Dogfight at 6,000 feet

I was shot down myself. Got a bullet through the top of my head and I’m in a French hospital. When I got hit, I don’t know if it was a flying wire or whether it was a bullet, but the blood was pouring over my goggles and I couldn’t see a thing, up in a dogfight at 6000 feet. I lifted off my goggles and I had a job keeping my eyes clear and my head was throbbing so badly as if my head was going to leave my shoulders and I knew I was going to pass out and I wanted to get down badly. I put it into a dive and a tailspin to get down to the ground as fast as I could. That was the longest getting down to the ground you ever saw. It may have only been three or four minutes, but it seemed to me three or four hours. When I got where I felt I was close enough to the ground, I levelled off and I don’t remember any more. But they told me in the hospital, when I was brought in there, that I kept on reaching for something. They wanted to know what I was reaching for. And I was reaching for the joystick, to right the joystick so I could, to right the plane