A 20-year-old Army sergeant is being hailed as a hero after he saved the life of a driver who had crashed on a highway.

Sgt. Trey Troney was driving through Sweetwater, Texas to see his family in Raleigh, Mississippi for Christmas when he saw the crash happen. He immediately pulled over and ran to the wreckage, where he found Jeff Udger slumped over the steering wheel with a huge gash on his forehead.

With the help of two others, Trey managed to pry open the door of the car, and he then used his New Orleans Saints hoodie to stop Jeff’s head from bleeding. Jeff responded by cracking jokes, saying, “Well, this is Cowboy country, so I don’t know how I feel about you wrapping me up in a Saints hoodie.”

However, things took a turn for the worse when Trey noticed that Jeff’s chest had stopped moving due to a collapsed lung. He ran back to his own vehicle to grab a first aid kit that the had left over from his military training.

The Army sergeant tried to use the kit’s Needle Chest Compression (NCD) to relieve the pressure in Udger’s lung, but the needle was too small. Thinking fast, Trey grabbed a ballpoint pen and took it apart. He then used the empty ink tube to relieve the pressure in Udger’s lungs.

“I took the NCD and put it right in the hole and kind of wiggled (the pen) in with my hand in between the ribs and you just started to see the bubbles come out of the tip, and I was like, ‘OK, we’re good,’” Trey said.

As he was doing this, a state trooper pulled over and asked him I he had indeed just stuck an ink pen into the lung of a civilian.

“I was like, ‘I did,’” Trey recalled. “And [the state trooper] was like, ‘he’s on no pain meds,’ and I said, ‘oh, he felt it, but he’s unconscious. He lost consciousness as I was running back to my Jeep because he had lost a lot of blood.’”

Paramedics arrived seconds later, and they rushed Jeff to the hospital. Doctors are expecting him to make a full recovery, thanks to Trey’s quick thinking. Jeff later wrote an email to Trey in which he offered to replace his bloody hoodie and thanked him for saving his life.

“Young man, you will always be my hero,” Jeff wrote. “Continue to give back to this world and the people in it. You truly will never know when you will make a life-changing impact to someone.”

Trey said that this would not be necessary, however, as he sees himself simply as someone who was in the right place at the right time.

“I was in a pair of jogging pants and a T-shirt on the side of a highway and somebody’s life depended on me slightly knowing a little bit [about emergency medical care],” Trey  said. “It wasn’t anything crazy, but to [Udger], it was his world. He needed an ink pen to the ribs – luckily, I had an ink pen.”