Fox News Channel correspondent Benjamin Hall lost half a leg, most of a foot, part of a hand and one eye’s sight in a Russian missile attack covering Ukraine’s war.
But talking to The Post about his new book, “Resolute: How We Humans Keep Finding Ways to Beat the Toughest Odds,” he reveals, “I eventually found that the physical injuries” were “the easiest to comprehend and get over.”
Going home and learning to live a new life was harder.
“There were a number of things that I couldn’t do. The ways in which people interact with you are different,” he says, “and that’s when I started to learn who the new me was.”
Hall was the sole survivor of a March 2022 blast just outside Kyiv as he, cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian translator-fixer Sasha Kuvshinova were driving away after interviewing soldiers. His bestselling 2023 book “Saved: A War Reporter’s Mission to Make it Home” detailed his harrowing journey out of Ukraine and grueling recovery.
“Resolute” — which entered The New York Times Best Sellers list at No. 4 — goes beyond the medical and physical.
“This book is a result of the hardest journalistic mission I’ve ever undertaken — an inquisition into why I’m still alive,” Hall writes. “The hardest part of my recovery, it turned out, was when I re-entered the real world.”
It’s “an examination not just of my own recovery but of the other people I speak to,” he tells The Post. “What gave them the ability to just stand up and get through absolutely anything? I think it’s fascinating. It’s human nature at its finest.”
He found, he writes, “the trait that most shapes the destinies of people and nations and movements, more critical even than bravery and cunning and all the other human traits, is the capacity to withstand and recover from adversity. Or, in a word, resilience.”
He set out to learn more about what gives human beings resilience — and the inspiring book by the guy with “post-traumatic optimism” teaches how to get better at unlocking its power, no matter what situation you’re facing.
A “key part of the book is that you can grow through struggle,” he says. “You go through something difficult, the next time it happens, you know how to deal with it. You know how to get through it. And ‘post-traumatic growth’ and ‘post-traumatic optimism’ is that.”
Few people have faced just the challenges Hall has (and continues to). But his book is written for anyone who’s going through any type of hardship at some point in life — in other words, we’re all the target audience.
“It’s fascinating what you just said about resilience, and how people say you’re really resilient and optimistic, but you don’t always feel that way,” he says. “Resilience is not the ability to get through something feeling great the whole time and happy and optimistic the whole time. Resilience is knowing that no matter how difficult is, you will get to the other side — that if you work hard and you set yourself those goals, you will get through.”
And he illustrates that with his own experiences, some of which weren’t easy to revisit.
“I write about the difficult moments, and I write about the painful moments, and I write about the moments that I was so low,” — even “brutal” moments — “but I always knew that I would get through it. So being resilient doesn’t mean that everything is easy. It just means you know that there’ll be something good on the other side. And I think that is the thing most people don’t realize.”
Hall continues to make adjustments, both big and small — all with the sense of humor he also believes is critical to surviving and thriving.
“I was at a dinner party about six months ago,” he relates, and the person opposite him had run out of wine. “I went to pour, and I just totally missed the glass. Because I can’t get depth, yeah? Pouring it on the table. Now you just learn to touch the neck of the bottle on the glass. All the little things that you learn so you’re not spilling on everything,” he concludes with a laugh.
Indeed, his social life has seen a significant shift. His first bigger gathering with friends post-recovery led to the painful discovery he could no longer keep up with the back-and-forth banter he used to relish.
“I’ve got a couple of really close friends who we see, and they’re mostly war correspondents. We normally end up talking about pretty serious things. I don’t really have that lighthearted, just go out and banter and talk about football, the weather,” he reveals. “Perhaps my focus is in more important places, and I’m perhaps I’m talking about more real things.”
It’s affected his work too.
“The way that my thoughts come don’t work in the same way. There are times when I find just really lining up a number of facts much harder than I would have done before. There are times when I just sometimes have blanks, but that’s fine. That’s the new me. Those are things that I can work around,” he says.
He still seems to easily give intelligent answers to questions about, for instance, Ukraine and Russia — and the future amid a second Trump administration.
“I hope that they can reach some kind of a cease-fire and then a peace deal. And look, it has certainly not gone the way that Ukrainians were hoping it would go. But until we see the final product, I just have to hope that there will be some kind of settlement that everyone agrees on,” he says.
“I just have to be optimistic at this point,” he adds. “Even speaking to some of the people in the Ukrainian government, they say, if we understand the way President Trump works, sometimes what might look really confusing at the beginning ends up being something quite positive at the end because he works in a way no other president has ever worked.”
Hall and his wife, Alicia, decided “very early on” they wouldn’t aim to “get back to the old life we used to have.”
“It’s about adapting. And I think that’s a key lesson. When you’re going through something difficult, be willing to adapt, change the way you do things, and then embrace that. Rather than feeling sad or sorry about what you can no longer do, accept and enjoy the things that you can do.”
He’s doing more specials now at Fox. He might even try his hand at fiction.
And the family has embraced a new member — Hall’s fourth daughter, Sage, was born in September. He calls her a “miracle baby.”
“There is a life and a baby person alive today only because I managed to survive,” he says. “And so out of something so dark and so sad, there is this new life. And what an amazing thing to hold up and just to celebrate.”
“I no longer see any hurdles as challenges. I think of them as opportunities,” he adds. “If I see something that’s difficult, boy, do I get even more pleasure from finding a way through it. And that’s what I want to teach my kids.”
