As an Iraq war veteran and Purple Heart winner, Nick McCallon of Edmonds-based Operation Military Family is no stranger to life-or-death situations. But McCallon’s training was put to the test Tuesday night after he and his wife witnessed a horrifying car crash in Everett that killed a 7-year-old boy.

It started when the 27-year-old McCallon and his wife Felicia, who is a veterinary technician at Perrinville Animal Hospital, were driving southbound on Evergreen Way around 6 p.m. Tuesday night, headed to a friend’s house for dinner. They observed a black BMW being driven very erratically at a high speed, swerving around traffic. The couple was about 200 feet behind the car when it clipped another southbound vehicle, spun and went into oncoming traffic, where a northbound minivan collided with it.

McCallon, who had been deployed twice to Iraq as an infantryman before leaving the service in April 2011, said he immediately pulled into the roadway median following the crash. He told his wife — who was nine months pregnant — to call 911 while he went to check on the condition of those involved. The boy appeared lifeless while the driver, later identified as the boy’s guardian, was disoriented but uninjured, McCallon added.

“It was a horrible scene,” he said.

McCallon then turned his attention to the 75-year-old driver of the minivan, who had a laceration on her neck. “I did what I could to stop the bleeding until paramedics got there,” he said. The couple spent the next two-and-a-half hours with accident investigators, then went back home. Felicia went to bed at around 11 p.m. but McCallon stayed awake until about 3:20 a.m. “I was just falling asleep when my wife woke me up and told me it was time to go the hospital,” he recalled.

Nathan McCallon was born three hours later, at 6:32 a.m., a healthy 7 pounds, 2 ounces. The baby came two weeks early, so it’s hard to say whether the trauma of the night before caused the labor to start. However, McCallon noted that “my wife joked with a friend that if that [the car crash] didn’t put her into labor, nothing would.”

McCallon said he has received calls from both the City of Everett Police Chief and Edmonds Mayor Dave Earling — whom McCallon got to know when developing Operation Military Family’s MVP Network — thanking him for his heroic efforts, but he doesn’t understand the fuss. “I went to the scene without hesitation trying to save the lives of those who were there,” he said. “That seems like a natural response to me but I’ve been told that most people don’t stop.”

Everett police identified the accident victim as Josiah A. Alves, of Everett. The boy’s guardian, a 30 year-old Everett man, has been released from the hospital. Physical evidence from the incident has been collected and is currently being processed, police said. No charges have been made and detectives continue to investigate the cause of the collision.