On base in Ali Al Saleem back in 2006 in Kuwait, I saw a sand viper.
I wasn't the first one who saw it, but everyone around me was freaking out. I was 29, and I had been handling snakes since about eight years old. For the most part, nothing big, just snakes are found in the yard in Ohio (I'm not including the Eastern diamondback I caught in Meridian, Mississippi back in 96). The three venomous snakes in Ohio are all found south of Columbus.
A lot of people are scared of snakes and react poorly when it comes to dealing with them, but on that day I was surprisingly calm.
Some people had weapons drawn, 9mm, one person even had a loaded M-16 (or M-4, I was in the Navy and don't know much about guns). People we're screaming, but I took control of the situation and told everyone to back away.
The worst thing you can do on a base in a war zone, (Kuwait is still considered a war zone), was fire a weapon. those who are around with know that you are shooting at a snake, but those who hear the gunshots would believe we are being attacked and all hell would break loose.
I knew that and calmed everybody the fuck down and told them to back away. Meanwhile, the snake is striking because people are surrounding it.
I had studied snakes for years and knew that the sand viper was the third most venomous snake in the middle East.
I grabbed the M-16, cleared it, and put the butt of the rifle on the snake's head. Once the snake's head was secured I picked it up.
Exclamations from everywhere, "Dude, you're fucking nuts" "Godofwine, you crazy, man." "That ninja think he's the black crocodile Hunter" but I stayed calm, held on to the snake's head, had someone dump out an ammo container and put the snake in there. (Ironically, 2 months later the crocodile hunter was killed)
I walked with the snake in the ammo container about half a mile with a buddy of mine who held the M-16. At one of the farthest fences from the main part of the base, I dumped out the ammo container, used the M-16 to pin down the viper's head so I can pick it up again, and threw it over the fence.
I thought the dilemma was simply if I had gotten bit, I would have had to get anti-venin. What I didn't know, was none of the higher-ups at thought to supply anti-venin on the base!
So, had I NOT known what I was doing and allowed the snake to bite me, I would have had to drive to a base over an hour away for treatment... Which likely would have meant my death.
So, my tempting fate made someone higher up realize that maybe we should supply anti-venin on each of the satellite bases and not just the main base in Kuwait. So it's possible I saved lives by risking my own to get the sand viper off the base. The picture of me holding it is floating around here somewhere
Had friends I grew up with try to kill me, only reason they didn’t succeed and find me is because I was evicted and was homeless shortly thereafter. That shit broke my heart for real because our moms knew each other through the church we met each other in Sunday school and how we got to the point where they hated me enough to want to see me dead I still don’t know why to this day. 
