Amidst the 24/7 Newtown coverage, you may have caught wind that Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye died. I, of course, grew up in Hawaii, and Inouye was Senator the whole time I was there. (He spoke at my high school graduation, so we were pretty much related.)

While I was aware Inouye lost his right arm in an act of battlefield valor during WW II, I was unaware of how utterly insane the event was. USA Today tersely describes the story in its obit.

Already wounded by a bullet to his midsection, Inouye was lobbing hand grenades at the enemy when his right arm was almost completely severed by an enemy grenade launcher.

With his left arm, Inouye reached over to pry the live grenade out of his debilitated arm. Hours later while receiving treatment at an Army hospital, Inouye’s right arm was amputated.

But this site, which lauds Inouye as its Badass of the Week, provides more detail.

From this point on in the battle, Lieutenant Daniel Inouye of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team went into Total Fucking Berserker Meltdown Mode. He doesn’t even remember what happened next – but his awestruck platoon members sure as fuck do.

While still bleeding profusely from the mangled stump that used to be his right arm, Daniel Inouye ditched the grenades, unslung the Tommy Gun, and started firing it one-handed while running all over the goddamned battlefield like a fucking maniac, blasting the holy living shit out of anything with a gray helmet. He cleared out the third machine gun position with the Tommy Gun, changed the magazine, and then started running towards the main body of the enemy position, by himself, shooting the machine gun with his off-hand, wasting Nazis left and right in a hail of gigantic bullets. Finally, after rampaging like a madman, Inouye was shot in the leg, lost his footing, and fell down a hill. Unable to move, but unwilling to back down, Inouye propped himself up against the nearest tree, kept firing, and refused to be evauated until his Sergeants had moved the unit into position and prepared defenses for the inevitable German counterattack. All told, he had killed 25 Germans and wounded 8 more, and he’d literally done it all single-handedly. When the men in his unit came to the hospital and recounted the events to Inouye, his exact words were, “No, that can’t be… you’d have to be insane to do all that.”

One final interesting tidbit from the USA Today piece:

In 1944, Inouye narrowly avoided death in France when a bullet struck him in the chest and hit two silver dollars he carried in his shirt pocket for good luck.