Page Utilities
Bob and Lee Woodruff, Random House Books (page 2 of 4) Page 2 of 4
He reeled off everything he’d packed, hoping I’d figure out what he might have missed. This was familiar territory, this nonchalant leaving. It should have had more weight, but to give it any more importance would have jinxed it in my mind. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Gaza Strip: give him a kiss as always, treat it like a normal morning, and he will come home safe and sound. I had a work deadline that day, and the sooner I got him on the road the faster I could finish my task.
Frankly, I didn’t think a lot about Bob over the Disney weekend either. The days had been full and the kids eager to pack in as much as possible. Bob drew sustenance from being on the road; the stories, the energy, the adrenaline rejuvenated him. He loved being a journalist, and that meant leaving us for stretches of time. We may not have always liked it, but we had made peace with it as a family. Periods of being intensely together were interlaced with periods of being apart.
As I rolled over and turned off the bedside light that Saturday night in Disney World, I thought we would all rise to this new challenge of Bob’s career as well. “Co-anchor.” It was good and bad. Good because he had reached the pinnacle of his profession, a plum job in television news, a successor to one of broadcast journalism’s icons. Bad because we would see him even less. Our definition of family time would need some revising.
The Sunday morning phone call pierced the quiet and I jolted awake to a bedspread of floral and chintz in a totally unfamiliar room. It took me a second to register where I was. Ah, right, I thought. Disney World. The wake-up call.
I rolled over and picked up the receiver. “Thank you,” I said, and lazily began to set it back on the cradle. I had decided to lie there for a few more minutes before I snuck out the door.
“Lee?” A faint voice came from the receiver, now almost back in place. Geesh, I thought. Personalized wake-up calls, how very Disney. I brought the phone back to my ear to thank the man.
“Lee, it’s David Westin,” the voice said.
He had my immediate attention. My brain fired signals to my body as I bolted up on the pillows. The president of ABC News does not make social calls to employees’ wives at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning, even a co-anchor’s wife. I licked my lips and swallowed. My mouth was dry.
“We’ve been trying to reach you,” he said, in a slow measured voice. He stopped for a beat as if to gauge how he would say his next line. “Bob has been wounded in Iraq.”
I sat straight up, trying to process the information I was hearing. Every synapse in my brain was firing. “Wounded?” I said to David Westin, as calmly as I could. “What do you mean wounded?”
“He was on an embed outside of Baghdad riding with the Iraqi army. We don’t have a lot of information right now, Lee, but we are getting it as fast as we can. We are getting him the best care possible.”
“David.” I interrupted him. “Is my husband alive?”
“Yes, Lee. Bob is alive, but we believe he may have taken shrapnel to the brain.”
I tried to digest what that meant and couldn’t comprehend it. He was alive; I’d start with that. The rest was gravy.
“What was an anchor doing on a military exercise?” I asked, voice rising. “The last thing I knew he was doing a story about an ice cream shop in Baghdad. I thought they were sleeping!” My mind grasped for facts, searching for what I knew or thought I knew. I was back in the Tower of Terror.
You can’t know how you would behave in a crisis until it drops out of the sky and knocks you down like a bandit: stealing your future, robbing you of your dreams, and mocking anything that resembles certainty. Sudden tragic events and even slow-burning disasters teach us more about ourselves than most of us care to know.
I felt the panic in my voice as I spoke to David Westin, and slow tears streamed down my face. At the same time, I began to feel a cool steely calm seep into my brain. It slowly formed a cocoon in which I could think and react rationally, disembodied from my emotions. In the months to come, this cocoon would allow me to handle the very public nature of this crisis, synthesize information, deal with teams of doctors, communicate with family, and take care of the business at hand without collapsing into a mass of spineless marrow.
For now, that steely calm began to morph into the part of me that became “the General.” The General would make important decisions, hold things together for the troops, lead the charge, and—most important for our team—ensure we didn’t lose a single man on the battlefield. The General was beginning to take over.
“Lee, we have a plane waiting to take you and the kids home to Westchester,” David said. “You just have to tell us what time. It’s fueled up and ready to go.”
I felt I needed to keep him on the line for some reason. I wasn’t ready to start making decisions. I didn’t want to take my first step into this new world. I wanted to relish my old life for just a minute more. All four of my children were blissfully sound asleep beyond my door. Inside my room their secure little lives were being hacked apart while they dreamed, oblivious to the chaos.
“Okay,” I said in a small voice. “Tell me what you know. Please tell me what happened.”
“Bob and the crew were traveling on a road in Taji on a routine ride,” David said. “Bob was in an Iraqi armored vehicle. We believe he was doing a stand-up at the time, and they were hit by an IED [improvised explosive device] in an orchestrated attack on the convoy. There was gunfire after that, but neither man was hit. Bob and the cameraman, Doug Vogt, have been taken by helicopter to Baghdad and are going into surgery.
“Apparently he asked Vinnie, his producer, if he was alive; he did come to.” David spoke coolly and rationally, but he was clearly rattled.
Excerpted from In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing by Lee and Bob Woodruff, Random House, 2007. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. www.randomhouse.com. For more information on the Bob Woodruff Family Fund, go to www.remind.org.
See All TBI Topics