Harper Influence

In March 2022, a car carrying Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall and two colleagues covering the war in Ukraine was struck by Russian missiles. Hall's co-workers were killed; he was severely wounded, "clinging to a heartbeat." It was a miracle that Hall was rescued, as recounted in his 2023 bestseller, "Saved: A War Reporter's Mission to Make it Home."

In his latest book, Hall writes of his long recovery, coping with severe trauma, adapting to the use of prosthetics, and his return to Ukraine, in "Resolute: How We Humans Keep Finding Ways to Beat the Toughest Odds" (to be published March 18 by Harper Influence).

Read an excerpt below:

The war in Ukraine has been one of the deadliest for journalists to cover: more than one hundred journalists or media workers have been the victims of violence in Ukraine since the 2022 invasion, and at least eighteen have been killed—an astonishing number that includes my great friend and colleague Pierre Zakrzewski, a veteran Fox News cameraman, and Oleksandra Kuvshynova, a twenty-four-year-old Ukrainian journalist who served as our fixer, both killed in the same attack that crippled me.

President Zelenskyy knew my story, and one of the reasons he invited me to return, I believe, was to demonstrate the resilience of journalists, who—like his country's courageous warriors and civilians—refused to be cowed by Russian aggression. In fact, journalists from all over the globe continue to pour into Ukraine, seeking the front lines, finding the story, doing their jobs.

For me, there was a personal element as well. My escape from Ukraine after the bombing had been improbable, all but doomed to fail, yet I'd somehow made it out alive and all the way back to my home in London, to my family. Returning to Ukraine was a chance to retake this most unlikely escape in reverse. To relive the many impossible events that had to happen for me to survive, only this time with a clearer head and a more functional body. A chance to appreciate and be thankful for all the twists of fate and acts of heroism that brought me home. It was important for me to confront anew everything that had happened, rather than look away and leave it in the past. Like I said, I am a journalist, and a journalist can't look away.

There was more to my story that needed to be told.

So it was that I arranged a meeting with a doctor from the Military Clinical Hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital—the brave Ukrainian doctor who, in between shifts as an armed sentry for the national army, saved my life after the bombing.

It was in that hospital in March 2022 that my team of rescuers dispatched from abroad by Save Our Allies found me in a bed, metal rods sticking out of my left thigh, a drain tube attached to my skull, a cigarette lighter-sized piece of shrapnel lodged in my throat, parts of my left eye missing, my right leg amputated at the knee, and deep burns across much of my body. The Ukrainian doctor was dead set against moving me, afraid that any passage on the country's gutted, bomb-shelled streets might dislodge the shrapnel in my throat and kill me—one of several ways that leaving the hospital might have cost me my life.

Finally, he did agree to let me leave, patched up and hammered together just enough to make the trip feasible. And now, on my unlikely return to see him almost two years later, there he was again, waiting to greet me along with a handful of nurses who'd helped keep me alive.

I did not recognize the doctor—I had been close to death when we first met.

But he recognized me.

When he saw me, his eyes widened and his face went white, and he began to cry. He walked up to me and looked hard at my face, as if I weren't real.

As if he were looking at a ghost.

"You were gone," he said. "My God, you were gone. You shouldn't be here. It is a miracle you are here."

I hugged him and I told him I agreed with him. I was gone, a bloody mess, clinging to a heartbeat, and yet there I was, 614 days later, walking upright on a prosthetic leg, my facial scars nearly invisible, looking from the outside like the healthiest person alive. I'd been at the very brink of extinction, but something had pulled me back.

This book is about that something.

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