Benjamin Hall wants people to know that drawing purpose from your community, family, and faith and trusting your own resilience will help carry you through any tragedy.
The Fox News correspondent who was gravely injured when a Russian missile struck his car while in Ukraine covering the war discusses his long road to recovery in Resolute: How We Humans Keep Finding Ways to Beat the Toughest Odds. Hall talks about the tragedy he will always carry with him as the only one of his crew to survive.
Hall said when he wrote his first book, Saved: A War Reporter’s Mission to Make It Home, which details his experiences covering the war in Ukraine, he focused on what happened in Ukraine, the evacuation, and the beginning of his recovery. Resolute, on the other hand, is much more than a testament to survival.
“I really thought then the tough part was done, that I’d done it and life would move on,” he said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “And actually, what I found out was that it was when I got home, it was when I no longer had the doctors, the nurses, and the 24-hour care around me that I realized there was a whole other part of this recovery.”
Hall admits those were tough times: “What I had learned is that even when times are particularly tough, that you can find a way through them.”
At the heart of that, he said, is finding your purpose.
“For me, it was about finding something to fight for, finding people to fight for, finding reason to keep going,” he said.
In researching his book, he continuously asked his doctors what the common recovery is for people going through something traumatic, and the answer was always the same: “They go in two directions; they either come out of it being really optimistic, and they don’t take anything for granted, and they think they’ve been given a second chance in life, or they lose their identity, they lose who they are.”
He said that when people lose their optimism to get through these traumatic situations, they have already lost their purpose.
Hall says one’s purpose is constantly changing, often through different aspects of one’s life, such as community, family, and faith.
“I write in the book about getting back to work. I really wanted to do that as quickly as possible. I write in the book about family. They were the ones that I really knew I had to get back to, and they pushed me in a huge way,” Hall said. “And I write about faith. And actually, when I write about faith when I was on the ground after the attack, I went right back to faith, and I went right back to family.”
The war correspondent, who lost half of one leg and suffered injuries on his other as well as on one of his eyes, said that when everything else is taken away, you go back to those values. “Even if you weren’t aware how strong, for example, my faith, I talk about my journey with faith, but that’s where I went back to.”
Hall said what changed the most about him following his injury was his emotional capacity: “I’m still immensely full of joy and happiness … but I physically feel more emotion when I think of, say, my family,” he said. “I never felt physical emotion when I thought of my children and my wife. But during my recovery and even when I’ve been away from them now for 10 days, I feel that emotion. I feel I want to be with them. And maybe I had sort of overlooked how significant and physical that was. And so I now have a great appreciation of that emotion as well,” he explained.
What Hall wants readers to come away with is simple: “I just want them to know that life will rather be full of ups and downs, but that there are ways of getting through any of them. I think that we don’t appreciate how strong our mind can be and that we sometimes allow difficult scenarios to knock us left and right rather than stopping, evaluating them, and getting the strength inside you to push forward.”
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He also wants people to trust in their capacity, which they may have never tapped into.
“I just want them to be able to trust in their resilience,” he said. “I talk a lot about trust, that you have that resilience to get to difficult things. I want to teach people that you can adapt no matter what happens. And if you hit up a wall, you hit a wall; you mustn’t let that distract you. You must find a way around it.”