Feel-Good Friday: Benjamin Hall edition

AP Photo/Richard Drew

Fox News Channel foreign correspondent Benjamin Hall is the very embodiment of strength and courage. He was severely injured in an attack as he covered Putin’s war in Ukraine. The Russians almost killed him. They did kill two other Fox employees who were in the car with Hall when it was struck by incoming fire in Horenka, outside Kyiv.

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Photojournalist Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova were killed. Hall was the only survivor. His book about the attack and his recovery process, “Saved: A War Reporter’s Mission to Make It Home,” will be released on March 14. It can be pre-ordered now. His is the kind of feel-good story that celebrates triumph over tragedy.

He’s a war correspondent and Ukraine was not his first war zone. The 40-year-old reporter covered conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan before covering Ukraine. He was saved by the voice of one of his three young daughters. “Daddy, you have to get out of the car.”

He was traveling in a car with Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski, 55, and Ukrainian fixer Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova, 24, through the abandoned village of Horenka when an explosion rocked a patch of pine and birch trees some 20 feet away.

“We’d barely turned to look before the second bomb whistled overhead and landed right next to us and everything went dark,” Hall writes in his new memoir, “Saved: A War Reporter’s Mission to Make It Home,” out Tuesday.

Catastrophically wounded, Hall — who had volunteered a month earlier to cover the crisis, a year after deciding to pull back from the front lines for the sake of his growing family — felt himself slipping into a “deep, infinite blackness.”

“I was blacked out and I had taken a lot of injuries from the second shell,” he told The Post.

But then he heard a familiar voice imploring him to get out of the car.

“I saw my daughters,” he said of 7-year-old Honor, 5-year-old Iris and 3-year-old Hero. “My daughter Honor in particular came to me. And I could see her and feel her. She told me, ‘Daddy, you have to get out of the car.’”

Hall understood he had to move immediately.

“Suddenly I had awareness: I was in the back of a car,” Hall writes. “I felt like I was stuck. The world rushed back into me — light, sound, smell. The car door to my right was open, and Pierre wasn’t there. He must have gotten out. Now it was my turn …

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From there he got himself out of the car and then there was a third explosion. He was on fire. He saw his right leg was gone and his foot was dangling on his other leg. He also lost the use of one hand and one eye. He believes it was an unworldly experience that saved his life on March 14, 2022, exactly one year from the time his book goes on sale.

He realized he had it in him to fight and recover for his family. He was rescued by Ukrainian special forces agents and the nonprofit organization Save Our Allies. They evacuated him to Germany and then he was transferred to Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas. “If we do things together as a team and community, you can get through anything,” Hall said Friday on “FOX & Friends.”

“FOX & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy then asked Hall what he’s been able to do during his year-long recovery that surprised him.

“Well, I think the ability to stay strong, to know you’re going to go through some of the toughest times of your life, both physically and mentally, but to know if you focus hard, if you have enough willpower, if you have enough trust and faith, then you can get through anything,” Hall said.

“I was amazed at the level you can find inside yourself,” he continued. “I would never have thought it before that I have it, but I’m a firm believer that we all have it. If you have to get through something difficult in life, don’t give up, just fight for it, and you can find your way through it, and I believe that wholeheartedly.”

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His is a remarkable and inspiring story. The story sounds like one worthy of a read.

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Beege Welborn 5:00 PM | December 24, 2024
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