Wife of Veteran Killed in Ukraine Shares Their Conversation Before the Attack: 'Good Luck, Adventure Buddy'
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Courtesy Alex Potter
Alex Potter first learned the name "Pete Reed" via a newspaper article. In was November 2016 and she had just landed in Mosul, Iraq, where she'd traveled to cover the war as a photojournalist.
"When I got there, there were already hundreds of other journalists covering the battle," Potter tells PEOPLE. "I was like, 'Well there's not a lot of frontline medical providers, maybe I can help out in that way.' "
Potter, who is a nurse in addition to a journalist with credits in National Geographic and The New York Times, happened to see an article in The Washington Post about a nonprofit team rendering medical aid in the area.
"I asked if I could come help them," she says. "I thought I would stay and help for a couple weeks. I ended up staying the entire time."
On day one working with the medical nonprofit, Potter met Reed and fell hard.
Courtesy Alex Potter
The "social, outgoing, gregarious" former Marine wasn't someone to whom Potter would typically be drawn.
"If we had met a decade earlier, we definitely would not have been together," she says. "He was former military. I thought he was a little bit of a showboater ... and yet he wasn't this hard-ass without a feeling bone. He had all the feelings."
Potter and Reed stayed in Iraq for a year and a half, then "followed each other around" indefinitely, moving to Idaho, then Minnesota, then Alaska — all while he continued to make the occasional international jaunt to offer medical aid.
Courtesy Alex Potter
Reed had a passion for people, says Potter, which came in handy in war zones in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Ukraine — all places he made a point to travel. "In war, in high-stress situations... that's how he worked the best," she says. "He was really good at making connections."
Having fallen in love in a war zone, Potter says she and Reed had an understanding — an unspoken agreement to allow one another to pursue their passions despite the considerable dangers.
"We would never tell each other 'no.' But I was worried," she admits.
Courtesy Alex Potter
Her worries heightened when Reed, 33, left for Ukraine in mid-November. He returned a month later, buzzing about the experience but somehow more introspective. He knew there was more work to be done.
Back home in the U.S., he had plans to become a paramedic. He had recently completed a program and applied for jobs in the field but when he lost out on a stateside opportunity, an altogether different offer materialized: a six-month contract, back in Ukraine.
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So off he went, while Alex stayed in Alaska, where she works overnight nursing shifts two days per week.
She says she mostly tried "not to think about it too much," getting nervous only when she wouldn't hear from Pete for long stretches of time.
Courtesy Alex Potter
"If he didn't answer his phone, I would catastrophize, and immediately think, 'Oh he's dead.' And of course, 99.9% of the time he was fine," she says, her voice trailing off. "But it turned out to be unfortunately true this one time."
Potter was working an overnight shift on Feb. 2 when she got a 4 a.m. call from the executive director of Global Outreach Doctors, the organization for which Reed was working. The two-minute phone call was sketchy on details — "I only knew a group of them had been hit," she says — and caused her to immediately go into "journalist mode," bolting out of the hospital doors to try and track down her husband some 6,000 miles away.
"I sat in my car for three hours ... contacting every single person I knew of who might have an idea of where he was or how he was," she says.
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Over the next several hours, she heard differing stories — he was in an ambulance but conscious, he was hospitalized with abdominal trauma — but by midnight the next day, she heard from a journalist friend with troubling news.
"He was like, 'There's a video going around the internet,'" she explains. "And I said, 'Send it to me. I want to see it. I have to know.'"
Even in a blurry version of the video, Potter could tell: it was her husband, lying motionless on the ground.
As she would later learn, the van in which Reed was traveling had been hit by a missile and continuously shelled for hours.
It would take four more hours, Potter says, for her husband's body to be taken to a safe space, where it was then photographed so it could be identified. "I had to identify him by his tattoos because of his injuries," she says.
Courtesy Alex Potter
Within days, she had booked a plane ticket to Poland, where she met friends who helped facilitate her travel to Ukraine. Following a meeting with Reed's team five days after he was killed, she went to say her final goodbye, visiting the morgue to see her husband's body in person.
"People were confused about why I went," she says. "I just know he would do the same for me. As far as seeing his body, it was weird. I had been an emotional wreck for a week, but it helped provide some comfort that his death was immediate."
Courtesy Alex Potter
She left him with a figurine of a British Queen's Guard — a role Reed's father, who died last year, had when he was a child — then headed to the crematorium.
"The guy at the crematorium said, 'All of Ukraine thanks you for his service. We will always remember him,'" Potter says.
The days and weeks following Reed's death passed by in a blur. The couple's one-year anniversary came and went (Potter went ice-climbing, something she said had been on Reed's bucket list). She got two tattoos in his honor — an illustration of wheat and flower, in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, and the mantra, "Deeds not words," to mimic a patch he was wearing when he died. And then there was Reed's funeral, which was attended by a few hundred people, many of whom had never even met him.
Now a month later, Potter is keeping herself busy by spending time with family and preparing to go into military training.
Courtesy Alex Potter
"Those first two weeks, I was in overdrive," she says. "I could not eat or sleep, there were heightened emotions ... Now, it just feels very surreal. It feels like he's working somewhere and I'm just waiting for him to come home."
She continues: "For the first week after, I would see him everywhere. It's not like I could reach out and touch him, but I could visualize him. After I got to his body, that all stopped."
But the shadows of Reed — who he was as a person, the goals he had that never went fulfilled — are still very much surrounding Potter.
Courtesy Alex Potter
"People ask me what I want to be as a leader and I never answered them this way but I really just want to be the type of leader that Pete was — forceful and in control, but also compassionate and willing to give everything up for the people that you're serving."
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Growing emotional, Potter shares one of the couples' final text message exchanges.
"I wrote, 'Good luck, adventure buddy.' And he wrote back, 'You're gonna have great adventures in Alaska,' and I said, 'I wish you were here, too.'"
"He said: 'I know, but I will be, for years and years to come.'"
