After the young American pilot was shot down in enemy territory, a grotesquely twisted ankle was snared by a branch that broke his fall after he parachuted from a crippled F-4 Phantom jet. Dangling upside down in a tree, Air Force captain David Stevenson faded in and out of consciousness to the sound of gunfire, uncertain if he would get out of the Vietnam War alive.
“I joined the military thinking I was John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart,” said Stevenson, who enlisted in the Air Force fresh out of college in 1964, hoping to do his movie idols proud.