If you didn’t know she was still alive, I didn’t either. Apparently she’s 95

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Fun fact: Dr. Ruth was trained as a sniper in the Israeli military.

    When I was in my routine training for the Israeli army as a teenager, they discovered completely by chance that I was a lethal sniper. I could hit the target smack in the center further away than anyone could believe. Not just that, even though I was tiny and not even much of an athlete, I was incredibly accurate throwing hand grenades too. Even today I can load a Sten automatic rifle in a single minute, blindfolded."

    She was never deployed though, due to a serious injury:

    My legs were almost ripped off on my 20th birthday in 1948 in Jerusalem from cannon ball shrapnel which exploded in the student’s residence where I was living. Three other students were killed instantly and many more were wounded. The metal pierced both my legs, and there was blood everywhere. A cannon ball from Jordan had smashed through the window. I was thrown 20 feet. The strangest thing was that all I could think about was whether there might be some blood on the brand-new shoes I had just gotten for my birthday, and amazingly there wasn’t even a drop on them, which was all I cared about in some kind of strange denial.

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ruthless-ruth/