A homeless career criminal knifed a Marine veteran on the Upper West Side, leaving him with a collapsed lung — all because the jarhead had the nerve to tell him to pipe down on his subway ride home, the victim told The Post.
Former Marine radio operator Mark Lelong was taking the 2 train home Saturday evening when loudmouthed vagrant Gil Green boarded his car and started rambling nonsensically, Lelong said from his bed at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital.
“I could hear him through my headphones and I could tell that people were being bothered by him,” added Lelong, 30.
Lelong — who acknowledged that he was “a little drunk” at the time of the 6 p.m. run-in — turned to Green and “told him to shut the f- -k up,” he recalled.
That allegedly incensed Green.
“He freaked out. He totally lost his s–t,” Lelong claimed. “He kept saying he was going to fight me. Like, ‘You’re gonna regret this.’”
Lelong got off the train at 110th Street, thinking that he was leaving the spat behind him — only to be allegedly jumped by a knife-wielding Green.
“He followed me off the train and then he whipped out a knife,” the veteran said. “He stabbed me and that was pretty much it.”
Green, 29, allegedly gouged Lelong at least four times with the blade — described as “about 5 inches” long — including one strike that partially punctured his lung, before running off.
Cops quickly nabbed Green, who claimed to officers that he was minding his own business snoozing on a Riverside Park bench when Lelong came along and hassled him.
Green — who has at least 20 prior arrests, including one for threatening an ex-lover and her daughter in May — was charged with assault and criminal possession of a weapon.
Lelong, meanwhile, is expected to pull through, but has a long road to recovery ahead of him.
“Breathing sucks,” he said.
But he’s also coming away with second thoughts about engaging Green in the first place.
“I probably shouldn’t have said anything to him,” he said.
Additional reporting by Stephanie Pagones