Television Review: Solid Effort By Woodruff and ABC

Feb 27, 04:49 PM

Current Headlines: By Sam McManis, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Feb. 27--In a remarkable scene in tonight's remarkable documentary, "To Iraq and Back: Bob Woodruff Reports," the ABC news anchor returns to a military hospital in Bethesda, Md., where he was treated for a severe head wound suffered in Iraq last year.

Neurosurgeons, trauma specialists and intensive-care nurses, who have seen all types of horrific battlefield injuries, stop and marvel in the documentary when they see Woodruff -- intact, ambulatory and lucid.

"You have defied every single textbook written," Dr. James Dunne tells Woodruff on camera. "And there's just ... you have no business speaking. I'm sorry to say that. But you don't."

Not only is Woodruff speaking, as you can see in the one-hour documentary at 10 p.m. on Channel 10 (KXTV), he is reporting. And that, Woodruff told journalists in a Monday teleconference, is what he wants to stress most.

"This happens to soldiers and Marines every day, and a lot of times, they don't get covered because no one's there to see it happen," says Woodruff, 45, former anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight."

"Knowing that people would want to figure out what's happened all this time to me, it would give people a chance to see what's happening more in general."

Thus, the first two segments of the documentary are devoted to what happened to Woodruff and photographer Doug Vogt.

Viewers see a re-creation of events on Jan. 29, 2006, in Taji, 15 miles north of Baghdad. How Woodruff asked to ride with the 4th Infantry Division in an armored vehicle. How he and Vogt popped up out of a hatch just as an explosive device detonated. How he felt an "out of body" experience before being taken to Germany, then Maryland. And, later, how Woodruff progressed during a long rehabilitation. (Vogt is still recovering.)

But to Woodruff and ABC's credit, tonight's prime-time special is not all about Bob.

Few would've faulted the network had it chosen that path. Woodruff, after all, is perhaps the highest-profile journalist to become a casualty of the Iraq war, and so far, neither he nor ABC has told his story.

But Woodruff and executive producer Tom Yellin, also participating in the tele-conference, chose to integrate Woodruff's personal story with those of injured troops and the treatment they receive stateside.

"Bob's first goal is as a journalist," Yellin says. "His interest in the beginning was in following this story with others and looking into the care that the soldiers were getting. He wasn't dwelling on his circumstance."

Woodruff, who admits that he could not maintain objectivity when meeting with injured soldiers, says he believes the Defense Department is not releasing all the data on the number of troops injured or the severity of those injuries. He says more troops are coming back injured because of improved armor and equipment.

"The injured coming back (from Vietnam) were about 2.7-to-1 compared to those who died," Woodruff says. "Now, we've got at least 16-to-1 (injured-to-deceased ratio). The injuries in many cases are much longer for (recovery) time than anything that happened before."

Yet for all the solid reporting Woodruff did, what undoubtedly will gain the most attention will be his personal story.

Woodruff, who is married and a father of four, was in a coma for 36 days after the blast, which took off much of the left side of his head. After several surgeries to rebuild his skull with synthetic material, Woodruff looks much the same as he did before. His hair has grown back ("Yes, my own," he says), and only a few pockmarks remain on the left side of his face.

However, speech and memory recovery have been harder. Woodruff says he's about 90 percent recovered but still has difficulty remembering words. At one point in the teleconference, Woodruff said the word "news" when he meant "knowledge." He quickly corrected himself.

"There's an example right there," he said.

Compared with the weeks after he emerged from the coma, Woodruff says, his recovery has been remarkable.

"I couldn't remember (when first awaking) my two youngest daughters (twins, age 6) -- not just their names, but their existence," he says.

His recovery is such that Woodruff talks about other stories he wants to pursue. He wants to return to overseas reporting and isn't ruling out another shot at anchoring, which he did for a mere 27 days before his injury. But he won't return to Iraq. He hedged when asked if he would go back to the war zone, but ABC News President David Westin assured reporters during the teleconference that it's out of the question.

"It would be the height of recklessness, from my point of view, for ABC News to allow Bob Woodruff to go back into Iraq right now," Westin said.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

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