A man who had to help

After four years in the Marines, after two combat tours of Afghanistan, after volunteering to help those in his native New Jersey whose lives and homes were ruined by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, Pete

Reed reached out to his childhood friend Augusta Friendsmith looking for a change of pace.

They met as kids, at a family summer camp in the Western Massachusetts town of Becket, and their families became close, reuniting every year in the Berkshires.

Friendsmith, who grew up in Somerville, is a ski instructor in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and she didn’t have to say much to convince Reed to fly out and give the great outdoors a try. The combat veteran, who seemed able to do just about anything, became a ski instructor for kids.

Pete Reed stood out where ever he went, wearing neon spandex and Hawaiian shirts on the slopes. He sometimes left the mountains of Wyoming to help others, as in the summer of 2014, when he trained 33 EMTs in Haiti. After three years in one of the most beautiful spots in the world, he decided his skill set was needed elsewhere, in less picturesque places where people were dying and desperate.

“Pete couldn’t sit still when he knew someone was suffering, no matter where in the world that was,” said Friendsmith. “He had to be there, to help, because that’s who he was.”

In 2015, he left Jackson Hole and within a year went to Iraq, to save lives, as civilians got caught in the fighting to re-take the city of Mosul, Iraq’s secondlargest city, from ISIS.

It was in Iraq, where he treated thousands of trauma victims in the field, that he met Alex Potter, a photojournalist and nurse. They met on her birthday in 2016. She had been photographing victims of war, but wanted to use her nursing skills to help, too. They became soulmates and teammates.

Potter was one of the first to join Global Response Medicine, a nonprofit that Reed and fellow veteran Derek Coleman founded because of what they experienced in Mosul to provide medical care to people trapped by war. Potter and Reed got married last year.

“Pete and Alex were quite a team,” said Friendsmith, who said Reed inspired her to volunteer for Team Rubicon, a veteranled organization that responds to disasters, and where Reed got his first taste of humanitarian work after leaving the Marines.

Last month, Reed became the country director in Ukraine for another humanitarian nonprofit, Global Outreach Doctors. He put out an urgent call for volunteers on social media.

Last Thursday, Reed was killed when his ambulance was shelled in Bakhmut, in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. He was 33 years old, about to celebrate his first wedding anniversary.

Alex Potter posted a tribute to her husband on Instagram.

“He was evacuating civilians and responding to those wounded when his ambulance was shelled,” she wrote. “He died doing what he was great at, what gave him life, and what he loved, and apparently by saving a team member with his own body.”

In Wyoming and everywhere life took him, Pete Reed seemed larger than life to those who knew and loved him. They didn’t think he was invincible. But pretty close to it.

“I think a lot of us thought, if he could survive Mosul, he could survive anything,” Friendsmith said. “I can’t explain how loved Pete was.”

Alex Potter is in Ukraine now, trying to arrange the repatriation of her husband’s body. She and Friendsmith traded messages Tuesday.

“I have never met someone more selfless. Everything he did was always for the benefit of others. He was always charming, often loud, and sometimes brash,” she wrote of her husband on the Global Response Medicine website. “That big personality overlaid the fact that he was also incredibly sensitive, loving, and brave in all aspects of the word.”

Pete Reed loved his fellow human beings. He died trying to save some of them, and a little bit of the world.