Heroic Sacrifice/Real Life

Zhenya Tabakov, a 7-year-old boy, who died while protecting his 12-year-old sister from a rapist.
A group Heroic Sacrifice - United Flight 93 on September 11th. After learning that three other planes had been used as weapons against thousands, passengers assaulted their hijackers, knowing it would probably lead to their deaths. It did, but countless lives were saved at wherever the intended target site was. Various cell phone calls to loved ones indicate that the passengers knew exactly what they were doing and there was no chance of surviving.
Prof. Liviu Librescu. During the Virginia Tech massacre, he held the door of his classroom shut, allowing most of his students escape. He was shot through the door five times before finally succumbing to a shot to the head.
Termites soldiers will go out of their mound in the event of a breach to hold off the enemy (usually ants) while the workers rebuild. Sealing the soldiers out. You know, when they don't just blow themselves into sticky goo.
Port Arthur Massacre had more than one sadly failed attempts. Nanette Patricia Mikac knelt down before a mass murderer to die whilst asking him, simply, to spare her children (unsuccessfully). Carolyn Loughton threw herself on top of her daughter, but while she survived, her daughter did not. Brigid Cook began an impromptu evacuation of the site and whilst shot, survived. Neville Quin was shot in the neck and survived trying to reach his wife.
Yuri Gagarin. Colonel Yuri Gagarin died on March 27, 1968 when the Mi G-15 he was piloting crashed near Moscow. He could have ejected safely from his failing craft, but chose to fly on past that point, because if he had ejected, the plane would have landed on a village killing everyone there.
- Previously, Gagarin had tried to save his friend Vladimir Komarov's life by pulling one of these. The Soyuz 1 spacecraft was a poorly designed and completely doomed piece of junk that was only going to be launched due to pressure from the Politburo, and Gagarin knew it. Komarov was going to be the pilot, and Gagarin was his backup. Gagarin tried to use his clout to cancel the launch, and when that was unsuccessful, he tried to take Komarov's place. But the Politburo refused to allow a national hero on a flight they knew would not be two-way, and Komarov went up as planned. Almost every system on the craft began to fail almost immediately, and the mission was aborted. Unfortunately, the ship caught fire during re-entry and both the main parachute and reserve parachute failed to deploy properly, so Komarov hit the Earth without slowing down and was killed on impact.
Falling on a grenade.
Practically every posthumous recipient of the Medal of Honor or similar awards. In fact, most recipients who survived would later say they never expected to.
Subverted, if the story behind the "Burghers of Calais" sculpture is to be believed: the six noblemen of the town who offered themselves in exchange for the town's safety ended up alive after it all, and the statue depicts them as not so much "heroic" as defeated and weary, but conscious of duty.
Flower, veteran matriarch of Meerkat Manor's Whiskers clan, embraced this trope when she went Mama Bear on a den-invading cobra, and got bitten on the face defending her pups.
- Her son Shakespeare as well. First, he gets bitten on the jaw and thigh driving off a puff adder, then later, he has the misfortune of being the lone babysitter for his mother's pups when a rival pack comes calling. No-one's actually sure what happened, but the pups survived and Shakespeare was never seen again.
First Lieutenant John Robert Fox called fire on his own position on December 26 1944 in a successful attempt to stall a German advance. His body was located in a counter-attack the next day, along with those of around 100 German soldiers.
Captain Lawrence Oates, member of the Terra Nova Expedition (and expedition to the South Pole). While returning from the center of the South Pole with another three people (they were five but one died) his condition started to get worse due to frostbite and scurvy, slowing the others. He realized that due to him slowing them down the others wouldn't be able to survive. So, he asked them to leave him behind; when they refused, he said "I'm just going outside and may be some time", he put his boots and walked out of his tent into a -40cº blizzard.
Marian Fisher, age 13, the oldest of ten girls taken hostage in the Amish school shooting in 2006: "Shoot me first"
Philippine man loses own life after saving dozens from floods
The Alamo in general. The lost include Davy Crockett.
Firefighters who responded to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, many of whom realized they were exposing themselves to lethal levels of radiation and condemning themselves to painful deaths by rushing in to extinguish the burning reactor but did so anyway.
While driving home with his pregnant wife, "Brian Wood" noticed that a car was crossing the center line and heading straight for them. With no time to avoid a crash, Brian swerved to the right so that he would take the full force of the collision, saving his wife and unborn child.
- The depressing thing about this is the reason the other car was out of control. The driver was trying to take her sweater off without stopping.
Ryan Arnold saved his older brother Chad Arnold's life by giving him his liver for a transplant, but died shortly after the surgery was completed.
This and this, from the Sichuan Earthquake
'Teen Hero' Drowns After Brother Saved First
When the Halifax Explosion of 1917 was about to erupt, train dispatcher Vince Coleman had an opportunity to flee, but remembered that a train was due in town any minute. He stayed at his post and transmitted the following telegraph: "Stop trains. Munitions ship on fire. Approaching Pier 6. Goodbye." Coleman was killed at his post, while the trains involved stopped a safe distance away from the explosion, saving hundreds of lives. What's more, the message was communicated throughout the rail network, allowing other dispatchers to immediately respond, rerouting traffic and sending relief supplies.
Glenn Allen^{[dead link]}, a devoted firefighter is killed in the line of duty trying to save the home of two residents, and only days before his first grandchild was born.
According to some, Vic Morrow's death during the filming of The Twilight Zone movie in 1983. One of the stunt helicopters crashed near to the filming place, he saved some of the child actors that were with him... and then was decapitated by the 'copter blades while trying to save the last two, who died alongside him.
Jalisa Granger, a young mother who died sheltering her baby during a tornado.
Don Lansaw jumps on top of his wife Bethany to protect her from a tornado and saves her life, but sadly dies in the process.
Compared to Chernobyl, the Fukushima 50 are (hopefully) an aversion. They are carefully being rotated to limit their total exposure to within international safety standards for emergency workers (with only a handful of cases where those have been marginally exceeded by accident), and thus far nobody is believed to have received any genuinely dangerous doses. The generators have now stablised, though cleanup is still needed.
- In fairness, the Chernobyl disaster was, of course, far worse (massively higher levels of radiation, inferior or lacking safety equipment and procedures, much less transparency). Certainly a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the 50, but it likely won't turn out to be a Heroic Sacrifice.
- As a corollary: all of the old people who willingly line up to clean radiation in Fukishima^{[dead link]} qualify as badass grandpas or grannies, exposing themselves to radiation so younger people won't have to. The highest levels involved may result in an increased risk of cancer from twenty to forty years in the future, so they figure they don't have as much to lose.
Following the March 11, 2011 earthquake, Miki Endo, a young Crisis Management worker in Minami Sanriku near Sendai, broadcasted a tsunami warning and was credited with saving the lives of nearly 7,000 people in her town. In recently salvaged recordings from the broadcast, her co-workers can be heard pleading with her to evacuate as the tsunami approached. But she stayed at the mic, warning people to flee until the more-than-ten-meter wave crushed the building she was broadcasting from.
- Fujio Koshita, at 57 the senior Otsuchi firefighter, died standing on top of the firehouse ringing the old warning bell, because the March 11th earthquake killed all electrical power in the town. His bell was heard ringing through the town until the tsunami swept him, and the firehouse, away. According to other firefighters, he violated his own rule about rescue workers; “Don’t die. Rescuers must stay alive” because your job is to help other people.
Arland Williams, the "sixth passenger" of Air Florida Flight 90. When the plane crashed in the icy Potomac River, he and five other survivors scrambled to the tail section of the destroyed aircraft. Twice he was tossed a lifeline from a helicopter. Twice he handed it off to others more severely injured than himself. When the chopper returned again he had slipped below the surface, the only victim to die by drowning.
The Four Chaplains on a crowded World War II troop ship. When it was torpedoed, the chaplains handed out life jackets to the men who made it onto the deck. When the life jackets ran out, they gave away their own.
Erwin Rommel, famed Nazi general, was condemned to death for his involvment in the July 20th plot against Adolf Hitler. The new 'blood guilt' (Sippenhaft) law meant that his family would have been punished as well. Rather than be executed as a traitor, Rommel accepted Hitler's offer of suicide and took a cyanide pill. His family was spared, and today Rommel is remembered for his civil conduct in warfare and willingness to help overthrow Hitler.
Everybody on the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice tablet.
On July 27, 2008, a man opened fire with a shotgun at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, because he disagreed with their beliefs. A church member named Greg McKendry deliberately took blasts from the shotgun to protect other church members, and died as a result.
On May 24 2008, Harry Potter actor Robert Knox saved his younger brother from a deranged knife wielder at a pub, losing his life in the process.
John Luther "Casey" Jones, a railroad engineer from Jackson, Tennessee, died in a train crash on a foggy, rainy night in 1900. He had ordered his friend, specifically, to "Jump, Sim, jump!". With his friend off of the train, Casey bravely controlled the engine to minimize impact, saving the lives of all of the passengers on board... except for Casey himself.
- In a less known event of Casey's heroism, he personally climbed onto the cowcatcher of the train, while it was moving, to reach out and save a child who was immobilized by fear on the tracks.
Richard "Rick" Rescorla saved over 2500 people by leading them to safety during the 9-11 attack, and died in the process.
- By extension, all of the firefighters and policemen who stayed in/near the World Trade Center in an attempt to evacuate as many people as possible.
Michael Monsoor, US Navy SEAL; a grenade landed on a roof where he was part of an overlook. He jumped on it and sacrificed his life, taking the brunt of the blast and keeping the shrapnel from hitting any of his friends.
A mother in Springfield, Massachusetts, saved her young daughter by shielding her with her body while a tornado destroyed their home. [1]
A shooting between gangs occurs near an elementary school with innocents caught in the crossfire. A mother shielded her daughter from the gunfire and lost her life protecting her child.
Everyone's heard about the band on the Titanic, but fewer people remember her engineering crew. The ship's engineers remained at their posts until the end, keeping the engines running as long as they could so that the lights would stay on and stave off panic. None of them survived the disaster.
- They quite possibly did more than keep the lights on. Questions have been raised about why the ship, unlike almost every other large vessel that's suffered damage on one side of the hull, didn't capsize. It's been suggested that the engineers kept working the trim tanks and pumps until all power was lost to keep the ship upright and allow the lifeboats to be launched from both sides. Since, as mentioned, none survived, we'll never know.
  - Let's not forget the people who gave up their own seats on the lifeboats. These people gave up their chance at survival to help strangers or to make sure that someone they loved who couldn't get a seat wouldn't die alone.
When the RMS Lusitania was torpedoed and sank in 1915, wealthy businessman Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt gave up his life jacket to a woman with a baby, and was last seen buckling her into it. He did this knowing that he could not swim and would surely die.
Kirsty MacColl was on holiday in Mexico with her family, diving in an area that was supposed to be off limits to boats, when a speeding powerboat appeared heading straight for her son. She managed to push him out of the way in time for him to suffer only minor injuries, but she herself was struck and killed instantly.
Kansas City Chiefs running back Joe Delaney dove into a lake despite his own inexperince in swimming to save three drowning children. Sadly, not only did Delaney lose his life in the process, but only one of the three children survived.
A couple of canine examples of this trope; George, a Jack Russell in New Zealand who was killed defending five kids from a pair of vicious pit bulls; and Chief, a pit bull in the Philippines who sustained a fatal bite protecting two women from a cobra.
U.S. Confederate soldier Calvin Crozier, who was headed back to his home in Texas at the end of the war, got into a scuffle with some aggressive Union soldiers in the town of Newberry, South Carolina. During the fight, he non-fatally cut one of them in the back of the neck, but the soldiers later claimed he murdered one of them and set out to arrest and execute him. Crozier was long gone, but found out that an innocent man had been arrested in his place. He returned to the town and turned himself in to save the other man's life, and was unlawfully executed by the soldiers.
Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe was a Polish Catholic priest who first was a missionary and thus went Walking the Earth for years. During World War II, this Badass Preacher was imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp for openly speaking out against the Nazi regime through noth a newspaper and a private radio station, and sheltering (among others) 2,000 Jews. He willingly went into the hunger bunker in place of of another prisoner, a Polish woodworker who had a wife and kids; he continued to calmly celebrate Holy Mass in the cell for the other prisoners, and was finally killed by a fatal injection of phenol after all the other prisoners had already died of starvation. He was made a saint in October 1982 by Pope John Paul II, and the man whose life he saved was there.
In 1907, a Mexican Brakeman named, Jesus Garcia, was killed when he droved a train filled with dynamite that was on fire. The explosion that claimed his life would’ve destroyed a Mexican mining town of Nacozari if Garcia hadn’t drove it 6 kilometers away from there.