NEW YORK (AP) — The physical pain of nearly being killed when shrapnel from a roadside bomb in Iraq ripped off his head 17 years ago was enough for ABC reporter Bob Woodruff.
Mentally it’s worse.
This is evident when we talk to Woodruff and see him take the audience on an adventure where his life changed in an instant on January 29, 2006. His first return to Taji, Iraq, is chronicled in “After the Blast: The Will to Survive,” which aired on ABC on Friday and began airing on Hulu a day later.
By the time he turned 44, Woodruff had reached the pinnacle of a competitive television industry. He had just been named co-anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight” and sent to Iraq at the height of the war to report on its progress.
Climbing aboard an Iraqi tank on patrol, he poked his upper body out to tell a report when the improvised explosive device exploded. A few inches on either side, Woodruff said, he would have died instantly.
As it stands, he remained in a medically induced coma for 36 days. When she woke up, she didn’t know the names of two of her 4 children, only a small part of what she had to relearn. Much of that came back and he temporarily recovered in the first two years after his head injury.
But like other people with aphasia, a disorder that affects the ability to communicate, it has stagnated. The recovery was not complete. He still has trouble remembering words, especially names.
“I have lost, without question, my abilities compared to what it was before,” he said. “It’s never going to be perfect. I say sometimes that it’s not my disability but a different ability.”
He’s candid about demanding recovery situations.
“The challenge is, through it all, admitting, almost admitting, that you’re not capable of doing what you’re used to doing,” he said. “Most people need to stay in control and never give up. I WOULD go back to normal. Actually, the purpose and hope is that you realize that you are on another path and locate the path to follow to take that path.
“I think it’s despite everything that happened,” he said. It took me a few years. “
He still works as a reporter for ABC and other Disney properties, but his days of live television reporting are over. It’s too hard. He focuses on long-running stories, such as a fentanyl special last year, an upcoming Arctic visit he made with military veterans, and “Rogue Trip,” a series of adventures he’s living with his son Mack.
He maintains constant contact with veterans through the Bob Woodruff Foundation, which raises funds for military families. Bruce Springsteen plays in his annual performances.
Woodruff is “a walking miracle of determination, resilience and absolute determination to tell the story, it is and wherever it happens,” David Westin, president of ABC News, said in 2006.
“He’s an inspiration to all of us,” Westin said. And it ultimately made him another journalist (and in many tactics better) than before, reaching millions of other people with stories we might never have known about otherwise. “
This time, when he arrived in Taji, he did so in the back of a white van.
I had several motivations for returning, in addition to guilt. Like some wounded veterans, he shared the feeling that he had to leave before he had finished the job he had been sent to do, despite a moderate excuse. So he devoted part of his reports to the evolution of Iraq, even going so far as to make a stopover on a glacier he had climbed 17 years earlier.
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