Summary of Saved By Benjamin Hall: A War Reporter's Mission to Make It Home

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Saved By Benjamin Hall: A War Reporter's Mission to Make It Home

 

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Benjamin Hall is a veteran war reporter who was blown up in a Russian strike in Kyiv in 2022. This is the story of how he survived, and Hall shares his experience in full, from his ground-level view of the war to his dramatic rescue to his arduous, and ongoing, recovery. He also includes a 16-page color photo insert. Saved is a powerful memoir of family and friends, of life and healing, and of how to respond when tested in ways you never thought possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Mar 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215561874

Willie M. Joseph

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Prologue

KYIV OBLAST, UKRAINE MARCH 14, 2022

The most important details in this text are the events leading up to the Battle of Manila, which ended a hellish three-year Japanese occupation of the Philippines and left more than six thousand U.S. soldiers dead or wounded. Roderick Hall, a twelve-year-old Filipino boy, was there for all of it. He was born in Manila to a Scottish father and a Filipino mother and lived there happily until December 1941, when Japan's Fourteenth Army landed on Batan Island and opened fire on the Filipino population. The Battle of Manila was the bloodiest, deadliest, most savage engagement in all of World War II. Rod's mother, grandmother, aunt, and uncle were rounded up and killed, leaving him to care for his three younger siblings for nearly four years. During the liberation of Manila in 1945, he and his siblings ran for their lives toward the American lines, where GIs from the 37th infantry, the Buckeye division, reached out and pulled them to safety.

Rod felt a profound sense of gratitude to the U.S. military, and after graduating from Stanford in 1954, he enlisted to serve for two years in Korea as a private during the Korean War. He shared his pride in the United States and its military with his children, and eventually became a war correspondent. Benjamin Hall was a war-hopping freelance journalist from 2007 to 2015, going wherever civilization was collapsing under the assault of factions and ideologies. He saw a lot of death, had guns pressed against his head, and dreamed horrific dreams. Despite the risks, he was determined to give voice to the voiceless and show the world the brutal reality of war, up close and at whatever cost.

He met Alicia and they had three beautiful girls, Honor, Iris, and Hero. After the birth of their first child, Alicia and Benjamin discussed plans to move away from the front lines and keep a safer distance from the worst of the fighting. I took a full-time job with Fox News in 2015 and continued my coverage of wars, but in 2021 I made the decision to pull back from the front lines. On February 24, 2022, Russian T-90 tanks streamed across the border from Crimea's Chongar region into southern Ukraine, and Kh-55 cruise missiles and ground-launched Iskander missiles rained down from the sky. I was assigned to go to Ukraine to report on the war from the western city of Lviv, more than three hundred miles away from the heaviest fighting in the east.

This would be the single biggest military invasion of a sovereign country since World War II, and the biggest news story of the year, if not the decade. The author's decision to fly across the world to Warsaw, Poland, near the border with Ukraine is a universal story about self-discovery and how we learn what matters most in our lives. The journey is long and complex and often wrenching, but the true blessings of life are even deeper and richer and more astounding than we ever imagined. Despite the worst displays of human nature, there is something impossibly beautiful and indefatigably good, some spark of light and joy that cannot be extinguished. The author would not be here without it.

The author's wish for readers is to recognize their own journeys and setbacks and hard decisions, and to take heart in their own strength and resiliency. The author's wife, Alicia, never once told them not to go to a danger zone, and she understood that it was important for them to cover the invasion. Alicia and I spoke on the phone before the invasion of Ukraine began, and by nightfall I was on a plane bound for Ukraine. When the third bomb hit, I heard my daughter Honor's voice and realized that I had to get out of the car or else I would die. I had to find some way to move.

Something’s Happened

THE PENTAGON ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA MARCH 14, 2022

Jen Griffin, the chief national security correspondent for Fox News Channel, was in the middle of preparing a report about the war in Ukraine when she saw Sylvie Lanteaume, a longtime national correspondent for AFP, running down Corridor 9 on the second floor of the Pentagon's D ring. Jen had heard nothing about anything happening to anyone on the ground, but the look on her face told her that something was wrong. She quickly slipped into an operational mindset and called her team to find out what had happened. Jen had been fired on in Gaza while covering the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War, reported on the killing of Osama bin Laden, and questioned senior military leaders in hazardous war zones around the world. The most important details in this text are that Nicole Knee, executive assistant to Fox News Media's president Jay Wallace, received a call from Greg Headen, head of the Fox News International desk and vice president of News Coverage, about a possible hit on a Fox News team in Ukraine.

Nicole wrote a message on a Post-it and hurried to the second floor conference room, where Jay and Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News, were in a talent meeting. Jay excused himself and hurried to his office, where he called Greg Headen to his office and passed along the little he knew. Greg confirmed it was the Fox News team that was hit, and Jay took the call from Jennifer Griffin, who had just spoken with Sylvie Lanteaume at the Pentagon. Jen and Jay were close and had shared a deep mutual trust and admiration.

The most important details in this text are that Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News, was informed by Jay Wallace that Ben and Pierre Zakrzewski were both missing in the attack in Ukraine. Suzanne spent the next thirty minutes with Jay, digging up whatever news there was about the attack, and eventually learned that Ben had been located and was in a Ukrainian hospital in bad shape. Alicia was upstairs in her bedroom, getting ready for dinner with the girls, and felt a strange sense of calm. She was used to not hearing from Ben most mornings, so she tried to call him at least once a day.

Alicia was sitting on the edge of her bed when her cell phone rang. She looked down at the screen and saw the number 1 ahead of the full phone number— a call from the United States. The woman on the phone, Suzanne Scott, identified herself as the CEO of Fox News, and told Alicia that her husband, Ben, had been in an accident. Alicia was shocked and her heart fell, but she also realized why the day had felt so calm—it was because she had a sense that change was coming. She was still on the phone with Suzanne, still in the middle of this terrible moment of learning, and she froze the moment in her mind.

She knew she had to go downstairs and have dinner with the girls. Alicia, a 25-year-old journalist from London, is on an Air Arabia flight to Iraq, where she plans to make a documentary about some young Iraqi rappers who are embracing U.S. culture and whose concerts are being attacked. The plane plunges out of the sky, but the pilot pulls up the nose and the plane makes a landing on an airstrip in the Kurdistan Region city of Erbil. Alicia is excited to experience life in a place of war, and the choice of Iraq as a destination is either audacious or dumb.

In 2007, Iraq was in the grip of war following the U.S.'s invasion and surge of twenty thousand American troops. Roadside bombs and other improvised explosive devices (IEDs) routinely killed U.S. troops across Iraq, while insurgents waged fierce battles in Mosul and Kirkuk, Al Anbar and Fallujah, in the capital of Baghdad and smaller cities like Latifiya and Hilla. Despite this, a British student went to a party in London to meet the nephew of Jalal Talabani, the first non-Arab president of Iraq and head of the joint Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish administration. The nephew was a fully Westernized young man of twenty-five, skinny and polished, in tight white pants and crisp blue blazer, a pocket square perfectly in place and a flute of pricy champagne in hand. He graciously spoke with the student about the situation in Iraq and promised him a letter of introduction from his aunt, Hero Ibrahim Ahmed, the wife of President Talabani and one of the