Anomaly - Against Odds

anomaly

əˈnɒm(ə)li

noun

Something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.

1. Desmond Doss

When he was a child, he once walked six miles to donate blood to an accident victim — a complete stranger — after hearing about the need for blood on a local radio station. A few days later, another call from further away in the need for blood and yet Again there he was.

Desmond had been raised with a strong belief in the Bible.

When it came to the Ten Commandments, he applied them personally.

During childhood his father had purchased a large framed picture at an auction.

It portrayed the Ten Commandments with colorful illustrations.

Next to the words, "Thou shalt not kill" was a drawing of Cain holding a club and standing over the body of his dead brother Abel.

Little Desmond would look at that picture and ask,

"Why did Cain kill Abel? How in the world could a brother do such a thing?" In Desmond's mind, God said, "If you love me, you won't kill." With that picture firmly embedded in his mind, he determined that he would never take life.

On April 1, 1942, Desmond Doss joined the United States Army at a young age of 18. Of the 16 million men in uniform during World War 2, only 431 received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

One of these medals was placed around the neck of a young Desmond Doss, who during combat had NOT killed a single enemy soldier.

In fact, he refused to carry a gun.

His only weapons were his Bible and his faith in God.

His fellow soldiers saw this Bible reading puritan, as being totally out of sync with the rest of the Army.

So they ostracized him, bullied him, called him awful names, and cursed at him.

His commanding officers also made his life difficult.

Things began turning around when the men discovered that this quiet unassuming medic had a way to heal the blisters on their march-weary feet.

And if someone fainted from heat stroke, this medic was at his side, offering his own canteen.

Desmond never held a grudge.

With kindness and gentle courtesy, he treated those who had mistreated him.

He lived by the golden rule,

"…do to others what you would have them do to you…"

(Matthew 7:12 NIV).

In each military operation he exhibited extraordinary dedication to his men.

While others were taking life, he was busy saving life.

As enemy bullets whizzed past and mortar shells exploded around him, he repeatedly ran to treat a fallen comrade and carry him back to safety.

By the time they reached Okinawa, he had been awarded two Bronze Stars for valor.

In May, 1945, Japanese troops were fiercely defending Okinawa,

the only remaining barrier to an allied invasion of their homeland.

After they secured the top of the cliff at Hacksaw Ridge, Japanese forces suddenly attacked.

Officers ordered an immediate retreat. As a hundred or more lay wounded and dying on the enemy soil, one lone soldier disobeyed those orders and charged back into the firefight.

With a constant prayer on his lips, Desmond Doss vowed to rescue as many as he could, before he either collapsed or died trying.

A lean and skinny guy although he was..

with His sheer iron determination and unflagging courage he would lift the wounded soldiers hoisting them right on to his back and carry them back to safety.

Desmond Doss, Alone & All By Himself saved at the least 75 lives that day.

2. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan & Mary Jackson

Known as the “computers in skirts,” the three African American women worked behind the scenes at NASA in the segregated West Area Computers division of Langley Research Center.

Their meticulous calculations helped the United States catch up in the “space race” against USSR - sending John Glenn, the first ever American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times.

While they did the same work as their white counterparts, African-American women were paid less and were put to work at the segregated west section of the Langley campus, where they had to use separate dining and bathroom facilities.

They became known as the "West Computers."

Despite having the same education, they had to retake college courses they had already passed and were often never considered for promotions or other jobs within NACA.

(National Advisory Comittee of Aeronautics)

Katherine Johnson's first big NASA assignment was computing the trajectories for Alan Shepard's historic flight in 1961.

Katherine and her team's job was to trace out in extreme detail Freedom 7's exact path from liftoff to splashdown.

The Flight was a huge success and NASA immediately set their sights on America's first orbital mission.

Dorothy Vaughan was one of NACA's early computer hires during World War 2.
She became a leader and an advocate for the "West Computers."

In 1948, she became NACA's first black supervisor and later, an expert FORTRAN programmer.

Vaughan struggled with the same things all female computers did while at NASA.

The conflict of working outside home to provide the best life for your children and, yet, not physically being there. But Dorothy knew she was changing the world.

Mary Jackson After graduating with dual degrees in math and physical science was hired to work at Langley in 1951.

After several years as a computer, Jackson took an assignment in assisting senior aeronautical research engineer Kazimirez Czarnecki.

Czarnecki encouraged her to become an engineer herself. To do that, however, she needed to take after-work graduate courses held at segregated Hampton High School. Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton to be able to learn next to her white peers.

She won, completed the courses, and was promoted to engineer in 1958, making her NASA's first African-American female engineer—and, perhaps, the only one for much of her career.

3. Arunachalam Muruganantham

aka Pad Man

Operating on a single machine at a time, Arunachalam Muruganantham explains his every move to four village women who watch carefully as he delicately handles lumps of cotton-like substance and rolls them to make sanitary napkins.

The final product, after the raw material passes through four other machines, is a thick, rectangular sanitary napkin costing just Re 1.

That’s about one-fifth the cost of an average branded sanitary napkin.

"It all started with my wife," he says.

In 1998 he was newly married and his world revolved around his wife, Shanthi, and his widowed mother.

One day he saw Shanthi hiding something from him.

He was shocked to discover what it was

- rags, "nasty cloths" which she used during menstruation.

"I will be honest," says Muruganantham.

"I would not even use it to clean my scooter."

When he asked her why she didn't use sanitary pads, she pointed out that if she bought them for the women in the family, she wouldn't be able to afford to buy milk or run the household.

When Muruganantham looked into it further, he discovered that hardly any women in the surrounding villages used sanitary pads

- fewer than one in 10.

He was shocked to learn that women in rural areas didn't just use old rags, but other unhygienic substances such as sand, sawdust, leaves and even ash.

Approximately 70% of all reproductive diseases in India are caused by poor menstrual hygiene - it can also affect maternal mortality.

“Looking at a sanitary pad one would feel it is cotton that these multinational companies use. So my first experiment was with cotton.”

The first sanitary napkin he made was cotton wrapped in a medical cloth which he gave to his wife and asked for her feedback.

He was disappointed when she said that it was useless and that she was going back to using that piece of dirty cloth.

For more useful feedback, he went to a medical college and gave the girls the napkins he made, thinking they were future doctors and would not be shy of giving their opinion.

When he did not get frank responses from them,

he prepared feedback forms which he asked them to fill.

“One day, when I went to collect the forms, I saw that two girls were filling out forms for the rest.This was not the kind of feedback I wanted; so I stopped the research,”

Strange though it may sound, he started using the napkin himself.

"I wore a napkin, tied a football bladder full of goat’s blood to my waist and attached a pipe to it."

He walked, cycled and ran with the football bladder under his traditional clothes, constantly pumping out blood to test his sanitary pad's absorption rates.

But it did not work as cotton cannot hold liquid.

Everyone thought he'd gone mad.

He used to wash his bloodied clothes at a public well and the whole village concluded he had a sexual disease.
His Friends avoided him.

"People thought I had become a pervert," he says.

As a last resort He supplied his group of medical students with sanitary pads and collected them afterwards.

He laid his collected sanitary pads out in the back yard to study them,

only for his mother to stumble across the grisly scene.

It was the final straw.

She cried, put her sari on the ground, put her belongings into it, and left.

"It was a problem for me," he says.

"I had to cook my own food."

Upon analyzing the used napkins, Muruganantham realized that the multinationals used cellulose, not cotton.

So he imported a cellulose sample from the US, anticipating a substance as fluffy as cotton.

“They sent me a thick sheet."

"I would just hold the sheet in my hand and wonder how they made sanitary napkins with this.

Then one day I tore the sheet and saw that it was made of fibers. The sheet was to be torn and made into fibers.

I now needed a machine to make the pads,” he said.

“The plant set up in the US cost not less than Rs 4 crore, which, of course, I could not afford."

"I understood the technique and designed simple machines that performed the same task but took up only a room’s space.”

Today, his workshop — under the name of Jayaashree Industries — produces sanitary napkin-making machines in bulk. He has supplied the units to over 200 districts in India.

4. Benazir Bhutto

Benazir - Her name means "one without equal."

Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was the founder of Pakistan People's Party who served as the President and then the Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1971 to 1977.

After completing her early education in Pakistan, she pursued her higher education in the United States. From 1969 to 1973, she attended Radcliffe College, and then Harvard University, where she graduated with a B.A. degree in comparative government.

It was then onto the United Kingdom to study at Oxford from 1973 to 1977.

There, she completed a course in International Law and Diplomacy.

Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 1977, and was placed under house arrest after the military coup led by General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq who overthrew her father’s government.

One year after Zia ul-Haq became The President in 1978, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged after his conviction on charges of authorizing the murder of an opponent.

Benazir was 29 when she inherited her father’s leadership and took the helm of Pakistan People's Party.

In 1988, Benazir Bhutto was the first woman ever elected to govern a Muslim country.

In the weeks prior to her election, Islamic scholar Mohammed Amin Minhas quoted the Prophet Mohammed, saying "a nation that elects to be governed by a woman will Not prosper,"

However, after she took her oath of office, Minhas reconsidered."Allah has given us this woman as Our leader, and Miss Benazir has acknowledged that this new power she possesses is, indeed, Allah's gift,"
he said.

Benazir Bhutto was killed when an assassin fired shots and then blew himself up after an election campaign rally in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007.

The attack also killed 28 others and wounded at least another 100.

The attacker struck just minutes after Bhutto addressed a rally of thousands of supporters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

She died after hitting her head on part of her vehicle’s sunroof.

She was the first woman Prime Minister in the Muslim world, and was well educated to do something for the betterment of her people.

She was a representative of women of Pakistan and thus, her eminence inspired hundreds and thousands of women to participate in activities outside their homes and get educated.

5. Dashrath Manjhi

Gahlaur is a remote and backward village, where caste system prevails. People belonging to backward castes are ill-treated by the village's mukhiya (leader), who is corrupt till deep neck.

'Development' word seems to be an alien term for them.
Dalits are not even allowed to look into the eyes of village mukhiya.
If they dare, they are brutally beaten.

Poor villagers have to travel through a narrow and a treacherous pass to cross a huge mountain, located between Attari and Wazirgunj, for their daily needs and for transport connectivity.

In 1956, Dashrat Manjhi, a native of Gahlaur village near Gaya district in Bihar, was married off in his childhood.

As a grown-up man, when he returned to his village after working in Dhanbad coal mines for seven years, he fell head-over-heels in love with a village girl, Falguni Devi.

To his surprise, that girl turned out to be his childhood bride.

One day, Falguni, who was heavily pregnant, was taking lunch for her husband to the fields, for which she needed to climb the mountain in the scorching heat. Unfortunately, Falguni's foot slipped and she fell down from the mountain, while hungry Dashrath was waiting for the food. Then someone from the village alerted Dashrath that his wife had fallen off the mountain. Dashrath ran into panic and took his blood-splattered wife to the nearest hospital - 70 kms away, where she was declared brought dead, but she gave birth to a baby girl.

The heart-broken Dashrath, who loved his wife more than anything else in the world, began cursing the huge mountain and vowed to bring it down to break its ego.

In the memory of his beloved wife, determined Manjhi embarked on a tough - almost impossible mission.
He decided to carve out a path, so that no other person suffered like his wife. Villagers and even his father ridiculed him for challenging such a huge mountain.

But Manjhi was adamant on his firm decision.

Years passed on, during which Gahlour was hit by a massive drought and villagers evacuated the village. Dashrath's father taunted him that what he had achieved in last so many years? He tried to convince Dashrath to accompany them to a city, where he could earn bread for his two children.

But, Dashrath decided to continue on his herculean task. With no water and no food, Dashrath was forced to drink dirty water and eat leaves.

People laughed and made fun of him but he just continued with his Hard work for 22 years.

This was Darshrath Manjhi, famously known as The Mountain man who single-handedly carved a path through a mountain using only a hammer and a chisel, so that his village could have easier access to medical facilities.

“That mountain had shattered so many pots and claimed so many lives. I could not bear that it had hurt my wife. If it took all my life now, I would carve us a road through the mountain.” Dashrath Manjhi

6. Senior Sergeant Yevdokiya Zavaliy

“It was the 25th of July.
I suddenly saw 4 black spots in the sky over our village and understood these were landing troops! After a terrible roar the enemy planes started bombing.
We rushed to our houses.

Having run into the yard, I heard someone moaning.
Under an old apple tree there was a young border guard lying in a pool of blood. I don’t remember the moment when I entered the house, tore the sheet to pieces and bandaged him… Then I saw another wounded soldier, then another…

The unit which Yevdokiya Zavaliy joined was the cavalry regiment. In order to be taken to the front line, she had to add three years to her real age and say to the commander that she was 18.

In the regiment she served as a nurse.
She learned to shoot a rifle, a pistol and a machine gun.

One day the people from the command came to take guys to the front line.
One of them approached Zavaliy and said that she had 15 minutes to pack her things.
The officer mistook Zavaliy for a man as she wore soldier's clothes and her head had been shaved to remove lice.

The officer ordered her to join a group of soldiers headed to the front line.

Zavaliy decided to go along with the mistake and two hours later she took part in a battle with the 6th Airborne Brigade.

She continued to serve in numerous battles under her new male identity and following her capturing of a German officer in combat she was appointed - commander of a reconnaissance squad.

The following year Zavaliy was a sergeant serving in the Kuban region when her company was surrounded during a heavy firefight and the company commander was killed.

Seeing her fellow soldiers confused as to whose orders to follow next Zavaliy took the command, shouting out to the men to follow her and leading them in a furious counter-attack which broke the enemy and sent them into retreat.

The battle left her seriously injured and during her treatment the doctors discovered that she was a woman.

Zavaliy expected to be dismissed and return to nursing, however in light of her many achievements she was allowed to stay in the army and in October 1943 she was promoted to commander of a submachine gunner platoon.

In her military career she was wounded a total of 4 times and received approximately 40 medals of honour.

Yevdokiya Zavaliy was the only female commander of the Ukrainian platoon of marines during WWII.

7. Evacuation of Dunkirk

Early in the Second World War, in late May 1940, the Allied forces of British, French and Belgian military were trapped by the invading German army on the coast of France & Belgium, in the area around Dunkirk.

The Germans spread chaos as they neared the English channel.

By the end of May 1940, the British pulled back and began searching for a way Home.

A disorganised fight gave way to an ordered retreat, and eventually to an organized evacuation.

At first, only support personnel were meant to be extracted, but the planning quickly evolved into a massive evacuation

An evacuation operation of more than 400,000 British, French & Belgian troops stranded on the Beaches of Dunkirk.

On the first day, a massive raid shattered the port of Dunkirk and tons of Bombs fell on the city, causing mass casualties and damaging the municipal water system which made it even harder to extinguish fires -

Dunkirk almost burned to the ground.

Not only did the vessels have to worry about round-the-clock air attacks during daylight,

but inshore, they were also within the range of German artillery.

Time did not allow the evacuation of all the troops via the Eastern pier bridge and hence, evacuation from the beaches was a necessity.

But they had a logistical problem: It was nearly impossible for larger ships to approach the shore and pick up troops due to Dunkirk's gently sloping and sandy shore, with shallow sea extending long distances under water.

In a stroke of ingenuity, a call went out for civilian boats to head to Dunkirk to ferry the troops to safety.

This heroic collection of small civilian vessels, Not built for war, was sourced from the rivers and coastal waters of south-east England.

Among their ranks were river boats, old sailing boats, rowing lifeboats, yachts, pleasure steamers, fishing boats, commercial sailing boats & Thames fire boats.

Many of these crafts had never even been to Sea before.

Some of the 'Little Ships' were formally chartered by their owners and some, where owners could not be contacted, were simply commandeered by naval crews.

A very small number of boats were sailed by the Navy personnel, whereas more than 90 % of the rescue boats driven to Dunkirk and back had civilians or were entirely civilian crewed.

While tugs towed some of the boats across, many other civilian vessels made the journey under their own steam & with little or no protection from German Air strikes.

Of the 700-odd officially recorded 'Little Ships', over 100 never made it home and became a part of the vessels lost during the evacuation.

However, not withstanding these losses,

their contribution to the rescue of 338, 226 Allied servicemen from Dunkirk had been invaluable and their achievements have gone into national folklore.

Termed as the Biggest Anomaly of its kind,

The Evacuation of Dunkirk till date is the worlds largest military rescue operation where more than 600 Civilian people voluntarily drove themselves into an ongoing Deadly War, amidst German Air strikes and Sea tides - in their "Little Ships" ONLY to bring back their fellow countrymen soldiers HOME.