Shoot the Shaggy Dog/Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • WWII Naval pilot Joseph P. Kennedy, eldest brother of John F. Kennedy, volunteered for Operation Aphrodite, a dangerous series of 1944 missions to destroy the German V3 supercannon. He and his co-pilot were to arm the explosives in their bomber, which could not be done remotely, and bail out. The bomber would then be piloted by remote-control, crashing into the V3's bunker complex and exploding. But shortly after the explosives were armed, they prematurely exploded, vaporizing plane and crew. The shaggy dog was thoroughly shot, however, when mere weeks later, Allied troops captured the alleged V3 complex and it was destroyed with a more conventional method by 617 Squadron on July 6, 1944.
  • The July 20th Plot was one of the many desperate attempts by sane Germans disgusted by Hitler and the Third Reich during World War II. The plan was within inches of killing Der Fuhrer and failed only due to the combination of a cavalcade of improbably unfortunate twists of fate. Planned and carried out in large part by the charismatic one-eyed and one-handed Major Claus Philipp Maria Justinian Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, Brigadier-General Hans Oster, General Friedrich Olbricht, and young Oberleutnant Werner Karl von Haeften, all of whom (along with many, many, many others who were crucial to the plot) paid for their attempt to shine a ray of hope through the darkness of the Reich (or, at the very least, hoping for a little good PR after the war they realized they were losing) with their lives - and many of them paid with the lives of their families and friends.
    • Valkyrie is the extremely authentic and well-researched film that tells much of the story, even if it skims over the multitude of less-than-noble motives that the plotters had for killing Adolf Hitler.
    • You forgot Henning von Tresckow. He was really the instigator (the Gestapo called him the "prime mover" and the "evil spirit") of the plot, and acted out of some of the better motives.
  • The Vietnam War veterans were looked down upon at the time of their return. To make it worse, in 1975 after the Americans left Vietnam, the Communist Northern side quickly steamrolled over the Southern side that the US sided with, making the entire conflict and the casualties on the American side ultimately meaningless.
    • There's the Second (Third, if you count its war with France) Vietnam War of 1979 between Vietnam, Cambodia and China 4 yeas later, especially meaningless for China and the CIA. China went to help the revolution in Cambodia because of a American "suggestion", which evolved into a war between Khmer Rouge and Vietnam, flattered the industry and trust it had built in North Vietnam before during the last war, only for Khmer Rouge to fall. Oh, and small-scale fighting continued until 1990.
  • Even worse: The soviet war in Afghanistan in the 80s. Thousands of Soviet casualties to try to force communism on Afghanistan... just for the whole Soviet-Communist system to come crashing down a few years later!
  • The book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls describes how the '70s generation of Hollywood filmmakers (Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, et al.) reinvented Hollywood in counterculture terms, only to end up either dying, being underfunded after huge flops, simply ignored or becoming the new establishment by the 1980s. (The final chapter is even entitled "We Blew It," a reference to the final line of dialogue from Easy Rider, the film which begins the story.) Possibly averted with some '90s filmmakers (Quentin Tarantino, The Coen Brothers, Kevin Smith, Paul Thomas Anderson, et al.) who took the '70s films as their inspiration and retained their indie cred throughout the 20-aughts. Or maybe not. Then again, it's a whole new decade.
  • Another film-making example, the documentary Lost in La Mancha was intended to be a behind-the-scenes of the Terry Gilliam movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. It didn't go as planned. In fact, at certain points in the documentary, it almost seems as if God Himself doesn't want this movie made. On the other hand, recent rumors suggest this may someday soon be averted.
  • Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov in the Soyuz 1 space mission, during the Space Race. Komarov knew the mission was unsafe, but knowing that his friend Yuri Gagarin was his backup, went ahead with the mission anyway so that his friend wouldn't have to take the risk instead. Everything went wrong. The capsule's solar cells didn't deploy properly. Communications broke down. The manoeuvrings thrusters that were designed to re-orient the ship lacked pressure. He couldn't see the sun to navigate the ship. After all that, after a heroic effect rigging up a system with the gyroscopes so that at last he could re-enter the atmosphere, the parachutes failed, and he died. Within a year, his friend would die in a plane crash anyway.
  • The 2002 Mecca girls' school fire is a tragic example. The school caught fire and the students were evacuated, but they were ordered back into the burning school by the Saudi mutaween police for not wearing their headscarves in public. Fifteen of the students were killed in the fire.
  • A 12 year old girl killed herself to give her eyes to her father and her kidney to her brother. Her body was cremated before her wishes were found, and, in any case, her choice of suicide (poison) would have made the organs unfit for transplant anyways.
  • The entire Universe will eventually give way to entropy and be cold and dead forever more. The aversion is Dyson's eternal intelligence hypothesis (or whatever you'd term "God"), and, of course, the possibilities of The Multiverse.
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