weirder. And that's where the water comes out.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Yeah, and so find the water is a bit of
a challenge here, but yeah, you have to like basically
you plug a hose into a lake or some groundwater.
You just like dig a hole down to groundwater and
plug it into that and you know, whatever giant water
source you can find, because this thing needs a lot
of water, and so that shoots out of the eyelashes,
and basically it produces enough water to fill in above
(29:21):
ground swimming pool in about twenty seconds. It's shooting out
at about seven hundred and seventy miles an hour, which
is roughly the speed of sound.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Wow, and I do kind of wonder what it's like
to be a human being in the vicinity of these things.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
It's probably not super fun, so we'll get into it
in a second though. Yeah, yeah, and be drilling. And
the leader of this unit that's going to be deployed
here with Big Wind, his name is Nandor Shumlai. And
one of our producers said, we can't mention him without
including our reference to Nandor the Relentless from what we
do in the Shadows. But Nandor goes in with his
(29:55):
two buddies, Tamas Debrezeni and Ishtvan Scheish. My Hungarian pronunciation
is very poor, and hopefully that was close enough. I
apologize to any Hungarians who had to witness that. But basically,
these three guys, they're all in like their late forties
early fifties, and they take Big Wind from Budapest to
(30:17):
Kuwait and they just start driving this tank around the
middle East. Just three middle aged Hungarian dudes driving around
a tank full of jet fuel trying to put out
oil derek fires, and.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
They're in the vicinity of water that's being shot out
at what did you say, seven hundred and seventy miles
per hour? So it's faster than the speed of sound.
How are their ear drums doing in all of this?
Speaker 1 (30:38):
You have to wear hearing protection or your ears will bleed.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yikes. Okay, so this is loud.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Yeah, I mean it's a jet engine, so the whole
thing is loud, right, And the T thirty four itself
is loud, and the.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Tea thirty four that's the main Soviet tank of World
War Two, but that's from like the nineteen forties, right.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Right, And yeah, it's the tank from the forties and
they're driving it around in nineteen ninety one. It's the
fifty sixty year old tank. It clanks and rattles and
just kind of chugs, and you know, the T thirty
four was famous for making this kind of rattling noise
when it drove around. Anyway, it's not quiet, and it's
got this big like you know, with the Camaro we
talked about the five point seven liter V eight. This
(31:16):
thing has a forty liters V twelve. It's loud and
it just cranks out plumes of black smoke. And then
on top of that you got the oil dereks, which
are making noise. It's like rushing water out of the ground,
catching on fire and burning. So it's like that rumbling
of water kind of sound. And then you have the
fireball on top of it, and it's loud. It's so
(31:37):
loud that the only way these guys can communicate. You know,
you can't do hand signals because you can't put your
face outside the tank when you're next to this burning oil. Derek, Oh,
hell no no. So they have these boxes with lights
on them like red, no, green, yes, up, down, left, right, and.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
So it's kind of like Captain Pike in the Menagerie
episode of Star Trek.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
It's exactly like that.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Not the most newance form of discourse.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
It's perfect. Yeah, that's the only way that can communicate. Right.
So you have Thomas diberd Zenny, he's sitting in the
driver's seat of the T thirty four, and it's like, okay,
you have to really trust this fifty year old technology
from World War Two to keep you alive here because
he can't really see out the front because the heat's
so intense that the entire front of the tank has
(32:23):
to be a heat shield, so there's no periscope, there's
no looking out the front of this thing. He is
just sitting at the controls driving it, looking at these
colored boxes. And then Ish van Scherish is in the
he's the platform controller. He's in the back. He's operating
the turret kind of aiming the jet engines at the
fire and Nandor is probably the biggest badass of all
(32:47):
of them because he walks next to the tank just
like wearing a radiation suit.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Like he walks walks, you mean, like on the ground.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Like on the ground twelve feet away from the tank
and to the side behind because he's got to look
at where he's going. So he's wearing like full hazmat suit,
right like when you see like a pandemic movie and
everybody's wearing all those biosuits, the anti nuclear, anti radiation,
anti whatever suits. He's wearing one of these giant fireproof suits.
And he walks next to the tank and he just
(33:16):
kind of eyeballs it. And he's got the control box
and he's like, yeah, I go forward, So he hits
the forward button they drive forward, And to me, that's
pretty baller.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah, that's pretty baller. That's pretty bad ass. That's pretty
relentlessly bad ass.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
An interesting thing about big Wind is that they originally
developed it to kind of hose down the aftermath of
like a nuclear attack.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
So if some city in Hungary got hit with the
nuclear attack, you could just drive this bad boy in
there and it would be shielded against heat and radiation
and you could use it to hose down tanks or
buildings or whatever. And that was the original purpose of this.
But then they were like, Okay, maybe we can make
(34:00):
this work for a different purpose.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Yeah, exactly, and they did.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
It was designed to kind of combat the heat and
radiation and fires after a nuclear attack, but it's actually
pretty well suited for fighting oil fires. They have this
big fire engine red tank with jet engines, and they
fly to the Middle East and the C one thirty
lands and opens the back hatch and this thing drives
out into the middle of all of these other firefighter
(34:27):
crews from all over the world who have come here
together to band together and fight this global disaster.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah, one of the guys out there was Reddair, the
most famous firefighter at the time, and you've written about
him on the blog, right Ben, I have, Yeah, And
he was famous for putting out guess what oil field fires?
He was from Texas. He put out a bunch of
fires in Texas and then he showed up here here
(34:54):
being Kuwait, he was seventy five at the time. Hey,
you know, he's living the best lat and he used explosives.
How do you use explosives to put out a fire?
Apparently what you do is you basically bomb the oil
field fire and that puts it out. Is this what
(35:15):
people mean when they say fight fire with fire? And
apparently you can use this specially shaped explosive. The explosion
creates a shock wave and that blows the fire away
from the oil well, the source the fuel, and it's
kind of like blowing out a birthday candle, only much
much bigger and there's no cake involved.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah, And that's like the interesting thing with putting these
out right is because the oil comes directly out of
the ground and ignites, but it doesn't ignite immediately because
when it's coming out of the ground, it's moving so
fast that it doesn't ignite, and so what you have
to do is break that connection between the stream of
fuel and the currently bursting fire. And you know you
(35:55):
do have to cap the well. Yeah, these explosives aren't
capping the well. Big wins not capping the well. Have
to stop the fire from being continually fueled out of
the ground. And yeah, somebody asked Nandor about Red Adair
because Redd Adair at the time was like the most
famous firefighter in the world. I think John Wayne basically
played him in a movie once. And they asked Nandor
about Red Adair and he was like, oh, he's explosives
(36:17):
to put out oil fires. And Nandor was like, what, Like,
I'm not crazy. I don't love that. I love that. That
was his reaction to that. But anyway, like these guys
who are in Kuwait, even the Red Adair guys, are
watching this giant fire engine red T thirty four with
MiG engines on it, like drive off the C one
thirty and they're just like, what is to deal with
(36:39):
this guy? I mean talk about like apocalyptic right, this
thing looks completely bunkers. They arrive in the Middle East
in August of nineteen ninety one, and these guys spend
the next fifty seven days fighting fires with big wind,
which you know, like I said, they're wearing these radiation suits.
They're driving them out to these fires. The controls get
(37:00):
it's so hot when you're sitting inside the tank that
you have to wear these like special super thick gloves
to touch them because you're basically cooking inside the tank
while you're putting these fires. I you have to get
like super thick up amidst basically to even grab the
control stick. Oh yeah, you got to get within twenty
five feet of this fireball for big wind to be
effective against it. And twenty five feet is like not
(37:22):
that far. It's like a big room in your house,
or like you know, a swimming pool, like a normal
swimming pool, not an Olympic sized swimming pool. And you
got to drive this tank that close to these things
before you can like blast the air at it. So
the jet engines, you couldn't crank them up beyond seventy
percent because if you went higher than that, they were
going to overheat. The jet engines are designed to be
run in the upper atmosphere where it's cold, and not
(37:44):
in front of like a hail of burning oil.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Yeah, this is not their natural environment.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
No, they're designed to be run in Siberia on a
landing pad or like in upper atmosphere. And yeah, they'd
find a water supplier. They did, They dig a hole
or whatever. They'd get some kind of water supply set up,
and they'd shoot at the thing with big wind for
like ten to twenty minutes, which is a long time
to be sitting there cooking inside of a base of
(38:11):
like literally a metal oven. And they'd sit there and
they'd hose down the fire in it, and then it
would work. And they say that when the fire was out,
like the tank, the exterior of the tank would be
burning so hot that you could literally just like slap
a steak on there and cook it. In a couple
of minutes. It would char grill it.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
You never know, that could be the next gastronomic trend.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Chart grilled on the exterior of a tank. I mean, like,
I would totally eat that if that was on a
menu somewhere, if I go, I would totally eat that,
as long as they weren't hosing down the radiation, you know,
the nuclear radiation. I think I probably actually would eat
that and yeah, they were there for fifty seven days.
And fifty seven days fifty seven days they were in Kuwait.
(38:53):
I don't have like a good count on how many
fires they put out, But one thing that's worth mentioning
is that these guys and all the other firefighters out
there who were working on this right there were teams
from all over the world, and they were out there
working crazy hours, and they came from everywhere to do
this because it was a global problem that had to
be dealt with. And these guys read a dare and
big wind and all of these other teams that were
(39:15):
a little bit more conventional in their approaches to putting
out fires. These people came from all over the world
and they were working day and night. They were underrested,
and they were putting out all together, people managed to
put out all these teams to combine to put out
something to like three or four fires a day. Wow.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Yeah. And towards the end of it, once everybody started
getting the hang of it, like collectively, these companies were
putting out four to six fires a day. When the
fires started, people believed it was going to be five
years before they would all be put out. And that
is like serious global problem, global temperature change problems. Oh yeah, yeah,
(39:54):
but when everybody in the world came together, including Big Wind,
including Red Adare, and they were able to put these
fires all out in six months and avert global catastrophe
climate change on like a post apocalyptic level climate change on.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
A frighteningly immediate timeline.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
And yeah, it was averted thanks to all of the
Big Wind and all of these other like brave firefighters
who got out there. It's heroic though, right, It's what
makes a badass.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
I think, Yeah, you do something, you go above and beyond.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
Yeah, And that's kind of the connection between our stories today. Yeah,
regular people watching some horrible stuff around the world volunteered
to personally go in and try to make the world
a better place. And it's admirable and it's badass, and
it's heroic and it's inspirational. And that's all we have
for today is you know, yeah, maybe I don't know
(40:47):
how we can apply this to our daily lives, but
you know, maybe you know, when the old lady at
the grocery store drops something you can get it for
or something, it's the least you can do. Because these
people are doing traveling around the world to fight fire.
Speaker 4 (41:00):
So yeah, with that in mind, thank you guys so
much for listening as always, and we really appreciate you guys,
And yeah, we'll see you on the next one with
probably something significantly more violent.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Thanks so much.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Phibbs.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.
(41:38):
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the
Week is based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.
(41:58):
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
your friends and your enemies if you want as. We'll
be back next week with another one. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
The streets of Sarajevo are pitch black. All lights have
been extinguished for fear of snipers or air strikes. Strict
sound discipline is maintained at all times. Enemy forces lie
in wait, unseen in the darkness, waiting to strike. That
quiet is violently ripped apart by the roar of a
(00:21):
four hundred and forty seven horsepower V eight engine and
the squealing of tires. Taking a tight turn at high speeds,
the Matte Black nineteen seventy nine Camaro is almost invisible
in the darkness. It accelerates quickly down an empty street,
running with no headlights, relying on the massive steel dozer
blade welded to the front of the vehicle to deflect
away the rubble, razor wire and land mines that line
(00:42):
the war torn Bosmian streets. Gunfire responds almost immediately, muzzle
flashes from building windows and dark alleys, followed quickly by
sparks and ricochets as their bullets strike the armour plating
covering the speeding vehicle's windows and chassis. In the driver's seat,
his face obscured by military great night vision goggles. Danish
Special Forces operative Helga Meyer flinches slightly as another enemy
(01:06):
round strikes the steel plate covering the passenger side window.
Meyer hits the clutch Dale, shifts the second, spins the wheel,
and peels out down the side street into the darkness beyond.
He carries no weapons, his vehicle is unarmed, but it
is full of food, clothing, and medical supplies and he
won't take his foot off the gas until he's delivered
(01:27):
them to the children who are still trapped in this
war torn wasteland.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
So then the other night I was meeting a friend
for dinner at the sushi restaurant, and they had this
robot going around bringing people their drinks, kind of like
R two D two on Job of the Huts boat
thing the bar barge. Yeah yeah, that barge in Return
of the Jedi, but with a less self aware motion.
(01:57):
It was actually more like a room.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
But honestly, I do love the idea of a that
brings you drinks. I do wish I had something like
that in my house. It could happen.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
And the drink's roombot actually got stuck in the waiting
area because it was surrounded by people and they were
just sitting around and no one was moving out of
its way, but it was just a sad little It
was kind of it was trying its best, you know,
and there's people just like you know, having human conversations
and this robot was just sort of kind of going
back and forth over the same three yard stretch.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Or this is why we have to fear the singularity,
because that thing's going to have its revenge, yes.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Unless you tip it. Well, but that got me thinking,
this is a thing that people do. You know, this
particular robot was custom made. It had little shelves built
into it and everything. But this is a thing that
people do. They mod their rumbas. Sometimes they hack the
software to make the software work better, and sometimes it's
just a cosmetic thing like sticking googly eyes on top.
(02:53):
And sometimes people mod their rumba to add actual functionality,
like adding a paintbrush so it can graffiti up your
living room, or duct taping a phone to it and
then running zoom so your remote friend can follow you
around in this kind of weird telepresence thing that reminds
me of this one Doctor Who episode.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
But whatever, that's the million dollar like idea here. We're
we're spending all this time researching things for this podcast.
But the million dollar idea is to just tape a
phone to your rumba and live stream it and then
people can like follow it on Twitch or whatever. And
I feel like somebody is going to make a million
dollars or has already made a million dollars off of
this idea.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, it's like putting GoPro on your cat, except it's
a room book.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Now that I would watch on Twitch. For me, where
I go with that because people do that, they jill
break their phones and they they you know, they recycle
old pieces to kind of put things together. And you
know where I always go with that is to think
kind of Mad MAXI kind of things. I've been playing
this game called thunder Road recently, which is like a
board game version of Mad Max, where it's like low
(03:56):
budget forty K Warhammer. You buy like a two dollars
model and then you mess it up to make it
look old and beat up, and then you play this
board game with it. It's very fun. But yeah, I
love the you know, like beat up muscle car with
machine guns strapped to it, aesthetic like a.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Di y batmobile or a DIY night Writer for those
of us who remember night Writer.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Yeah, Night Writer was great. That's but that's actually a
perfect segue into our story this week, because you're talking
about a car that's basically the Night Writer car.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah. Actually yeah, only real life and somehow even more
badass than.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Fiction, more badass than Hasselhoff, well at.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Least as bad ass as Hasselhoff.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
But real life. So we'll take it and we'll.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Talk about it after this word from our sponsor for children.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
No sokola, no, no nothing.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
The year is nineteen ninety two, and somewhere in Denmark,
Helgemeyer is sitting in front of his TV watching the news.
What he sees on his screen horrifies him. He's looking
at the aftermath of the Bosnian War, the horrors of
the former Yugoslavia. This was the first war in European
soil since World War Two. There's been ethnic cleansing, massive
(05:28):
civilian casualties. The cities of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia have been
devastated by this action.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
If you look at the shildboard, we need somebody who's
gonna make peace here, not the keep peace. You have
to live together again.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
There's tracer fire service to air missiles, artillery craters, you
name it. What he sees on his screen is the
civilian cost. Houses destroyed, shops destroyed, tusks destroyed, churches destroyed.
There's no rule of law. There's brutal street warfaring. It's
racially charged, it's ethnically charged. You know, gangs are taking
(06:11):
over and there are people just fighting each other in
the streets, and then there are dangers that you can't see,
their land mines. The whole thing is declared a war
crime by the UN. And the gangs, the rebels, the outlaws,
the bandits that are roaming in the cities in the countryside.
They even go after UN humanitarian aid trucks that had
(06:31):
tried to go in. They tried to go after Red
Cross vehicles, They intercept them. They steal the humanitarian aid
before it gets to the starving, suffering civilians. The rest
of the world heard about this, but they didn't go in.
The political situation was too complicated. They didn't want to
make their humanitarian crisis worse. After a certain point, what
(06:53):
are you going to do. Even the actual literal humanitarian
aid workers even given clearance to go in, it was
that bad.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Look at the shoulder, we need somebody was going to
make Bee here.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
What would most people do? Most people would give money, right,
call their elected officials, have a bake sale, send thoughts
and prayers. But Helga Meyer was not most people. Helga
Meyer had trained with the Green Berets, the Danish special Forces,
and he was also, in addition to all that, the
(07:33):
proud owner of a nineteen seventy nine Camaro.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Pat I don't want to kill the vibe of that
because it was awesome, But I have to interject and say,
do you know who else owned a late twentieth century Camaro?
Speaker 2 (07:47):
I don't know, Ben, who else did own a late
twentieth century Camaro.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
I had a nineteen ninety two Camaro Z twenty eight
and I loved it. It was my favorite car I've
ever had. I named her Black Ice. She was awesome.
For a decade, that car was the most important thing
in my life, I think, or top three probably. So
when we're talking about this type of car, this nineteen
(08:13):
seventy nine Camaro. You mentioned night Writer earlier, and night
Writer was a Transam and the Camaro is a similar
body style. They're both general motors. This is the generation
before the Iraq and the trans Am, but this one
is kind of a very similar body type to if
you want to picture like Smokey and the bandit those
(08:35):
firebird cars with like the big bird on the hood.
It's like that style of car.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
So with that visual in our minds, let's picture Helga
and his camaro.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
I don't think he.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Had them attle at this point, but I don't want
to make any assumptions. He was furnished with the camaro
and the courage of his convictions. I actually said in
some interview later, he said that God had called him
to do this, was.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
The brothers, like, you're on a mission from Dad exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
So he goes to the United Nations and he says
to the United Nations, hey, folks, looks like people in
that part of the world need help. I would like
to provide help. I have a plan. They said no, okay.
He was undaunted. He approached other governmental agencies, he approached
other militaries, he approached other non governmental agencies. They all
(09:25):
said no, no, too bad, nope, Helga. Sorry, So what
does he do? He tootles on over to Germany. Well, toodles,
I don't know, tootles not the right word. He speeds
on over, he dashes on over.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Yeah, yeah, as a fellow Camaro owner, I'm not comfortable
with tootle being the verb here. I think he'd cruise.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
There we go, he cruises, he drives.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
I do think it's worth mentioning here that, like it's
literally just some guy. Is some guy in Denmark with
the nineteen seventy nine Camaro, which we've established beyond the
shadow of a doubt is cool and I don't think
we have to believer that point any longer. But it
is just a two door car from the late seventies,
(10:07):
and he's just some guy from Denmark and he's driving
that car over to the United Nations and being like,
I want to help with the war in Yugoslavia and
they're like no, and he just doesn't want to take
that for an answer.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
No, he is just some guy. But he is also
some guy who was in the Jaeger Core, which is
kind of the Danish equivalent of the Green Berets. So
he wasn't just any some guy. He was a very
particular some guy with skills, moxie, confidence in his own abilities.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I'm just going to say that if Hasselhoff showed up
at the UN with the Kamara and was like, I
want to help in Sarievo. They might have said, yes,
he was cool.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
But alas he was not David Hasselhoff, so he had
to pursue alternate roots. So he drives, he drives, he drives,
and I'd like to think that the autobon was involved
for at least part of his journey, because Germany is involved.
He goes over to Germany. He goes to the fine
Mine Airfield, which is a home to a US Air
(11:10):
Force base, and he drives his Camaro onto the tarmac.
He says, hi to the folks there, and these are
US Air Force guys, and he tells them what he
intends to do. Well. He wants to say, Hey, US
Air Force guys, I want to go to war torn
Sarajevo and drive around and hand out food as humanitarian aid.
And the US Air Force guys are like, yeah, you
(11:33):
mean like a post apocalyptic Santa Claus. Maybe not quite.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Those words, but maybe those words.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Maybe those words yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
And the Air Force guys are in They're down with
just some guy driving his Camaro onto the tarmac of
Rhinemain Air Force Base and being like, hey, can you
guys fly me to Serbia so that I can start
passing out candy to children.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yeah, candy and stuff with actual nutritional value and yeah, medical.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Aid, you know all that stuff too, but mostly the candy.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
So honestly, Ben, I think badasses recognize other badasses.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
That's true. That does happen.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
They say to Helga, hey, hey, how can we help,
And Helga says, can you pimp my ride? And they say,
hell's yeah, we can pimp your ride.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I mean, I guess it's probably kind of an awesome
question for these guys, like, hey, what can you do
to like mad Max my seventy nine Camaro? And they're
just like, oh, yeah, dude, I got some armor plating
around here, somewhere we can put this year, Like, let
me get my rivid gun and like we'll figure something
out here.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yeah. So they're like, let me check in the back.
They bring all sorts of stuff out of the back.
They do their thing, and Helga, even though he had
had this whole litany of no, no, third time no,
seven times no, ten times no from all these other big,
presumably powerful organizations, he and his new best friends, his
(12:58):
buddies in the US Air Force, they trick out the
Camaro and if you imagine the camaro such as Ben described,
which is just sort of the ordinary, like baseline badass
camaro such as a mere mortal might drive. Sorry, Ben,
I'm considering you a mere mortal, for.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
I'm extremely mortal. It's totally fine. I'm not offended by this.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Well, okay. When you think of humanitarian workers driving around
handing out supplies, helping people, I usually just picture like
a big, boring van, maybe with a red cross logo
on the side or something like that.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Yeah, a big white truck packed up with as many
supplies as you can get in it. But that's what
they were driving in there before, and those trucks were
getting ambushed and looted, and they were getting all their
supplies jacked by these warlords and all this stuff. So
you know, maybe that's not the right move to go
in with the vehicle that people are expecting to be
full of things that people who are in a war
(13:51):
zone might need.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
The Scooby Doo van or whatever you want to call it,
it's maybe not the best option. So you need something
maybe a little more aerodynamic, and you need something that's
suited to this really dangerous context. You need something maybe
a little less obviously visible. So you take this muscle car,
and Helga's priority was speed and speed and more speed
(14:14):
and ideally not getting fatally shot.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Right, And yeah, the stealth is the good is a
good option here, because yeah, they are looking for humanitarian
trucks and it's not great to be kind of sitting
in one exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah. Yeah, he wants to get in get out, so
he and his US Air Force buddies strip everything down
as much as they possibly can. They get rid of
the back seats, They armor plated as much as possible,
They kevlar the heck out of it. They painted the
whole thing matt black. The enemy, enemy, ambush brigands, robbers,
(14:48):
bad guys would not be able to see it on
thermal imaging or radar or whatever. They took out all
the lights, and I have to confess, I'm just freaked
out at the idea of driving at night without lights.
But on the other hand, I am not Helga Meyer.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Yeah. They say that he wore night vision goggles and
just looked at his GPS, and he's driving through like
when he gets into Sarajevo. He's driving through streets that
our mind with land mines and barricaded and blockades and
barbed wire, and he's never driven in Sarajevo, he's never
been to Bosnia before. And yeah, he's driving this car.
(15:25):
And I'm not gonna lie to you. I loved that
ninety two Z twenty eight Camaro, but that thing broke
down on me all the time. It was not super
reliable and to kind of I mean, he's painted it
with this aircraft like stealth aircraft paint that like absorbs light,
and he's driving it with the lights off in the dark,
trying to navigate by night vision goggles and not not
(15:48):
the like awesome night vision goggles that we have today,
but the night vision goggles from what is this nineteen
ninety six, like the first gen night vision goggles, which
are like, you know, not as good.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, so he's got all that. He's got a military radio,
he's got a front blade, which I'm picturing is kind
of like a cowcatcher but much cooler, so he can
kind of plow through or just kind of shove away
whatever or whoever needs to be shoved away.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Yeah, it was. It was still like push debris out
of the road and stuff like the blockades we were
talking about, And when you read interviews with him, he
said it was to a you know, he thought that
maybe having that blade out front just a big shovel
like a snowplow, and he was like, oh, maybe having
that out front would set off land mines before they
went off, so that they wouldn't blow up underneath my car.
(16:38):
That seems extremely ill advised, but it apparently worked out
for him.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
How big is this thing? It can't be more than
a few feet away from his car, So, okay, okay,
you do you helga.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
It's not blowing up directly under your ass, Like, yeah,
it's blowing up more in your face, which is probably better,
I guess.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, it's blowing up adjacent to your ass.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah, Be that.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
As it may. It apparently worked out for him.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
He survived.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Oh oh was that a spoiler?
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Yeah, spoiler alert for this Also the car had a
spoiler on it, so I don't know if that's.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
A uh huh I did there?
Speaker 1 (17:14):
I regret it? Regret nothing, No, that's it. And you know,
this car looks like something out of Mad Max. It's
just it's black. It's got the roll cage on the interior,
it's got a front blade, it's got armor plating. On
all the windows. All the side windows are armored out.
It's just the front window, which is tinted like crazy.
The main difference between this and a mad Max car, though,
(17:37):
is that he didn't put any guns on it because
he's not a warrior. He's not a soldier. He's not
trying to kill anybody. He's not looking to shoot his
way out of a out of the situation, which in
some ways is almost more bad ass that this guy didn't.
He didn't even carry a side arm he didn't carry
a pistol into this war zone because he wasn't there
to fight. He was there to help people, and like
(17:58):
that takes some serious right. I will say, though, that
my favorite upgrade to the car is that he put
like a little rubber ducky in the grill.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Wait what then, you're kidding about the rubber ducky right?
Speaker 4 (18:09):
No?
Speaker 1 (18:10):
No, no no. So if you go and look up
pictures of the car, he called it the ghost Camaro
because it was all blacked out and you couldn't pick
it up on thermal imaging and it was really hard
to see it at night. But if you look up
pictures of the ghost Camaro on Google, or if you
go to our site and check it out. There you
can see like just the little eyes and beak of
this little plastic yellow rubber ducky like you'd see in
(18:33):
a bathtub.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
That must be the baddest ass rubber ducky of the
twentieth century.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah, that rubber ducky has probably seen some shit. And
Helga Meyer, it's important to remember that he's doing this
without any approval by anybody, right, I think it really
needs to be said that it's like everybody told him, no,
you can't go. It gets in his car and he
is making sorties every night. He's driving his Camaro, however
(19:00):
many miles to whatever school or location he needs to
go to. I mean, it's amazing, right in a way.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
He's got all of this equipment, but he's basically using
the force to go through Sarajevo and he's getting up
to like ninety miles an hour. Does that sound about right?
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, that's right. Like there's a several stories of him
being ambushed. There's stories where he's being chased by a
car full of dudes with AK forty seven's shooting at him.
The armor plating is bouncing bullets and like it's constant
danger for him. And I had enough mechanical issues with
my Camaro that I wasn't comfortable getting it up too
far above ninety on a flat terrain, not in a
(19:40):
war zone. For this guy, like he installed like nitrous
oxide into the car, which is crazy. It's not the
kind that gets you high, it's the kind that you
inject into your engine. I don't know if you remember
like the Fast and the Furious movies that used to
be about racing, and that was the thing that you
always see in those movies where there's the little red
button on the dash and you push it and you
(20:01):
go super fast. So he already has a pretty juiced
up car between what he has done to the car
beforehand and the Air Force guys, you've got this four
hundred and forty horsepower V eight and injecting NOS in
there is going to give you a little bit of
extra acceleration. Kind of think of it as like an
after burner for a fighter plane.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah. Over roughly a decade, he made over one hundred runs,
He delivered nearly a thousand pounds of food, and he survived.
He took a bullet off of his helmet. The car
itself took a lot of heat, but both Helga and
the car and the rubber ducky were so well protected
that they were otherwise unscathed and they survived the war,
and also, honestly, so did many of the good residents
(20:42):
of Sarajevo, because they had access to the supplies that
Helga the renegade delivered to them. And so yeah, that's
that's Helga Meyer.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Yeah, and there's some great pictures that you can find.
We'll post some of them on badassodweek dot com and
it's part of his article. But if you searched Ghost
Camaro and Helga Meyer, he drives this car through Sarajevo,
through the streets of Bosnia and Serbia, and he's just
basically unloading these big cardboard boxes of cotton candy for
(21:11):
school kids. And you know, like you said, like there's
some more important things that can be delivered, but you know,
there's this psychological, like morale bonus of hey, you know,
we got candy. We're in the middle of this war
zone and this nice thing is happening today. I think
it's hard to put a value on how much that
contributes to the happiness and the morale of people who
(21:34):
are going through one of the most horrible wars we've
seen in a very long time, the worst the world
had seen since World War Two.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, and especially since normal humanitarian aid wasn't getting through.
The residents of Sarajeva are thinking, Hey, someone out there
is actually thinking about us.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
And he still has the Camaro, which is cool. At
least as of the time of the article I wrote
about him, which was a few years ago, he still
had the Camaro, which is cool. And so that's the
story of Helgemeyer and the Ghost Camaro, and that's pretty awesome.
From there, we are going to transition into another story
of similar repurposing, and we're going to do another modded rumba.
(22:14):
When we come back from this, we're going to be
talking about a group of guys who took a tank
and a jet fighter and duct taped them together and
used it to fight oil fires. We'll be back after this. So,
(22:36):
if you turned on the TV in the late nineties,
you were seeing the horrors of the Yugoslavian War, But
if you turned on the TV in the early nineties,
you were seeing the horrors of the aftermath of the
Gulf War. So in nineteen ninety one, Saddam Hussein owed
a bunch of money to Kuwait and instead of paying
them back, he invaded and conquered their country, and a
lot of people said, no, maybe you shouldn't do that,
(22:58):
and they formed this big co of various countries around
the world attack Saddam Hussein and the Desert Storm War
as we know it in the US. Saddam had the
third biggest army in the world at the time, only
behind the United States in Russia, and that army was
destroyed in I think like a week to ten days. Honestly,
within a few hours. Most of it was kind of
beat up, and by the end of the war it
(23:20):
was mostly annihilated. So Saddam decides, okay, maybe this might
have been a mistake, and he leaves Kuwait. But he says,
you know, if I can't have all this oil, no
one can. So he sets all of the Kuwaiti oil
fields on fire on his way out the door, and pat,
I'm sure you've seen the pictures of this and the
footage of this like towering fireball, like the inferno, like hellscape.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Oh yeah, it's scary to look at. And what's also
scary is thinking about the environmental damage.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Of all this.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yeah, the environmental damage of these oil fires is catastrophic, right,
The ecological impact is staggering. It's like one step removed
from basically being an extinction level event like a nuclear winter.
You know, it depends on how long these fires were
going to burn for. But you're still looking at literally
hundreds of oil fires. All of these oil dereks were
(24:09):
lit on fire, they say six to seven hundred of them.
They're two hundred foot tall pillars of flame burning at
this huge heat. They're just spewing black smoke into the atmosphere,
like millions and millions of gallons of crude oil or
just burning every day forever, NonStop. So you know, I
mean oil wells are pressurized and the oil shoots up
(24:30):
out of them and as soon as it contacts the air,
catches on fire and they're not going to stop burning.
And when you look at that from an ecological perspective,
you're looking at like gas raining, like gasoline spraying everywhere
and raining down on things. You've got acid rain that
comes out of this thousands of miles away. You're seeing
these pillars of fire, and if they burn too long,
there's a chance that, you know, you get this kind
(24:52):
of nuclear winter conditions where it's going to you know,
lower the temperature of the Earth by a degree, which
is just you know, doesn't sound like much, but it's
a real bad deal. And basically every firefighter on Earth
is watching this on TV and is like, we gotta
do something about this, this big problem.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah, it's a huge problem. Hundreds of oil, of fires
of honestly biblical proportions. How does a firefighter deal with
something of that magnitude?
Speaker 1 (25:20):
I mean, I have no idea, right Like, I look
at these images of these humongous fires and it's just
like like you're literally shooting a flamethrower in the air
from underground, is what it looks like.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Have no idea how you would begin to even deal
with something like that, let alone seven hundred of them.
And at first a lot of engineers were like, yeah,
we don't know what we're gonna do. I don't know
if we're gonna be able to put these out fast
enough before it does, you know, cause some very serious
problems globally, and they want to get firefighters from all
over the world out there to help. And so just
(25:51):
as Helga Meyer was watching Yugoslavia on his TV. There's
a group of guys in Hungary watching their TV. They
work for a company called MB Drilling. They're based about
thirty miles south of Budapest in Hungary. These guys are
watching and they're like, we have what might be a
solution here and now is when we need to talk
about big Wind.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Big Wind that's either a really cool name or the
punchline to a fart joke.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Yes, it is a really cool thing. It might be both.
I don't know if they have any big Wind jokes
about it. It's an old style like Russian engineering thing.
It's kind of came out of, you know, the Cold War,
which is like, hey, in Siberia, we have a bunch
of airfields that are covered in snow eleven months out
of the year, and we have to clear the snow off.
(26:41):
So I don't know what do we do. How about
we just strap a jet engine onto a flatbed truck
and turn it on and use the exhaust of the
MiG engine to like blow like snowblower the snow off
the runway.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
So they mcguyvered a huge ass snowblower.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yes, that could work very like Russians style. I definitely
like have an image in my head of what these
guys looked like when they came up with this solution.
But apparently it works. I don't know how efficiently, but
it worked. And then they decided like, okay, well, how
do how do we google ie room by this version
of it? And how about we take two jet engines
(27:19):
and we mount them onto a tank. And that's what
Big Wind is. Big Wind was built by MB Drilling
Company in Hungary and it is two jet engines from
a Meg twenty one fighter mounted onto the turret of
a World War two Soviet T thirty four tank. And
it looks awesome.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
It does. I've seen pictures. It's painted. I am not
making this up fire engine red. You could kind of
say it looks like a railgun, but I think calling
it a railgun doesn't do it justice. This thing is
honestly surreal. It looks like rejected Star Wars concept art.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Yeah. The engines are ten feet long, which is roughly
like a short school bus, and they are filled with
jet fuel. They'll forget.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
So you've got these large cylinders things filled with jet fuel,
and they're coming out of the front and I'm looking
at these photos and I'm thinking this is sort of
like some weird oversized Oh hey, you know Wally, the
little robot character. He's got those kind of big round eyes.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah, that's a great analogy for what it looks like.
It looks like Wally except a tank.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Except a tank. Yeah, much much much bigger than Wally.
And these big round things come out the front, and
these huge cylinders or eye stalks or whatever you want
to call them. That's where they shoot the air out, right.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yeah, that's where the air comes out.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
And they're on these mounts so they can beget this
angled around, they can shoot air in different directions. And
then each of these two eyestalk cylinders have these three
like long rigid eyelashes coming out at the top, making
it look even weirder. And that's where the water comes out.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Yeah, and so find the water is a bit of
a challenge here, but yeah, you have to like basically
you plug a hose into a lake or some groundwater.
You just like dig a hole down to groundwater and
plug it into that and you know, whatever giant water
source you can find, because this thing needs a lot
of water, and so that shoots out of the eyelashes,
and basically it produces enough water to fill in above
(29:21):
ground swimming pool in about twenty seconds. It's shooting out
at about seven hundred and seventy miles an hour, which
is roughly the speed of sound.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Wow, and I do kind of wonder what it's like
to be a human being in the vicinity of these things.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
It's probably not super fun, so we'll get into it
in a second though. Yeah, yeah, and be drilling. And
the leader of this unit that's going to be deployed
here with Big Wind, his name is Nandor Shumlai. And
one of our producers said, we can't mention him without
including our reference to Nandor the Relentless from what we
do in the Shadows. But Nandor goes in with his
(29:55):
two buddies, Tamas Debrezeni and Ishtvan Scheish. My Hungarian pronunciation
is very poor, and hopefully that was close enough. I
apologize to any Hungarians who had to witness that. But basically,
these three guys, they're all in like their late forties
early fifties, and they take Big Wind from Budapest to
(30:17):
Kuwait and they just start driving this tank around the
middle East. Just three middle aged Hungarian dudes driving around
a tank full of jet fuel trying to put out
oil derek fires, and.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
They're in the vicinity of water that's being shot out
at what did you say, seven hundred and seventy miles
per hour? So it's faster than the speed of sound.
How are their ear drums doing in all of this?
Speaker 1 (30:38):
You have to wear hearing protection or your ears will bleed.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yikes. Okay, so this is loud.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Yeah, I mean it's a jet engine, so the whole
thing is loud, right, And the T thirty four itself
is loud, and the.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Tea thirty four that's the main Soviet tank of World
War Two, but that's from like the nineteen forties, right.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Right, And yeah, it's the tank from the forties and
they're driving it around in nineteen ninety one. It's the
fifty sixty year old tank. It clanks and rattles and
just kind of chugs, and you know, the T thirty
four was famous for making this kind of rattling noise
when it drove around. Anyway, it's not quiet, and it's
got this big like you know, with the Camaro we
talked about the five point seven liter V eight. This
(31:16):
thing has a forty liters V twelve. It's loud and
it just cranks out plumes of black smoke. And then
on top of that you got the oil dereks, which
are making noise. It's like rushing water out of the ground,
catching on fire and burning. So it's like that rumbling
of water kind of sound. And then you have the
fireball on top of it, and it's loud. It's so
(31:37):
loud that the only way these guys can communicate. You know,
you can't do hand signals because you can't put your
face outside the tank when you're next to this burning oil. Derek, Oh,
hell no no. So they have these boxes with lights
on them like red, no, green, yes, up, down, left, right, and.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
So it's kind of like Captain Pike in the Menagerie
episode of Star Trek.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
It's exactly like that.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Not the most newance form of discourse.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
It's perfect. Yeah, that's the only way that can communicate. Right.
So you have Thomas diberd Zenny, he's sitting in the
driver's seat of the T thirty four, and it's like, okay,
you have to really trust this fifty year old technology
from World War Two to keep you alive here because
he can't really see out the front because the heat's
so intense that the entire front of the tank has
(32:23):
to be a heat shield, so there's no periscope, there's
no looking out the front of this thing. He is
just sitting at the controls driving it, looking at these
colored boxes. And then Ish van Scherish is in the
he's the platform controller. He's in the back. He's operating
the turret kind of aiming the jet engines at the
fire and Nandor is probably the biggest badass of all
(32:47):
of them because he walks next to the tank just
like wearing a radiation suit.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Like he walks walks, you mean, like on the ground.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Like on the ground twelve feet away from the tank
and to the side behind because he's got to look
at where he's going. So he's wearing like full hazmat suit,
right like when you see like a pandemic movie and
everybody's wearing all those biosuits, the anti nuclear, anti radiation,
anti whatever suits. He's wearing one of these giant fireproof suits.
And he walks next to the tank and he just
(33:16):
kind of eyeballs it. And he's got the control box
and he's like, yeah, I go forward, So he hits
the forward button they drive forward, And to me, that's
pretty baller.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah, that's pretty baller. That's pretty bad ass. That's pretty
relentlessly bad ass.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
An interesting thing about big Wind is that they originally
developed it to kind of hose down the aftermath of
like a nuclear attack.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
So if some city in Hungary got hit with the
nuclear attack, you could just drive this bad boy in
there and it would be shielded against heat and radiation
and you could use it to hose down tanks or
buildings or whatever. And that was the original purpose of this.
But then they were like, Okay, maybe we can make
(34:00):
this work for a different purpose.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Yeah, exactly, and they did.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
It was designed to kind of combat the heat and
radiation and fires after a nuclear attack, but it's actually
pretty well suited for fighting oil fires. They have this
big fire engine red tank with jet engines, and they
fly to the Middle East and the C one thirty
lands and opens the back hatch and this thing drives
out into the middle of all of these other firefighter
(34:27):
crews from all over the world who have come here
together to band together and fight this global disaster.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah, one of the guys out there was Reddair, the
most famous firefighter at the time, and you've written about
him on the blog, right Ben, I have, Yeah, And
he was famous for putting out guess what oil field fires?
He was from Texas. He put out a bunch of
fires in Texas and then he showed up here here
(34:54):
being Kuwait, he was seventy five at the time. Hey,
you know, he's living the best lat and he used explosives.
How do you use explosives to put out a fire?
Apparently what you do is you basically bomb the oil
field fire and that puts it out. Is this what
(35:15):
people mean when they say fight fire with fire? And
apparently you can use this specially shaped explosive. The explosion
creates a shock wave and that blows the fire away
from the oil well, the source the fuel, and it's
kind of like blowing out a birthday candle, only much
much bigger and there's no cake involved.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah, And that's like the interesting thing with putting these
out right is because the oil comes directly out of
the ground and ignites, but it doesn't ignite immediately because
when it's coming out of the ground, it's moving so
fast that it doesn't ignite, and so what you have
to do is break that connection between the stream of
fuel and the currently bursting fire. And you know you
(35:55):
do have to cap the well. Yeah, these explosives aren't
capping the well. Big wins not capping the well. Have
to stop the fire from being continually fueled out of
the ground. And yeah, somebody asked Nandor about Red Adair
because Redd Adair at the time was like the most
famous firefighter in the world. I think John Wayne basically
played him in a movie once. And they asked Nandor
about Red Adair and he was like, oh, he's explosives
(36:17):
to put out oil fires. And Nandor was like, what, Like,
I'm not crazy. I don't love that. I love that. That
was his reaction to that. But anyway, like these guys
who are in Kuwait, even the Red Adair guys, are
watching this giant fire engine red T thirty four with
MiG engines on it, like drive off the C one
thirty and they're just like, what is to deal with
(36:39):
this guy? I mean talk about like apocalyptic right, this
thing looks completely bunkers. They arrive in the Middle East
in August of nineteen ninety one, and these guys spend
the next fifty seven days fighting fires with big wind,
which you know, like I said, they're wearing these radiation suits.
They're driving them out to these fires. The controls get
(37:00):
it's so hot when you're sitting inside the tank that
you have to wear these like special super thick gloves
to touch them because you're basically cooking inside the tank
while you're putting these fires. I you have to get
like super thick up amidst basically to even grab the
control stick. Oh yeah, you got to get within twenty
five feet of this fireball for big wind to be
effective against it. And twenty five feet is like not
(37:22):
that far. It's like a big room in your house,
or like you know, a swimming pool, like a normal
swimming pool, not an Olympic sized swimming pool. And you
got to drive this tank that close to these things
before you can like blast the air at it. So
the jet engines, you couldn't crank them up beyond seventy
percent because if you went higher than that, they were
going to overheat. The jet engines are designed to be
run in the upper atmosphere where it's cold, and not
(37:44):
in front of like a hail of burning oil.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Yeah, this is not their natural environment.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
No, they're designed to be run in Siberia on a
landing pad or like in upper atmosphere. And yeah, they'd
find a water supplier. They did, They dig a hole
or whatever. They'd get some kind of water supply set up,
and they'd shoot at the thing with big wind for
like ten to twenty minutes, which is a long time
to be sitting there cooking inside of a base of
(38:11):
like literally a metal oven. And they'd sit there and
they'd hose down the fire in it, and then it
would work. And they say that when the fire was out,
like the tank, the exterior of the tank would be
burning so hot that you could literally just like slap
a steak on there and cook it. In a couple
of minutes. It would char grill it.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
You never know, that could be the next gastronomic trend.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Chart grilled on the exterior of a tank. I mean, like,
I would totally eat that if that was on a
menu somewhere, if I go, I would totally eat that,
as long as they weren't hosing down the radiation, you know,
the nuclear radiation. I think I probably actually would eat
that and yeah, they were there for fifty seven days.
And fifty seven days fifty seven days they were in Kuwait.
(38:53):
I don't have like a good count on how many
fires they put out, But one thing that's worth mentioning
is that these guys and all the other firefighters out
there who were working on this right there were teams
from all over the world, and they were out there
working crazy hours, and they came from everywhere to do
this because it was a global problem that had to
be dealt with. And these guys read a dare and
big wind and all of these other teams that were
(39:15):
a little bit more conventional in their approaches to putting
out fires. These people came from all over the world
and they were working day and night. They were underrested,
and they were putting out all together, people managed to
put out all these teams to combine to put out
something to like three or four fires a day. Wow.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Yeah. And towards the end of it, once everybody started
getting the hang of it, like collectively, these companies were
putting out four to six fires a day. When the
fires started, people believed it was going to be five
years before they would all be put out. And that
is like serious global problem, global temperature change problems. Oh yeah, yeah,
(39:54):
but when everybody in the world came together, including Big Wind,
including Red Adare, and they were able to put these
fires all out in six months and avert global catastrophe
climate change on like a post apocalyptic level climate change on.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
A frighteningly immediate timeline.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
And yeah, it was averted thanks to all of the
Big Wind and all of these other like brave firefighters
who got out there. It's heroic though, right, It's what
makes a badass.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
I think, Yeah, you do something, you go above and beyond.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
Yeah, And that's kind of the connection between our stories today. Yeah,
regular people watching some horrible stuff around the world volunteered
to personally go in and try to make the world
a better place. And it's admirable and it's badass, and
it's heroic and it's inspirational. And that's all we have
for today is you know, yeah, maybe I don't know
(40:47):
how we can apply this to our daily lives, but
you know, maybe you know, when the old lady at
the grocery store drops something you can get it for
or something, it's the least you can do. Because these
people are doing traveling around the world to fight fire.
Speaker 4 (41:00):
So yeah, with that in mind, thank you guys so
much for listening as always, and we really appreciate you guys,
And yeah, we'll see you on the next one with
probably something significantly more violent.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Thanks so much.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Phibbs.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.
(41:38):
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the
Week is based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.
(41:58):
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
your friends and your enemies if you want as. We'll
be back next week with another one. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
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