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The Journalist Who Wouldn't Be Silenced: Benjamin Hall's Story of Survival and Recovery · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Today I'm your host, roger Ream.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: It is a pleasure to welcome a return guest today to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast journalist Benjamin Hall.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Ben is the senior correspondent for the Fox News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: In March of 2022, while covering the war in Ukraine, hall was wounded when his team was struck by a series of incoming Russian missiles outside of Kiev.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: He recounted his harrowing story of the survival and recovery that followed in his best-selling book Saved A War Reporter's Mission to Make it Home, published in March of 2023.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: This past March, benjamin Hall published a follow-up book Resolute how we Humans Keep Finding Ways to Beat the Toughest Odds.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: That book will be the subject of our conversation today.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Ben has spent decades as a journalist, primarily reporting from the front lines of conflicts in the Middle East and Africa.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: He has reported nationally and internationally for publications including the New York Times, the Times of London, the Sunday Times, the Independent and the BBC.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: I'm pleased to say that Ben was also the recipient of TFAS's Kenneth Y Tomlinson Award for Courageous Journalism in 2023.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Ben, thank you so much for joining me today.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: That's a great pleasure to be here.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: For those who aren't familiar with what happened to you in Ukraine when you were covering the war there and who may not have read your first book Saved, would you mind just recounting or providing a backdrop to your new book, resolute?
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was March of 2022 and Fox News and we were covering the conflict in Ukraine just after Russia had invaded, and our team was inside Kiev and we were reporting on everything that happens during a war.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: I'd covered conflict for over a decade at that point and this was obviously the biggest land invasion that we had seen in Europe since World War II.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: It's a major story just outside Kiev, covering the story about a bombed out village called Harenka, and we filmed how it had been obliterated by Russian shelling and it was abandoned.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: At the time, there was no one there.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: We were with a couple of Ukrainian military and as we were driving back towards Kiev, we slowed down at this abandoned checkpoint and out of the sky, out of of nowhere, came these shells targeting our car.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: The first one missed by about 30 feet and quickly the driver tried to turn the car around reverse, but a few seconds later, the second one landed just alongside the car.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: Now that one knocked me out.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: I believe that's when I got a lot of the facial injuries shrapnel in the eye and in the throat and at that moment it went to total peace, total black.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: I could hear, see nothing.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: It was all peaceful and at that moment I saw my daughter, anna, in front of me.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: She was eight years old and she said to me Daddy, you have to get out of the car.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: You have to get out of the car as lifelike as anything.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: And it brought me back.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: And it came back and suddenly all this noise.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: Everything was happening.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: I grabbed for the car of the door, I took one step out of the car and the third shell hit the car itself.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: That one threw me away and I woke up a little bit later.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: I was on fire.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: I was rolling around, I was trying to put the flames out.
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: I managed to do that and I was badly injured.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: That day my right leg was gone, most of my left foot and I had.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: It was very badly burned across my body, my left thumb.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: And this began this whole journey of trying to first of all be saved.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: It took about 40 minutes before we were found.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: I think the saddest part of that whole day is my team died.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: The rest of my team died that day Cameron and Pierre fixer, local producer Sasha, the two Ukrainian soldiers who we were with.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: They all died.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: But it began this very brutal three-day evacuation where some incredible group called Sayor Allies came into Ukraine to find me.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: Despite the accident I'm an American.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: They knew an American was injured.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: They didn't know where I was for the initial period and they had to come in and find me.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: Finally they did and they found a way to get me out with all my injuries and then began this journey to recovery and I wrote about that in Saved, my first book, and Resolute is the follow-up and it's sort of a much more personal look at some of the hard moments and how I got through those.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: We'll talk mostly about Resolute today.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Just published in the last few weeks.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: We'll talk mostly about Resolute today.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Just published in the last few weeks Saved.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: I highly recommend anyone listening today.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: It was a New York Times bestseller.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: It's quite an account of heroic actions by so many people, from doctors and drivers and your colleagues at your company, who all mobilized to make sure you're with us today, and it's a great book, you know.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: Let me ask this first You've experienced some very dramatic times as a war correspondent, covering conflict in North Africa, in the Middle East and elsewhere.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: Looking back now on that and having all these close calls in your career, where does that come from, that desire to cover these conflicts like that?
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: And you do touch on that in Saved, but I thought I'd ask that question today.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: I'd say first of all, I grew up being fascinated by conflict.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: My father was born in the Philippines.
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: He was in a Japanese prison of war camp at the age of eight.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: Most of his family were killed and he was under Japanese occupation for a few years.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: And he was rescued by American soldiers at the age of 12, along with his siblings, and it defined his life.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: He moved to the US, he joined the US army, he enlisted and he served in Korea and our life growing up we were watching John Wayne films.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: It was talking about how war had affected the family, how he had been saved and about how the impact it can have.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: And I grew up traveling the world and so I was fascinated with different parts of the world.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: You know, my father was American and I was raised in the UK, so I had this desire to travel the world.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: I wanted to see different cultures, I was fascinated by the extremes of human experience and of conflict and straight out of college I decided I wanted to go to Iraq.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: I was fascinated by the conflict happening there and that was the first thing I did.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: I was just drawn to it and immediately I got out there and I found it fascinating.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: The thing about conflict is that you know what you see in the news.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: You hear about the violence and the brutality and the death and destruction, but you know you see so much more At the same time and I write about this in the book.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: You see so much of the opposite.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: You see courage and bravery and resilience, and you have these two incredible things side by side.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: And I found conflict fascinating because it happens at so many different levels.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: It happens at the level of, say, the person who has lost their home has been blown up and they're at the receiving end of it.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: Then it happens at another level that can happen to the tribes.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: The economy is affected, then geopolitics get involved, then neighboring countries become involved and suddenly conflict nowadays is about so many different things and I just found that I was so drawn to it and once you start covering conflict, I found it was very difficult to cover anything else.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: It is something that I was constantly drawn to, fascinated by and just wanted to keep doing.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: Your new book, resolute, is certainly not a rewrite of your last book, saved.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: You cover new ground here and the ongoing recovery that's taking place in your life.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: You literally had to, in your own words, relearn how to be part of the world.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: Could you explain now the role of being resolute and, as you say, resilience, and how important that is, and it's something you think we all have in us as well.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: The reason I called the book I wanted to call it Resolute was because it was about this journey through a traumatic event.
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: And I talk about resilience and what I think about resilience is that it's in all of us but it requires hard work.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: You can't just naturally be resilient.
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: You have to set yourself goals, you have to set yourself targets, you have to fight for where you want to get to.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: And that's why I wanted to call it Resolute.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: And I write about the ups and I write about the downs and I think that being resilient, you don't feel resilient when you're going through it, but you can have one solid common knowledge, which is resilience, which is you can get through it, no matter how hard it is.
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: And this book is about those moments that felt really difficult.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: For example, the first time that I was abroad and I remember I had a little difficulty with my legs and I was on the floor somewhere and I was just broken one day.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: And I'm happy to write about those in this book, because I write about the difficult moments like that.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: I write about the PTSD, I write about some of the flashbacks, but in each case I write about how you can stop, you can gather your thoughts, you think about what's important, you think about what can drive you and you pull yourself up, you stand up or, in my case, you crawl and you just find a way through.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: And I think that's what life is about, you know.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: It's about finding a way through.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: It's about dealing with difficult things.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: There isn't a single person who hasn't dealt with something that's difficult, and each and every one of us has to find a way through it, and I think that's what I really wanted to convey in this book.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: And, like I went through something traumatic, but this book is not written just for people who have had injuries like mine.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: The same is true if you have economic problems, struggle with money, or if you have family issues, or if you're having troubles at your job, like each and every one of those, if you're anxious or you have anxiety.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: That's going to so many people and everyone has to find a way through these.
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: What I've just tried to do in this book is I've tried to tell it as a story and tell about my experiences, but I hope people can get from my story some clues, some hints that might help them through theirs.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you use this phrase in there or I don't know if it was original to you or the doctors who accused you of having PTO post-traumatic optimism syndrome because you are such a fighter and you do write about those dark moments.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: That one, where you're on the hotel room floor, was, I think, a few blocks from where I am today, when you came for the White House Correspondents Dinner.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: You talk about the pain I think there's a chapter called Pain and you reflect on flashbacks.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: You started having Talk about that story when you went on your first vacation with your family to Portugal and you were heading to the beach and a truck was approaching you.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we were driving along it should have been a perfect family day and this truck came up behind us and out of nowhere, just suddenly out of nowhere, I believed that it was full of Taliban, the Taliban hanging out of the back of it, that they were chasing us.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: And it lasted, and it's happened a few times.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: It happens a fair amount, but that first time was a few seconds where everything that I had experienced came right back to me, where you immediately get back on action, you don't know how to escape.
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: It was a real awakening for me.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: I very quickly realized that I just needed to talk to my wife about it, so to tell her about these things.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: And again I talk about how, by talking about these things, you managed to get rid of them.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: I feel it every time the bell rings, depending on the mood I'm in.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: I think the Amazon driver is coming to raid our house.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: You know whoever's behind that door, but I see these as a consequence of the life I chose to live.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: You asked earlier about being a war correspondent and I don't think any war correspondent is foolish enough to think that there won't be some implications.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: I have to hope you live in a heightened alert and sense at times, and so the way I look at those flashbacks, the way I look at those moments, is look, I picked this life.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: There will be knock-ons as a result of it, but I can handle those.
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: I know they're short, I know they don't hold me down.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: And look, I talk a little bit about other people who have PTSD, and I know that it hits other people in far more severe ways, and that's why I think, with everything I've got all my injuries, everything that I feel I know there are people who have it worse than me.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: I know there are people who are going through the struggle in a bigger way.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: In this book you also talk about the importance of community and support and, most particularly, family.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: You know your wife, Alicia, is a hero of this story as well.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Could you talk about how that was, in terms of how she dealt with your six to seven months in the US recovering and she's managing the family back in England and has been such a source of strength for you?
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: And I couldn't have done this without the most incredible wife.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: I had three daughters.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: We have four now.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: We've had one who she's seven months old, but you know, my wife stood up when she needed to stand up and not a single time did she say, oh, how are we going to handle this?
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: What are we going to do?
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: She said we will do whatever we've got to do.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: You get better, you stay in hospital.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: And I was in hospital for seven odd months and she said however long you got to be there, that is fine, I will take care of the kids.
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: You do what you were doing.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: Come back to me.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: But it became pretty hard when I got home.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: You know, I thought that the recovery was in hospital.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: I thought that when I got home, life would begin again and we could start.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: Well, that wasn't true.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: In fact, when you leave hospital where you are surrounded by doctors and nurses and physios each and every day, when you take those away and you suddenly have to figure out how you can move, how you can get around your community, even in the house with stairs, you know, bathrooms that aren't accessible, there are so many other hurdles Again, that's one of the reasons I also wanted to write the book.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: You know these journeys, they go on for life and at every step I had to find a way to sort of get through them.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: But Alicia was there for me and she continued to be there for me, and there are moments at home where she has to do things that I can no longer do Now.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: They could be small things like carrying anything big up and downstairs, being able to reach high shelves, changing a light bulb on a ladder.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: You know these are things that I can't do.
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: But there's one moment I write about in the book which was really dramatic and I really realized for the first time this reversal of roles, and it was the middle of the night.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: I'd been home a few months and the dog started barking downstairs and we knew someone was breaking into the house and I didn't have my legs on.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: It still took me a while to figure them out and Alicia was pregnant at the time, so it must have been about a year after we got back or so.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: But she ran downstairs.
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: My pregnant wife ran downstairs to protect the house and screaming at them and shouted and waved things and they ran away.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: But that moment meant such a lot to me and actually it was one of the parts that hurt so much.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: I was supposed to protect our house.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: I was the father, I was the husband.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: That's what I always did.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: I would have done and I hadn't thought about it before.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: But to see my pregnant wife having to run downstairs to save the family and the household really knocked me a bit and I'm trying to get my legs on and I come downstairs.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: You know, a minute and a half, two minutes later which time she scared them off.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: I remember just thanking her for it and saying I'm so sorry I couldn't do that.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: I'm so sorry that you're the one that had to come downstairs and do that.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: But Alicia is someone I you know.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: I mean you stand at the altar and you marry in sickness or in health and she has never stopped for a second.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: But it's her, it's the community, it's people around you.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: And I talk also in the book just about how people help family help, friends help, doctors help, everyone helps.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: And maybe you don't realize that when you're not going through something traumatic, but wow, do you realize it when you do.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: And that's a big lesson I've learned is to constantly look and reach out and help others.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: Now when I see them needing it and you don't always know if they do need it, you got to ask see if you can help Turn up if someone is having a tough time.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: Just ask if what you can do it helps.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: Even if they don't tell you they need it, maybe they do, and so that's part about being a community.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: I think it's so important.
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: It makes us stronger, makes us great.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: That's a great message that we don't realize that most of us, because we don't have the circumstances you had to deal with, that we're being helped all the time, every day, from you know that barista who gets up at 6 am to be at the Starbucks to give us our coffee, to all the people around us, friends, family and strangers.
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: I tell you what's been fascinating on the back of that is and I never expected this something that is really positive.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: Because of my injuries and the prosthetic legs, people come up to me all the time and share things with me which I wasn't expecting.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: People, you know, at school pickup people come up and want to tell me about something difficult they've gone through.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: Somehow.
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: By seeing my injuries, they feel that they can open up and talk to me, and I'm a journalist.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: I've been trying my whole career to get people to open up to me and like people are doing that and I thought what a great gift that is.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: People just have this inherent sense that they know you've gone through something difficult and they are willing to share what they've gone through as well, and I've just found that to be great to be able to talk to people.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: It's fascinating to see how that's happened Could Fascinating to see how that's happened.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: Could I just ask you to quickly comment as well about faith, because you do talk about how you went to school at a monastery, growing up and were raised with a Catholic faith, but what role, if any, that played in this process.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, look, I've had a real journey with faith my whole life as well.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: I'm very strict Catholic.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: Growing up, you know, I was at a Benedictine monastery in the Yorkshire Moors.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: And then, I suppose, when I was at a Benedictine monastery in the Yorkshire Moors, and then, I suppose when I was at university, I started to.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: You know, I wasn't sure how much I believed in sort of the established religion and I always believed in religion.
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: I've always believed in God, but whether I was still Catholic or not or whether I just had my own beliefs.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: And then so many times during my career I came across some stories and I write about being in Iraq after ISIS took over the northwest of Iraq and I remember going to this one church that they'd blown up and I remember walking.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: I had to track this little minefield that they'd laid and someone had planted the priest had planted this path back to this demolished church.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: I remember walking into it again and seeing everything demolished but the altar and this crucifix that had somehow stayed up, and I just kept having these moments where I was suddenly brought back to this real faith.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: But this happened all the way through till I was injured in Ukraine when I was lying there during those 40 minutes brutal 40 minutes that I was lying there and maybe I felt no pain.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: Adrenaline had kicked in and you are just thinking about how you can save yourself.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: I just, first of all I said how am I going to get home to my family?
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: What have I got to do?
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: I will do anything.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: And then the next thing I thought of was God.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: I said God, please, god, will you get me home?
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: And there it is All the questions I'd had of faith in my life when everything else was taken away.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: I went to my family and I went to God and that began the rebuilding of my faith.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: And even afterwards, I was treated for seven months at the Brook Army Medical Center in Texas, in San Antonio, this incredible military hospital in San Antonio, this incredible military hospital.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: But once I was let out of the ICU, after the first six, eight weeks or so, I passed the chapel and it took a good few weeks and I wasn't ready to go into the chapel and I don't know why.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: I had so many questions about life and death and what had happened to me and was I ready to talk to God about it?
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: And then, finally and all, because there was a long line at the lunch hall next door.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: I said I'm going to pop in and again, sitting there opened it back up to me again and just again these things started happening.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: That brought it back to me and, more than anything, I went in on that first occasion and I prayed and I spoke to Pierre and Sasha, the two of my colleagues who died with me, and I spoke to a pastor as well and I write about talking to him in the book and one of my first questions to him was because he'd spoken to dozens of people injured like I've been injured in Afghanistan, iraq, other veterans, and I said why would God have allowed this?
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: Why would God have allowed me to be injured in this way?
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: And, I think, anyone who's gone through something traumatic.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: I asked the same about natural disasters, for example.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: You know, why would God send a tsunami towards an island, kill thousands of people?
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: And you have these questions and I remember the pastor just saying that God will always be looking for the good and the bad.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: I know I had this optimism the whole time, but I also.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: It was one lesson.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: I said, yeah, I can stop and I can think about the bad, or I can stop and I can focus on the good.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: I can stop and make sure that everything I do is focused on helping other people who have gone through something similar to me or something traumatic, not to question it so much, but just to keep living and keep doing it for God.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: And so now again back to being religious again.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: But you know, it's never too late.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: I say to everyone, even if it's never too late, I say to everyone, even if it's just a prayer, you don't have to go to church, you don't start off by just saying a prayer for a minute in the morning.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: Little bits, that piece that really helps and that you know.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: It's remarkable, that comes with the title of the book Resolute and the resilience you have all along the way, from when the missiles hit to where you are today.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: You've approached things with such a great attitude of resilience, of treating these things as opportunities to overcome.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: I think you have to.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: Everything you know.
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: You've got to set yourself goals, you've got to know what you're fighting for, you set yourself challenges, and that's helped me a huge amount.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: Well, let me just ask you in our time that remains about three trips you've taken your return to Ukraine, your visit to Israel and coming to New York to receive our Ken Tomlinson Award for Courage in Journalism.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: So you returned to Ukraine some 6, some 631 days, was it, after the attack.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: Could you just briefly talk about that as something you write about in the book?
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: Big, big moment for me and I wanted to go back straight away.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: Like a lot of the book is about never hide from bad things that happen.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: Never pretend they didn't happen.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: Face up to them, talk about them, stand up.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: You know, if you get knocked off the horse, you get back on it.
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: And I knew I wanted to go back to Ukraine.
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: I had to go back for a few reasons.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: First of all, personally, I needed to show that I wouldn't be stopped.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: You can hold us down, but I will keep moving forward.
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: I also wanted to go back for journalism.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: I honestly felt that the way I saw it is that Putin and the Russians tried to silence journalists that day.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: We were targeted that day and I know that he wanted to silence journalists and I wanted to go back to say you may have attacked us, you may have tried to silence us, but I am back and I am still reporting.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: You will not stop journalists.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: We will always report, no matter the threat, because I think that's so important.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: And so I went back and interviewed Zelensky and I sat with him for a journalists.
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: We will always report, no matter the threat, because I think that's so important.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: And so I went back and interviewed Zelensky and I sat with him for a good hour and it was just fascinating to be back and I felt fine, as if I'd come full circle.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: I was back reporting, doing something I loved.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: But the train that I took into Ukraine was the same train that I took out when I was so badly injured and on the way out I had no pain meds.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: It was a brutal, brutal 10 hours where I had to learn a new me.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: I mean, it was tough and I write about it in the book, how you have to overcome that level of pain.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: And I took the same train, night train, back in and I lay down in the same place along the same kind of bench that I was laid in on the way out, and I relived it.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: I wanted to go back, I wanted to remember what it was like, and I still try to remember what it was like because I don't want to forget it.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: I remember that moment, I remember what happened, because I think you have to, as I said just before, I think you have to remember when these things happen, you know, don't run from them.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: So I want relive it.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: It was for those reasons that I wanted to go back to Ukraine and I just felt that it was really important to do so.
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: And who knows, I might be going back at some point again in the future, hopefully when the war is over.
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: But it was an important journey for me to do, and personal as well as professional.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: And I should mention you were awarded the Order of Merit Third Class from President Zelensky in Ukraine for your work in covering the war there.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: Before I ask you about your visit to Israel, could you comment on the war?
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: You know you've invested a lot in covering it and I find it incredible.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: Now we have troops from North Korea fighting on the frontiers of Europe and Russian forces still trying to conquer Ukraine, and they've put up a tough fight.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: But what are your thoughts on where we are right now, if any?
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: Everything at the moment hinges around whether or not there will be a peace deal that President Trump can make both sides agree to.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: At the moment, it seems to weigh heavily in Russia's favor, but I don't know if the Russians really want to sign a deal to be, honest.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: The way I see it is that if Ukraine signed a peace deal, even if the US isn't there, I believe the Europeans will make sure that Ukraine becomes, as they've been calling it, like a porcupine state.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: You know it will arm itself up.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: It will have.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: Let's say, putin would wait three years till the next president came in, or till he tried again.
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: That it would be a lot harder for him to do so at that point.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: He is winning at the moment.
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: You know he's doing well.
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: I don't know if it was a benefit for him right now to stop.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: I think it is more of a benefit for him to try and make the President Trump.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: As he's been saying, we're going to pull out If we don't get a peace deal.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: We'll just won't do anything, and I think maybe that's the direction Russia would rather go, so that actually there is no peace deal and Russia continues fighting.
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: I don't know how that will happen, but I think that we need to be helping Ukraine in every possible way.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: I think certainly the Europeans have to.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: This is on their land border.
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: This is really the ones that need to be doing a bit more.
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: The other thing is that Russia has set up a war economy.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: Everything in the country is geared towards providing weapons and funding for the military.
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: You can't turn that off.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: If they sign a peace deal, that doesn't stop, that's many years to undo.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: That's how they've geared everything up, including their future generations.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: Their children are in school holding guns and being told they've got to learn to attack the West, and so, however it is, I feel that Russia is going to be a threat for many years to come, because that's how they've set it up, and I don't think they want to stop right now.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: You write in your book about a visit to Israel and meeting with some of the Israelis who were taken hostage.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Could you touch on?
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: that.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: I remember October 7th happening.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: I wasn't traveling at that point because of my injuries, but I remember the first thing I wanted to do was I wanted to get out there and cover it.
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: And I covered so much of the Middle East and my first opportunity I could I managed to get out there to interview.
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: I went down to all the kibbutzes and I was telling the stories and I interviewed this incredible girl and she had been held by Hamas in the hostages in the tunnels under Gaza.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: She was injured like I'd been injured, one leg almost gone, damaged in the other leg, and I remember sitting opposite her and talking to her about it and it was the first time that I realized what an impact my injuries had had on my journalism, my whole career.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: I kind of hoped and believed and wanted to think that I had kind of understood the stories that people were telling me when they'd gone through these difficult moments.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: But I didn't Until it happened to me.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: I didn't understand what it meant to go through something traumatic and when I sat down and I spoke to her and we talked for a long time, I understood for the first time as a journalist what maybe she'd been going through and I realized that my whole time as a journalist I've been doing everything I could.
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: I'd been reporting what they were telling me, but I actually kind of got it and it was fascinating.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: Listen to her Maya Rajev and I sat and spoke to her and she's another incredible person who's gone through it all and she's out the other side and she's doing amazingly well.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: But it was a real eye opener for me, that journey and again, another tragic story you know that's still not over.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: Hostages are still being held.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: It's terrible to watch Kenneth Tomlinson Award for Courage in Journalism.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: I think no one deserved that award as much as you that we're proud to give out each year.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: And if you're in New York this November 11th, we'll be having our dinner again.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: We'd love to have you join us for this year's dinner, but I hope that was a meaningful event for you and your journey, and we were pleased to provide everyone at that dinner a copy of your book Saved as well.
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it really was.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: And I went through a little moment and I write about it in the book as well where at one point I thought do I want to be given awards just because I was injured?
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: Should it be for my work?
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: And I have since decided that, yes, you should, because if it gives me the ability to stand up and encourage other journalists, if it gives me the ability to stand up and to talk about how important journalism is war correspondence in my case then yes, and I now want to take every opportunity I have to talk about the work that my colleagues do, the people I know do, because it is so important and I now know what people and colleagues and journalists go through to get these stories.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: And so getting that award is a great honor for me and it gave me an ability to stand up and to talk about why it was important for me, why I believe firmly in journalism and it really is.
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: That's why I'm so grateful that you're doing it and you can't tell us who's going to win this year, can you yet?
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: No, I can't yet, but.
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: I didn't think so.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: We did just select our next class of Joseph Rago fellows and we're in the process of selecting our Robert Novak Journalism Fellows.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: So that's why it was important to us is to have you talk to these young people that are going into journalism and present the courage that it takes for people like you and others to do the kind of reporting you do.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: It's more important than it ever was as well, because you know we talk all the time about AI and social media and the impact they're having on journalism.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: So that's why, more than ever, you need to know the journalist.
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: You need to know that there's someone there speaking to the sources, seeing what's happened with their own eyes.
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: If you take that away and you rely on anything else, it's not real journalism, and we're so clouded by this kind of fake journalism at the moment that give me a journalist who's done it, who's been there.
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: Those are the only people I will read about and follow and trust, and that's why these young people that you're helping educate they are the most important.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: They really are.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: They're the future of journalism.
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly our emphasis, for even for journalists who end up on opinion pages, they need to do reporting.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: People don't just want to hear their opinion about something, they want to learn something new in the column they read.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: And so get out there and do reporting, talk to people and then reflect that in your writing.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: Well, one message that comes across in the book Resolute is how much you've come to value time, and it's important for everyone to put a premium on time, and I know you have your wife Alicia, your children Hero, Honor, Iris and Sage, probably looking forward to spending the evening with you tonight.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to bring this to a close.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: I'm so grateful to you, Benjamin Hall, for joining us today on the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: I could talk with you for another hour, but thank you so much for joining me.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it would be my pleasure to do so, but, roger, it's so nice to see you it always is and thank you for everything you do as well.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership podcast.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at TFASorg, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.