War-Time Instinct Takes Over in Texas Train Crash With the thunderous crack of a freight train slamming into a parade float carrying his fellow war veterans, Sudip Bose went to work. A front-line physician in Iraq, Bose and other veterans instantly tended to the injured. They applied tourniquets and put pressure on wounds as their training and battlefield experience took over in the chaotic moments after the wreck at a railroad crossing in this West Texas city. "Instincts kicked in," Bose said Friday, a day after the train traveling at more than 60 mph barreled into a flatbed truck adorned with American flags and filled with wounded veterans and their spouses. Four veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were killed - including an Army sergeant who apparently sacrificed his life to save his wife, and 16 people were injured. Bose, who served in Fallujah and Baghdad, said the aftermath reminded him of a combat triage situation. Some of the veterans who managed to jump clear of the wreck rushed to help the injured. Tommy Shoemaker, a special operations soldier, resuscitated one person and applied a tourniquet to a bleeding woman. "They are trained for tragedy," said his wife, Pam Shoemaker of Monroe, La., who was with her husband on a float ahead of the one that was hit. At the time of the crash, the veterans were on their way to a banquet in their honor and being cheered on by a flag-waving crowd. Their float was inching across a railroad track in Midland when the crossing gates began to lower. Some of those seated on the float jumped off in wide-eyed terror just moments before the train seemed to appear out of nowhere and crashed into the flatbed truck. Michael, one of the soldiers killed, pushed his wife off the float when he saw the train coming, his wife told Cory Rogers, a friend of the couple. "His first instinct was to get her out of harm's way," said Rogers, who was not at the parade. That's the kind of man he was, and I feel like it was his training as a paramedic and then as a soldier, choosing to put someone's life before your own. Locals were struggling to cope with a tragedy at the start of what was supposed to be a three-day weekend of banquets, deer hunting and shopping in appreciation of the veterans' sacrifice.