As I'm leaving work my wife calls me: "Are you at the front door?"
Me: "No, I'm just leaving work."
Her: "Somebody's pounding on the front door, jiggling the handle. They went onto the porch and started pulling on the slider. I think they're trying to break in!"

I was about 7 miles away, during rush hour, on surface streets. I could picture my handgun upstairs, unloaded, and too big for her to operate. I got there fast.

And?

Desert Storm in '90 -'91.

Well, that call was pretty scary.

By the time I got there nobody was around. We figured it was a drunk at the wrong house or some punk kids.

Anti-climactic, I know. But that was a good thing. She has her own handgun now and they're always ready to go.

honest answer?

scariest? 4th grade. mandatory G D effen square dance class! (grew up in texas). we had to ask a girl to be our partner for the duration. mustering up the stones to ask diana ciceri to be my dance partner. i almost peed. she was the hottest girl..and i got her to be my partner by being first to ask.

she said yes, and we rocked that school gym with a doo cee do of epic style. man i was scared.

In '69 a buddy in the geology dept. asked me to go down to Punta Banda south of Ensenada to help him with a research project. He needed to gather some gas samples for analysis from the floor of a bay on the south side using Nanson bottles. The gas bubbled up through places in the sand from cracks down below at a depth of about 70 ft. I had an old regulator I'd used for years & always had it serviced at the beginning of the season. This was early & I hadn't had it serviced. We went out on a boat and over the side and started down. At about 10 feet, my regulator siezed up & wouldn't let any air through. I sucked hard & it released and the air came through. I should have stopped right then but I didn't. When we were down at about 70 ft. and had gathered a few samples my regulator siezed up again. I tried sucking hard but couldn't get any air out of it. I tapped my buddy and signaled I had lost my air & was going up & for him to follow. I tried to do a blow & go to the top going no faster than my his bubbles, but couldn't quite make it & had to buddy breathe the rest of the way. I'm really glad I didn't panic when that happened. I didn't get scared until later when I thought about how stupid I was & what could have happened.

LOL. Great stories.

Vash, as per usual, I hold you in the highest regard.

Dont know what Hueys (UHIH) you guys were on. We got 120 knots on a reg basis(Viet Nam) LOL
But for real 80 knots was SOP
Scared -
Green streaks coming at us !
More scared- Green streaks makeing noises as they pass through .............
Most scared -Hot LZ with **** going off every where !
Funny scared - finding extra a whole at post flight that you did not even seee or hear!

two things come to mind, both offshore sail boat racing.

30 miles off the coast of Maine, in June. early morning and a squall comes at us going 60+ knots. 30 ft Tartan, spinniker class. Captain, navigator, bowman (me) and main sail trim for crew. Got the fore sail down at the last minute but was late on the main. Wind took the stay bags out of the sail and had us heeled over 25 degrees. At that point I was on leeward winch and it was under a foot of water.

Capt had the devil in his eyes, that convinced me we were prolly gonna be ok. I did a mental check list and determined my family would be ok. Made peace with my Lord and was ready.

Worst part was we brought a newby guest along who panicked, freeked out like a school girl! Capt told me "put him below and close the hatch!". The terror in that man's eyes is something I will always remember. I did have to "put" him below. After it cleared we come upon a sister boat. J&J 40 as I recall. Mast was hanging over the starboard side, Capt was worried the spreaders would hole the hull and he was one agitated sob. All his electrics were out. We put him on a course for land. He was making 3 knots under diesel power. Took us 18 hours to sail our broken vessel back to Marble Head. Couldn't point the boat for crap as the Main was a shredded rag. Mr. Newby never uttered a single word the whole way back.

Second time we were way out, in the shipping lane. Becalmed, say 2 AM, and darker than a boogie man's ass.. Tug comes up on us, hooting, three triangle lights over the wheel house. Seemed weird that the Navigator didn't understand what the tug was making noise about. Spooked me, so I finally popped up, "hey check the manual for international signs, dammit!"

Tug was pulling a barge on a inch or more thick steel hawser. We managed to get between tug and barge, which was far enough off we could not see it. Tug Capt was trying hard to avoid the idiots in the rag boat.

That put me off my feed bag with these guys and I limited my racing with them to offshore, close in events after that. They would have never found any more than some junk floating on the surface...

Then there was the time I slid a 12 ton loader down a muddy slope......... but all that resulted in was a change of skids....

Explosions Rock Texas Chemical Plant, Killing 3 - NYTimes.com

Had this explosion happened 8 minutes later I would have been directly under the blast sight. The above article didn't state just how big the blast was. Explosion experts from all over the world were flown in to determine just how big it was. Final conclusion 25,000lbs of tnt. Pretty big. It rattled windows in a town 45 miles away. It blew hundreds of windows out of houses 6-8 miles away. Moved walls in houses etc. Most of the cars in the parking lot were crushed like tin cans. The debris that got so many cut up people was transite. All the pump houses were made of the half inch thick corrugated asbestos cement mix material. It shatters and sends heavy pieces flying everywhere.

I was in a control room that was 2 stories high. It was protected by the building right next to it which absorbed the brunt of the blast. A huge vapor cloud of mostly butane several hundred feet in diameter was lit off by reserve boilers which were being started that day due to maintenance issues with the main boilers. We actually thought it was one of those old boilers which had blown up. When the blast went off the walls caved in then were sucked out again when the actual area the blast happened in sucked all the air back into the void left by the explosion. Kind of a double whammy.

The main area that had the 2-300 foot flames was surrounded by huge fire monitor stations. Being a member of the emergency fire crew because it was a weekend we went to try to aim streams on the raging flames but had no firewater pressure. The system backed by 5 million gallons of storage water had its main header in a supposed explosion proof bldg directly under the blast which was destroyed. So the 150lbs of pressure we had at the monitors was gone. Like a little kid pissing on a burning house.

When I went to the area I would have been in 8 minutes later I found a guy that i could not recognize. His eye was blown out hanging on his face. His ear torn off, his leg twisted and bent at 90 degrees the wrong way. He was alive but barely. 10 feet away under debris was one of my co worker friends his head half taken off by flying debris. I was a lucky guy that day.

Winner!

Changing a flat tire around midnight in the Bronx.

When our son was 5 months old, he get a serious respiratory invection "RSV". Came on very fast and hard. The doctor gave him a 50/50 chance of living through the night.

Of all the things that have frightened me, the dodgy places and situations I've been in, none have terrified as did that night.

angela

Been thinking about this since yesterday morning. I've done so many stupid things that it's not funny. But scared is not how I felt. At least don't remember it that way. Been over in a racing kart a couple of times but when I realized nothing was hurt but the kart, I didn't feel scared.

However, I do remember doing a little cafe racing on a Gilera 125 I had in the late 60's. I used to like to head over to Palos Verdes peninsula (look it up on Google) and do some twisties after midnight. I was kind of a night owl then. Always alone.

I came around a left hand sweeper way too fast and drifted out to the armco barrier that separated me from the cliff and the ocean below. Believe me, some folks have died there, some just walking and slipping. I got into the marbles at the side and just as I was about to lay it down I hit a few of those big posts with the tires.

Somehow miraculously I didn't high side over the rail and I didn't lay all the way over. I just kinda bounced out onto better pavement and finished the turn.

I took the clip ons off that bike the next day and made it a dirt bike. Midnight racing alone is dumb enough and had I gone over the side, it might have been days before I was found down there on the rocks in the surf.

I rode back to Long Beach I'm sure white faced and shaking. I guess that's why when I flipped the kart in a race it was no big deal. No cliffs at the race track.

when my daughter was just 3-4, we were going somewhere and I needed to move a car out of the way first. I asked my girlfriend to watch my daughter as I backed out the car but she must have turned her head for a couple seconds because no sooner than I had moved a few feet I heard a tiny scream. looked over towards my girlfriend and my daughter was not there with her. slammed the car into park, jumped out and ran around back to see my precious baby trapped under the rear of my car. what to do? couldn't take the time to lift it up to get her out and if I drove forward it might rip her to shreds. luckily for both of us it was a corvette, had the slanted spare cover under the back and she was a tiny skinny little thing. the water meter cover was missing and by chance her little skinny legs had slipped down into the meter box just enough to keep them from getting crushed. had I been backing any faster or had not heard her screams, she would have been crushed and shredded under the low car. I drove forward, ran back, scooped her up and hauled ass to the hospital while my girlfriend, a nurse, checked her out. halfway to the ER my baby said she was okay, nothing was hurting her and since she didn't even have any scrapes or scratches we just went on to the movies. it was a heartstopper for sure. I couldn't not have lived with myself had she been seriously hurt or killed

Great perspective...it ain't always about us. Thank you. That is indeed the fear.

I remember the sonogram on my son...they thought he had spinal bifida.

The next, more detailed look was a week later. The cool thing is my wife and I weren't scared. We were resolute. Come what may this was our son and we'd move the hill to make it work.

Kids.

The scaredest I have ever been was on December 16, 2006, when my wife and I went to the hospital to have genetics counseling. She was in her mid thirties and pregnant with twins, we had found out the week before. She was sixteen weeks along. Her doctor gave us some pamphlets on the counseling and told us it was for downs syndrome and other genetic abnormalities. We had talked about it and did not want to take the risk with an amniocentesis procedure. Anyway on that day we went thinking we were ready, had done our homework. After an hour or so of ultra sounds they put us in a little room with no windows and three chairs, a young doc comes in and tries to explain TTTS and that we have 4 options. Do nothing, treat with amnio reduction, find more information on laser surgery, or terminate the pregnancy.
He gave us about 45 minutes to decide.

Played at being Casey Jones with a belly full of Tequila on H blvd in SB at 100 MPH in a 911...

Fell off a horse when he slipped to his knees and slid through a jump - I saw his knees sliding toward me as I rolled up out of a mud puddle. Thankfully he stopped and I kept going.

A few mo's ago around midnight on a Fri I had to take some guy who's previously untreated liver tumor ruptured and bled to the OR. There was a moment when the assistant was sucking out blood and I'm just compressing the tumor to slow the bleeding that I really thought I wouldn't be able to stop it and he'd bleed out right there with my hands in him. Not fun, but we finally got it controlled. That was a lonely few minutes.

I just sent my youngest son Ryan [2LT - Infantry] off to Afghanistan - to be a INF Rifle PLT LDR in Lowgar Province - RC east - it's his first unit assignment - he just graduated from Benning IBOLC and Airborne - as a father - I have some degree of be anxiety - He'll be OK - good head - common sense - good skills