Stephen Hood Greene

Below is a section from U.S. Army Captain Stephen Green'e’s memoir describing being wounded for the second time in the Vietnam War in 1967, while attempting to medevac a wounded paratrooper from the 173d Airborne Brigade.

The morning was already hot when I lifted from Bien Hoa, the bubble canopy turning into a small greenhouse under the sun. Alone in the cockpit, I threaded my way north toward War Zone C, avoiding the arcs of friendly artillery batteries that bracketed the countryside. I had no navigation aids beyond a map spread awkwardly across my knees, the open doors letting the slipstream threaten to tear it from my hands. Every ridge, every bend in a river was a checkpoint I had to trust. One mistake could put me over the wrong stretch of jungle—or worse, over enemy guns.

Still, when I finally circled down into the forward base and set the skids onto the dirt, I felt a surge of pride. I had found it. Alone, with nothing but my map and my instincts, I had flown into one of the most contested corners of Vietnam and brought the little Sioux safely to its destination.

The base was alive with activity. A 4.2-inch mortar battery occupied one sector, its tubes angled skyward and already blackened from use. Parts of three infantry companies dug in around the perimeter, their bunkers and fighting holes hardened into a stout defensive ring. The headquarters itself was well-fortified, the kind of position that spoke of experience—men who had fought long enough to know what worked and what didn’t.

For me, it was a moment to take stock. I had proved I could handle the Sioux alone, find my way into the teeth of War Zone C, and deliver a battalion commander where he needed to be. But I also knew the day wasn’t finished. In Vietnam, a flight could begin in sunlight and pride and end in fire and blood.

The Second Battalion had a personality all its own, one that even showed up in the way it branded itself. They’d borrowed their identity from an unlikely place—Avis Rent-a-Car. In the States, Avis trailed behind Hertz in second place, but their marketing slogan, “We try harder,” had caught on. The 2nd Battalion made it their own, turning a corporate motto into a badge of grit.

At first, the buttons were white with red letters, just like Avis handed out back home. Every trooper pinned one on his fatigues. But as word spread of this airborne battalion’s ferocity—and especially after Colonel Sigholtz led them in the war’s first major unit combat jump—Avis took notice. They sent over a special run of buttons for the men of the 2nd. These new ones were camouflage with black lettering, more suited to the battlefield than the PX. Everyone wore them, from the colonel down to the riflemen, even the helicopter pilots who ferried them into the fight. I pinned one to my uniform like the rest.

I flew several missions with Colonel Sigholtz that day. By afternoon, two of his infantry companies were locked in a fierce firefight just moments from the battalion base. The heat pressed down, the jungle shimmered with dust and smoke, and the air seemed alive with the constant percussion of small arms and artillery.

At one point, I set down to refuel at a nearby airfield where dozens of helicopters and Air Force transports cycled in and out. Pilots and crew stood by their aircraft, waiting for their turn at the giant rubber bladders that held aviation and jet fuel. Generators coughed and droned, forcing fuel into our thirsty machines. The smell of raw fuel mixed with the whine of turbines and the chatter of men swapping after-action reports. I was already set for something big.

I picked up the battalion artillery officer, a major, and flew him over the fight. From the bubble canopy, I watched him calmly adjust fire, calling in 4.2-inch mortar rounds from the base. The shells landed only a few hundred meters from our own perimeter, so close you could feel the shock waves from their explosions. Then, when the mortars paused, the Falcon gunships swooped in, raking the tree-lines with rockets and machine gun fire. The two arms of firepower worked in brutal rhythm—mortars, then gunships, then mortars again—each holding back so they wouldn’t destroy their own. The fight churned on, the jungle flashing with muzzle bursts and rolling smoke.

Then the call came. A medevac was needed. Urgently.

What I hadn’t known—what I would only learn later—was that while I had been refueling, a Dust Off Huey had already tried to get into the fight. They’d flown in low, straight into enemy fire, and been torn apart in seconds, forced to break away without lifting a single casualty. If a dedicated medevac ship couldn’t land, the wounded man on the ground wasn’t supposed to have a chance. He’d taken a bullet through the hip, and with the dense web of arteries and veins in the pelvis, he was bleeding out fast. Every minute meant he was closer to death.

When I landed back at the base and heard the situation, I didn’t hesitate. I volunteered to go.

The medics spoke to the casualty directly, crouched beside him in the dirt and heat, and told him his only shot was to be folded into the tiny bubble of an H-13. His answer came through blood loss and pain, but without hesitation: he wanted out. He wanted to live.

I ferried the artillery major back to the base, heart hammering, already rehearsing the approach in my head. The Sioux wasn’t built for this kind of mission—no armor, no doors, just a glass bubble and a thin skin between me and the gunfire—but the choice was already made.

I was going back into the firefight—alone, with nothing but that fragile little helicopter and the will of one wounded man who refused to die in the jungle.

After takeoff, I called the ground unit for landing instructions. At the same time, I checked in with the Falcon gunships that would cover me on the run. I told them the direction I would land and where I thought the friendlies and the bad guys were. They replied with a simple, “Roger.” Two rifle companies on the ground were laying down suppressive fire, and the Falcons circled above, heavy with rockets and machine guns. For a moment, I felt secure. Protected. I had a plan.

As Mike Tyson would say years later: Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

From the cockpit, the battlefield sprawled beneath me—chaotic, smoke-hazed, alive with gunfire. Troops were scattered in clusters around the perimeter of the field. I couldn’t tell where the wounded soldier was and where they wanted me to land.

I radioed for them to mark the LZ with smoke. That was the standard: pop smoke, call the color, guide me in.

A burst of green smoke answered my call. The ground confirmed it—green was theirs. I banked toward it, ready to descend.

Then the unthinkable happened. The smoke grenade set the dry grass ablaze. In seconds, the clearing was a torch. Flames leapt and thick smoke boiled upward, blotting out the field and painting a target for every enemy gunner watching.

I couldn’t land in fire. I radioed the Falcons and told them I was holding off until the flames burned through. I circled above, waiting for the blaze to burn down, knowing with every orbit that I was giving the enemy more time to draw a bead on me.

I had lost the element of surprise. The smoke marked me as surely as a bull’s-eye, and my circling only confirmed what the enemy already knew: someone was coming down, and it was me.

When the fire finally burned through the LZ, I radioed Falcon Lead. “I am going to land now.” I radioed the ground RTO and told them to have their man ready to load as soon as I touched down. If I could make it down, I only wanted to remain on the ground for a few seconds. I was an open target—a sitting duck.

In seven weeks of flying, I’d already made hundreds of landings—some under fire, many expecting to be. But this one seemed different. Maybe in retrospect, it felt ominous. I pulled the nose up on the 13, thirty degrees or more, dropped the collective, rolled off throttle to keep the rotors from overspeeding. The airspeed bled away—thirty knots, twenty—and I kicked hard on the left pedal, shoving the nose into a skidding, corkscrew dive.

The Sioux fell out of the sky. It happened in seconds. Exhilarating. Terrifying.

I heard the first bullets snapping by, sharp and close, and then the aircraft started taking hits. Each strike against the airframe sounded and felt like being inside a bell, struck hard by the clapper. I worried for a moment that the bullets might knock my frail helicopter out of the sky, but at the same time, I felt a strange invincibility. It couldn’t happen to me—not yet, not today.

Then the ship itself began to come apart. Shards of metal, torn loose as rounds punched through the skin, whipped through the cockpit. A piece buried itself in my left thigh, another ripped into my calf. My chest protector took a hit, slamming me back.

And then came the blow that changed everything. It felt like Mickey Mantle, swinging for the fence with his Louisville Slugger, had connected squarely with me. The round tore through my left hand, shattering bones, severing tendons, and bursting blood vessels. I glanced down and saw holes punched through my flying glove, blood oozing out across my leg, and splattering onto the floorboards.

I lifted my hand off the collective just long enough to look. Blood ran out of my glove, down into my sleeve until my whole arm was sticky with hot blood. It soaked through my jungle fatigues.

My body wanted to give up. Sweat streamed down my face, my vision tunneling, the edges darkening. A weakness crept in, urging me to let go, to slide into unconsciousness. But I knew the truth: if I passed out, I was dead. There was no one else to fly the helicopter.

I forced my focus back to the stick, the pedals, the engine’s shriek. Fear and adrenaline were the only things holding me upright. I gritted my teeth and told myself the only order that mattered: stay there. Keep flying.

The Sioux shuddered beneath me, wounded as badly as I was. I broke off the approach, banking hard away from the kill zone, willing the machine to stay in the air just a little longer. Fly it until it won’t fly—that was the rule. If I could make it to the 4.2 mortar base, maybe I’d have a chance.

But with my hand broken and blood still streaming down my arm, I knew the truth. I was going down. The aircraft was gliding, and I only hoped I could make it to the mortar base and not crash into the enemy position.

I was unsure how much more damage the aircraft—or I—could take. The snipers on the ground had me zeroed in, and I couldn’t seem to escape. Every second, the Sioux shuddered and rattled as if it might tear itself apart. Sweat poured off me, my body clammy and weak, as if my strength were draining out with the blood from my wounds. My vision narrowed, the edges going dark. I knew if I passed out, that was it. There was no one else. The helicopter would crash, and I’d die alone in the jungle.

I thought of Deanne, of Joey, of my family—how I might never see them again. All those earlier feelings of invincibility, of believing that nothing could touch me, were gone. This might be my moment, the one I wouldn’t come back from. The thought chilled me more than the blood soaking my uniform. 

However, I felt strangely calm. I did everything I could. I was not panicked or frightened. I was resigned. 

I looked down. My glove was shredded, thick hot blood oozing from the tears in the leather, pooling on my leg and across the floor of the cockpit. Everything was slick, sticky, and reeked of mayhem. I felt compelled to look. I forced myself to look back up, to hold on. I told myself over and over: stay awake, keep flying, don’t die now.

I keyed the mic. “I’m hit,” I croaked, my voice unsteady. I lined up for the fire support base, hoping the ship and I could hold together just a little longer. Every adjustment on the controls was agony. The manual throttle was almost impossible with my broken hand.

As the pad came into view, I saw a crowd gathering, soldiers waiting. I wobbled the cyclic to warn them, and the helicopter lurched erratically. The men scattered, backing away as I staggered the Sioux onto the ground. Somehow, I managed to set it down in one piece—no one on the ground injured, the ship intact, and me still breathing.

The moment the skids touched down, medics and mortar crew pulled me from the seat and lowered me onto a stretcher. Pain roared through me—my hand throbbed as if Mantle’s bat were still crushing it, my leg burned, my chest felt split in two where the round had slammed into the plate. But I felt relief. I was alive. I made it. When they cut away my uniform, the fabric tore from the blood that had glued it to my wounds. Voices shouted above me—bandages, IVs, pressure—urgent, but already beginning to fade as the edges of my vision darkened.

And then the image struck: just days earlier, I had stood on a drop zone watching soldiers unload the dead. Bodies lowered from the Huey lay gently in rows, ponchos pulled across them. Lives ended in silence while, back home, wives, parents, and siblings still lived in the illusion that everything was normal. That memory had haunted me—but now it was almost me. A few inches, a few seconds, and I would have been the one pulled from a shattered aircraft, only to be covered, nameless, lifeless, a body to be counted.

I thought of Deanne. I thought of Joe and Katie. And then, most piercingly, I thought of Joey. My brother, trapped in a body and mind that left him cut off from the world, may never even have known I existed. He could not know I had come to Vietnam, could not know I was lying here bleeding, could not know if I lived or died. If death took me now, he would never know the difference. But I would know. He would be lost to me, and I to him. That final severing terrified me more than the wounds.

I wasn’t ready to vanish under a poncho. I wasn’t ready to let Joey’s existence slip out of mine, or mine out of his. I fought to stay awake, to keep breathing, to hold onto the pain itself as proof I was still alive.

After they pulled off my left glove, I looked at my hand and thought a bullet had blown my finger off. My ring finger was displaced, with a strange gap between it and the pinky. I quickly counted—four fingers and a thumb were still there, only rearranged grotesquely. The finger wasn’t gone; it was just hanging by skin.

One of the medics handed me two narcotic pills, and I swallowed them dry. I don’t remember much pain—shock, adrenaline, and sheer relief seemed to blunt it. Managing to bring in that damaged helicopter without crashing into enemy positions felt like victory enough. They wrapped my hand and leg, then stripped off my chicken plate to check for chest wounds. Nothing there but bruises—luck had spared me again. But as I lay there, I knew luck was fickle. It had chosen me this time, but there was no guarantee it would the next.