The unsung ones, now quietly dropping off their respective perches and we never know anything about them until their obituary shows up in the newspaper. And you read it, and you think to yourself: “Bloody hell!” and sit there, quite stunned.

Freddie Spencer Chapman is one such. Worked behind enemy lines in the Malaya campaign of WWII, cheerfully blowing up the enemy with bamboo-and-gelignite bombs and inflicting so much damage with two comrades that the Japanese thought they were being taken on by 200 crack commandos. A life that, if it was fiction, would be dismissed as unbelievably far-fetched.

Read his obit, and I dare you not to be moved, inspired, uplifted, and also saddened that we don’t seem to make ’em like that any more.