Today, I have an article about the late Pervez Musharraf, who was president of Pakistan in the ’00s. (A fiendishly difficult job.) Here in the Corner, I would like to return to the subject of Pete Reed, whom I mentioned in some Ukraine notes on Sunday. Reed was a volunteer medic in Ukraine. A former U.S. Marine, he had founded Global Response Medicine. He was killed while attending to an injured woman in Bakhmut. She was killed in the same attack.
Oliver Marsden, a British journalist in Ukraine, has a piece about Reed in the Times of London. I recommend it highly. “I had heard the name before,” writes Marsden. He is referring to that of Reed.
In 2016, the former US marine from New Jersey became famous in war zones, when he set up the only field hospital on the front lines of the Battle for Mosul, as the Iraqis tried to liberate it from Isis control.
Now in another unimaginably hostile situation, he was once again attempting to do the almost impossible. “We’re trying to find a building in Bakhmut that doesn’t have military in it, with an underground bunker, so that we can set up a civilian field hospital,” Reed told me as he got ready to head into the besieged city.
What were the circumstances of Reed’s death? Here is a report from ABC News: “‘It was a trap’: Video shows American volunteer likely killed by guided missile in ‘deliberate’ Russian attack.”
The report begins,
The video is only about a second long but it captures the killing of American medic volunteer Pete Reed and a Ukrainian woman he was treating in Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine which has been the target of a bloody Russian assault for months.
When watched frame-by-frame, the footage is revealing.
A low-flying missile can be seen hurtling toward Reed’s white van ambulance which was parked at the scene.
The images show that Reed was not killed by Russian shelling, as eyewitnesses had previously thought.
Military experts say the missile visible in the footage bears all the hallmarks of an anti-tank laser-guided missile. Reed’s colleagues say the video, together with firsthand witness accounts, show that the group of international medics was deliberately targeted.
“They were hunting us down,” said Erko Laidinen, a 35-year-old Estonian medic whose camera recorded the missile and the explosion.
It fell to Oliver Marsden to inform Reed’s wife, Alex, of her husband’s death. This is how Marsden concludes his piece in the Times:
Reed, 33, died attempting to save others. Every day, heroic volunteer medics like him from across the world risk their lives to help the vulnerable in Ukraine.
Choosing to tempt death far from home in a frozen city, in the throes of a savage foreign war, is an act of bravery most people can’t even begin to fathom. Why do they do it?
For Alex, the answer is simple. “Pete wanted to help in the biggest most tangible way possible, and he was just really, really good at it.”