America's AIRBORNE Anti-hero - Jake "McNasty" McNiece

There is a kind of soldier an army needs desperately the moment the shooting starts, and cannot get rid of fast enough the second it stops. Not the recruiting-poster hero. Not the man who salutes on time and never opens his mouth out of turn. The other kind. The one who always does the right thing, and never once does it the right way. This video is about Jake McNiece, the paratrooper his own buddies called McNasty, ringleader of the single most notorious little squad the United States Army ever tried and failed to control, a demolition section history remembers as the Filthy Thirteen. A photograph of them, war-painted and mohawked the night before D-Day, went on to help inspire a movie you've almost certainly seen. Four combat jumps in a war where plenty of airborne men did not survive their first. And he pulled off nearly all of it while carrying the lowest rank in his entire company, because the Army, as a matter of policy, flatly refused to promote him. In this video, we tell the full, completely absurd, completely true story of Jake McNiece, from a broke Oklahoma poacher to the wildest anti-hero this country ever turned out. You will discover: ✓ Why a draft-exempt firefighter volunteered for the single most dangerous job the Army was offering ✓ How a fistfight over butter in his first week told his commanders exactly what kind of man they had ✓ Why he was the only new man in the company the Army refused to promote, and why he did not care ✓ How he rucked a hundred and thirty-six miles to jump school without changing his socks or getting one blister ✓ How and why he stole an entire train because he did not feel like walking back to base ✓ Where the mohawks and war paint came from, and how a photograph of them went viral in 1944 ✓ How his own Air Force blew up the bridge he was ordered to hold, and what he did about it ✓ How thirty-five men on the high ground answered a demand to surrender from seven hundred Germans ✓ Why he cleared an entire town in Holland sliding on one hip to protect six eggs ✓ How he volunteered for a job with an eighty percent death rate and helped save Bastogne with it The Army's containment strategy for its worst influence was to put him in a platoon by himself and make him his own sergeant. Then, every time another trooper turned out to be cut from the same strange cloth, they shipped that man over to join him. It worked about as well as you'd expect. The man they refused to promote to private first class eventually talked his way up to acting first sergeant, on the exact strength of the behavior that had kept him off the ladder in the first place. And here is the part most tellings leave out. The same qualities that made him indispensable in combat made him nearly impossible in peacetime. He drifted, drank, and fought his way through a rough stretch after the war, nearly killed himself in a car, then turned it all the way around. He beat the drinking, settled down, and spent the rest of his life selling stamps behind a post office counter in Ponca City, Oklahoma, where not one person in line ever guessed who their quiet small-town mailman had been. Late in his life, somebody asked Jake how he survived all of it. He said he figured God simply did not have anywhere to put him. I'm not sure anyone will ever write a cleaner definition of an anti-hero than that. Tell us in the comments your favorite moment, the butter, the eggs, the seven hundred Germans, or the train. And tell us which forgotten soldier you want dug up next. Lest we forget. #JakeMcNiece #FilthyThirteen #Paratroopers #DDay #Bastogne #101stAirborne #WWII #MilitaryHistory #TheDirtyDozen #LestWeForget