Everyday Heroes: Nightmare on the French Train

In August 2015, a tragedy was narrowly averted in France thanks to the courage of three American passengers and a British man who rushed to take down a heavily armed man after they heard gunfire. Two of the three men traveling together were off-duty servicemen, Air Force servicem

By Your Bro · Tue Jan 28 2020 · Guy Stuff

In August 2015, three young Americans and a British man walked into a moving nightmare on a European train — and walked out of it having stopped a terrorist attack that could have killed hundreds. It happened on the Thalys high-speed line between Amsterdam and Paris. There were 554 passengers on board. There was one man with an AK-47, a 9mm Luger, a box cutter, and enough ammunition to level a rail car. And there were four ordinary guys who decided in about three seconds that today wasn't the day.

Two of the three Americans traveling together were off-duty servicemen: Airman First Class Spencer Stone and Oregon Army National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos. Their childhood friend Anthony Sadler, a senior in college, was with them. They had met up in Europe for a summer trip. They boarded the train in Brussels for the last leg into Paris. They expected wine, cheese, and a couple of good photos. They got a rifle at the far end of the car.

"I saw a guy entering the train with an AK-47 and a handgun and I just looked over to Spencer and said, 'Let's go, go!'" said Skarlatos.

Thirty Seconds That Saved 554 People

"Spencer got to the guy first and grabbed the guy by the neck," Skarlatos told Sky News. "I grabbed the handgun, got that away from the guy and threw it. Then I grabbed the AK-47, which was at his feet, and started muzzle-bumping him in the head with it. Everybody just started beating the guy while Spencer held the chokehold until he went unconscious."

Stone took a box cutter across the neck and had his thumb nearly severed. He held the chokehold anyway. Then, bleeding heavily himself, he crawled to another passenger — a man with a gunshot wound spraying arterial blood from his neck — and pinched the artery closed with his fingers. That passenger, a French-American named Mark Moogalian, was minutes from bleeding out. Stone kept his fingers in the wound until the train reached Arras and paramedics could take over. Moogalian survived.

Who stopped the 2015 French train attack?

The 2015 Thalys train attack was stopped by childhood friends Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, and Spencer Stone, along with British passenger Chris Norman. The group tackled and disarmed a gunman carrying an AK-47 and a handgun before he could open fire into the main cabin. Their actions were widely reported by outlets like the New York Times as the decisive intervention that saved hundreds of lives.

When Skarlatos later inspected the AK-47, he discovered it had jammed. The magazine on the handgun had been dropped. The attacker had four more magazines on his body. Whether the gun would have cleared in the next few seconds is a coin flip nobody wants to think about — but the men who acted didn't wait to find out.

Chris Norman, a British consultant who lives in France, joined the fight late and helped hold the attacker down. "I came in at the end of it all and helped get him under control," he said at a news conference in Arras. "The guy pulled out a cutter and started cutting Spencer — he cut behind his neck and nearly cut his thumb off."

Sadler, the college kid, described the whole thing with an almost embarrassed pride: "It's my last year in college, I came to see my friends on my first trip in Europe and we stopped a terrorist. It's kind of crazy. I'm really proud of my friend that he just reacted so quickly and so bravely. He was really the first one over there. Even after being injured himself, he went to go help the other man who was bleeding also. Without his help, he would have died."

What the Rest of the Train Did

The 554 passengers included the French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade, star of Betty Blue and Nikita, who was lightly wounded breaking glass to sound the alarm. In interviews later, he described the horror clearly:

"I thought it was the end, that we were going to die, that he was going to kill us all. I really could see us all dying because we were all prisoners in that train, it would have been impossible to escape from that nightmare."

The train staff, Anglade said, entered a private cabin and locked the door when they heard the shots. That's not a criticism of them — it's a description of the default human response. Most people freeze. Some hide. A very small number move toward the noise. On that train, four of them happened to be sitting near enough to close the distance in seconds.

The Real Lesson for Every Man

Stone and Skarlatos had military training. Sadler and Norman did not. The training helped, but it wasn't the decisive factor. What separated these four from the other 550 people on the train is that they had already, unconsciously, decided who they were going to be if the moment ever came.

You don't rise to the occasion. You fall to your training. And "training" here doesn't just mean CQB drills — it means the quiet daily reps of being the man in your family, your workplace, and your friend group who does the hard thing when nobody else will. That gets built at 5 a.m. in the gym. It gets built by not lying about small things. It gets built every time you volunteer to fix the problem instead of debating it.

FAQ

Have any of these men spoken since? Yes — Stone, Skarlatos, and Sadler co-wrote a memoir, The 15:17 to Paris, and Clint Eastwood adapted it into a 2018 film with the three men playing themselves. Chris Norman was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).

What happened to the attacker? Ayoub El Khazzani, a Moroccan national linked to ISIS, was convicted in a French court in 2020 and sentenced to life in prison.

Would I actually do the same thing? The honest answer is: probably not, unless you've already decided in advance that you would. Which is exactly why you should decide right now.

The American men and Mr. Norman were awarded medals for bravery by authorities in Arras. They deserved every one of them.

— Your Bro