The story is unforgettable. Just three years ago, on March 14, 2022, in Benjamin Hall’s retelling, the Russian army shelled a car returning to Kyiv in which three war correspondents, including Hall, and two Ukrainian soldiers were riding. The first shell landed some 30 feet ahead of their vehicle, halting it. The second severely damaged the car, and Hall reported being swarmed in blackness, as if he were dead. It was exactly then that he heard the voice and had a vision of his oldest daughter, Honor, saying, “Daddy, you’ve got to get out of the car!” Somehow, missing one lower limb and with the other foot heavily damaged, he escaped to the roadway. Then a third bomb hit, and only he survived.

All this transpired just 18 days after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. Hall, a young but still veteran reporter who had covered war zones everywhere from Iraq, to Syria, to Afghanistan and Mogadishu, had accepted an assignment from his employer, Fox News, to cover the invasion of Ukraine. Fully aware of the danger, Hall had called his wife Alicia in London, where she had remained when he moved to the United States to start work covering the U.S. State Department. He knew, he writes, that his wife did not want him to leave their young family for such a role, but that “covering wars was what I loved to do.”

Hall’s first book, “Saved: A War Reporter’s Mission to Make it Home,” is a harrowing account of how he survived the near-fatal attack that took the lives of his companions, cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian journalist Sasha Kuvshynova, and their two Ukrainian military escorts. These events unfolded in the early days of the war when Russian forces attempted to move on Kyiv. Hall relates in a recent interview how the physician who operated on him in Kyiv moved about the hospital under armed guard because of the proximity of Russian soldiers. One did double duty as a healer and a sentry. The doctor later told Hall, “I couldn’t believe you are still alive. You were gone. You were so close to death.” Hall states that his recovery began when he “reached out to God” and begged Him, “God, please get me home, and it was the beginning of the rebuilding of my faith.”

The second book Hall is releasing this month details that rebuilding and offers counsel to anyone who has undergone tragic trauma. In our current era of “wars and rumors of wars,” the need for such a message could not be greater. The book is titled “Resolute: How We Humans Keep Finding Ways to Beat the Toughest Odds.” It holds nothing back. Here is the description Hall provides of his injuries:

“It was in that hospital in March 2022 that my team of rescuers dispatched from abroad by Save Our Allies found me in a bed, metal rods sticking out of my left thigh, a drain tube attached to my skull, a cigarette lighter-sized piece of shrapnel lodged in my throat, parts of my left eye missing, my right leg amputated at the knee, and deep burns across much of my body. The Ukrainian doctor was dead set against moving me, afraid that any passage on the country’s gutted, bomb-shelled streets might dislodge the shrapnel in my throat and kill me — one of several ways that leaving the hospital might have cost me my life.”

Resolute carries forward how Hall was soon cleared to leave Ukraine and was carried to an American hospital in Landstuhl, Germany and then to the Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) in Texas where the long travail of treatment began. Hall details these events as well, what he calls “being dissected like a specimen.” In Texas, he received the initial assessment, a roster of damage that reads like a pathology report, which resulted in the judgment that he would need two years at the center to recover. Hall reacted to this news with what he describes as a lesson of successful war fighters through the centuries — that battles are won not by force of arms but by resilience — a trait he had seen among suffering peoples all over this war-torn world. He informed his doctors he was determined to walk out of the hospital and return to London within six months.

Hall made good use of those six months, fighting for health, rehabilitating, and thinking, he says, about “the thing that inspires me to fight the hardest not to lose.” For him the answer, he writes, was clear: “It was the voice of my daughter — all my daughters, really — that brought me back from the brink of death. And it was Alicia and my daughters who inspired me every day at BAMC to fight every day as hard as I possibly could[.]” Hall almost ruthlessly describes the details of his months-long recovery, and his writing is vivid. Having shared how doctors at the Center for the Intrepid (CFI) at BAMC devised a prosthetic for his right leg and made him stand for the first time since the bombing, he writes, “The simple act of standing was indeed the first true rung on my reconstructive ladder.”

Hall unflinchingly describes the sequence of rungs he had to mount as his recovery continued. They included coping with infections, immense pain, psychological episodes, having to crawl across the floor in various situations, trying to play with his daughters on a backyard trampoline, traveling internationally (accessing a plane on one occasion via a forklift and the food door), learning to drive a car solely with handheld controls. The book enters its most engrossing passages when he writes about what family and faith meant to him as he reentered his life and gained strength. He quotes his wife Alicia, whom he calls his recovery’s “secret weapon”:

“We both agreed that sometimes tragedies have hidden blessings, among them the chance to put your life into perspective. I genuinely believe we haven’t lost anything as a family because of what happened to you. In fact, it’s made us all much closer. It’s given us a unified purpose. In a weird way, by going through something like that you kind of earn your stripes as a family.”

Here the book takes another riveting and revelatory turn, to the events of October 7, 2023 in Israel and the role of renewed faith in the midst of the gravest hardships. This time Alicia vetoed Hall’s plan to travel to the Middle East to cover the Hamas assault. Three months later he persuaded her to allow him to travel to Israel to interview survivors of the attack at the Nir Oz kibbutz adjoining Gaza. The theme of resilience recurred: “Their unshakable faith — in God, in family, in each other — sustained them and kept them from falling apart. That was the real story of what happened at Nir Oz. And it’s why it was easy to come up with a title for my report. I simply used an English translation of the Hebrew words Nir Oz: “Meadow of Strength.”

The remainder of “Resolute” explores that meadow, beginning with a chapel at BAMC that took Hall months to venture into as his rehab proceeded. He relates how his return to active Christianity was inhibited by the questions he faced as a war correspondent, where he witnessed devastating acts of violence against innocents committed by forces claiming religious motives or justification. He was vexed too by the knowledge that he was spared while colleagues he admired and loved, and dozens of fellow reporters, were injured or killed on these battlefields. It defied easy explanation. “In that small, quiet chapel,” Hall writes, “I said a prayer to God and asked for His help.”

“It all made more sense to me,” Hall goes on, “after that visit to the chapel. It was OK that I was questioning God, but why not ask for His help at the same time? What was the risk of asking God to pitch in? I was relying on my work ethic and my resiliency to get me through the recovery process, and also on the love of my family and children, but what was the harm of layering God’s help on top of all that? Even if I wasn’t sure if I believed in God’s healing grace or not, why would I turn my back on it in such a desperate time? Why not welcome it with love and reverence?”

“Resolute,” in the end, gets at the roots of resilience and recovery. Hall, for all he has been through, is but 42 years old. The limits on his ability now mean he is an unlikely candidate to report again from a war zone, places where thousands of men and women have been injured or killed to send their dispatches back home. He has taken up new assignments at Fox, not only telling his own story but venturing out to places where, he points out, the best stories come to the surface only after the cameras are turned off. His trek has carried him to southeastern Kentucky, where the turn away from coal mining was followed by a flood of opioids, and then real floods. In all of it, as “Resolute” recounts so well, Hall has set forth a testimony to the power of faith and family in the midst of the tragedies that befall us all.

Hall’s works are available, as they say, wherever books are sold. A final note: The Halls’ fourth daughter, Sage Scarlett Jennifer, was born on September 6, 2024.