Saved: A War Reporter's Mission to Make It Home - Benjamin Hall

 

"The paradox of covering war is that, while the job exposes you to unimaginable horror, you also have to love doing it."

 And Benjamin Hall feels so strongly that exposing the truth about war is his true calling in life, that he craves doing it again despite having barely survived his last assignment for Fox News covering the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. (I have to say, however, that as impressive as Hall's war reporting has been, I do hope for the sake of his wife and three daughters that he never puts himself in that position again.) 

Benjamin Hall, who holds dual British/American citizenship, was born and raised in London, and he credits his mother with instilling in him a sense of wonder about traveling the world. So, from an early age Hall developed the urge to stick himself into the middle of things while traveling rather than leaving it to someone else to decide what he would experience at any given destination. Perhaps as a result of that approach, Halls says that he had already spent "years of chasing stories that no one was paying me to get" before Fox News hired him, still on on a freelance basis, to "file a long-format piece from Iraq."

Rather ironically, by the time Fox News approached Hall about anchoring a nightly news report from Ukraine, he was a married man with children who had decided no longer to risk his life as willingly or as often as he had in the past. Still, he did not manage to resist the urge to get on-the-ground stories for himself, a fateful decision that led to Hall almost losing his life along with his four colleagues who all died the day their small car was obliterated by a nearby bomb strike.

The rest of Benjamin Hall's story reads like fiction. The circumstances and teamwork that somehow combined to get him back to Kyiv, much less across the Polish border (inside a private train being used by the Polish Prime Minister to get himself and his staff back to Poland from Kyiv) were a one-in-a-million shot that can accurately be characterized as miraculous. 

Benjamin Hall has written a remarkable account of what he experienced, and how his being "saved" has changed him as a man, a husband, and a father. 

"I can't say I spend a lot of time analyzing any psychological transformation I might have undergone. But what I can say, without any doubt, is that the person who is emerging from the bombing, from the more than twenty surgeries, from the continually painful rehab - the reconstituted whole Ben - is a better, stronger, and more joyful person than the one he used to be."

Saved is a powerful and emotional experience for the reader, a reminder that when good people combine their efforts to make good things happen, miraculous results often follow. Benjamin Hall is a remarkable reporter, but more importantly he is a remarkable human being.