Marine Corps veteran Taylor Winston was attending a concert with his girlfriend at the Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest country music festival when shots rang out.
Rather than get out of harm's way, the Iraq veteran stole a truck and transported dozens of injured to the hospital, CBS news reports.
“The shots got louder and louder, closer to us and saw people getting hit, it was like we could be hit at any second,” Winston said in a CBS video. “Once we got to the fence, I helped throw a bunch of people over and got myself over.”
“It was a mini war zone, but we couldn’t fight back.”
“I saw a field with a bunch of white trucks,” he said. “I tested my luck to see if any of them had keys in it, first one we tried opening had keys sitting right there. I started looking for people to take to the hospital. There was just too many and it was overwhelming how much blood was everywhere.”
After transporting the first truckload of victims to the hospital, Winston went back for more. He estimates he transported between 20 and 30 people to the hospital.
“I think a lot of my training in the military helped me in the situation,” he told CBS. “We needed to get them out of there regardless of our safety.”
Winston enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 and deployed twice to Iraq. He was honorably discharged in 2011. Winston returned the keys to the truck owner Monday night, according to CBS.
Army veteran Rob Ledbetter was also present during the Las Vegas massacre.
Ledbetter’s brother was shot and injured as bullets rained down, The Associated Press reported. After finding cover in a VIP area, the former Army sniper who served in Iraq immediately rushed to tend to the wounded.
“The echo, it sounded like it was coming from everywhere and you didn’t know which way to run,” Ledbetter told the AP.
Ledbetter fashioned a makeshift tourniquet on a teenage girl with a flannel shirt, compressed the shoulder wound of another victim, and aided another man who had a bullet go through his leg.
“I’m saving people, or trying to do my best. But it got to the point, I saw people all over, laying where we used to be standing ... just laying there and nobody getting to them and I couldn’t get out there,” he told the AP. “The shots just kept coming in and bouncing. I would have been in harm’s way.”
Mackenzie Wolf is an editorial intern for Military Times.
