Contra dudes have ridiculous stamina and durability... when not getting shot or touching an enemy.

And this includes Hard Corps Uprising to a degree.

In the Contra games (the most recent one I've seen with this particular instance was Shattered Soldier) you'd have your characters latching onto a missile from a fast-moving aircraft. The missiles are then released and they fly, with your characters perfectly content in hanging and even directing the missile's flight path. You see this in Shattered Soldier's Seabed mission.

Now I'm not a scientist and I don't have specific numbers for the missiles, nor do I have calculations for the friction a person would have to deal with while hanging off a missile in that specific position, but what I do know is that the air-to-air missile speeds in the United States military are anywhere from Mach 2 to Mach 4, maybe higher if there's stuff that's not listed. I also don't know the actual missile being fired in the Seabed mission, so I can't get a decent speed measure.

At any rate, if we're comparing the likes of Bill Rizer to a normal human, he's basically putting up with a ton of friction for a long period of time if we cut out the gameplay portions and only have the cutscene portions. In 2012 a freefaller wearing some kind of space suit broke the sound barrier and survived. Bill Rizer's just wearing armor that covered his torso and legs and nothing else, and he's using only one arm the entire time without dropping his oversized multi-fire rifle.

Now to a lesser extent, all four playable characters in Hard Corps Uprising rode a missile up to a high building in the opening for the game, and they rode missiles in the last level of arcade mode. They don't ride the missiles for nearly as long as Bill does when only counting cutscenes, but if not the friction then it's the explosion they survive afterwards without so much as a scratch. That missile hits the side of the building and launches them up the rest of the way.