For every Chuck Norris joke you read on the Internet, there’s a true and equally impressive Ernest Hemingway story. For instance:

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A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition

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1. “When Chuck Norris was born, he drove his mom home from the hospital.”
2. “If you flip over China, it says made by Chuck Norris.”
3. “Alcohol has a Chuck Norris problem.”
4. Sharks have a Chuck Norris week.
5. Chuck Norris makes onions cry.

But there’s tough-as-nails Hemingway cheating death over and over again in real life, according to Time magazine:

1. He once shot himself in the calves of both legs while trying to gaff a shark.
2. During World War I, he served on the Italian front lines as an ambulance driver with the Red Cross and was hit with 237 bits of shrapnel in a burst of shellfire.
3. During 1942 and 1943, he armed himself with grenades and submachine guns on his wooden 38-foot fishing boat and scanned the Gulf Stream for German U-boats.
4. & 5: “While on an African safari in 1954, he survived two plane crashes in two days.” In the first crash, the pilot had to choose between making an emergency landing in a sandpit filled with crocodiles or an elephant track. The pilot picked the elephant track. Hemingway, his wife and the pilot spent their evening surrounded by elephants. The next day, The Hemingways were on another plane that went ablaze and crashed. After the second crash, multiple papers reported both Hemingways had died. In fact, Hemingway emerged from the jungle, “carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin,” and summed up the day by reportedly saying, “My luck, she is running very good.”

But when it comes to women, it turns out Chuck Norris and Papa Hemingway have a lot in common: