Woodruffs key on vets’ brain trauma

SALEM – Brain-damaged by a roadside bomb while covering the war in Iraq in 2006, television newsman Bob Woodruff retold his poignant story Tuesday to a packed Salem State College audience, flanked by his wife, Lee, who shared the emotional hardships she endured during the recovery process.Together they hope to focus attention on the medical needs of thousands of U.S. troops home from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and struggling to cope with serious brain injury.”Bob’s injury was able to put a public face on that situation,” said his wife, noting that many of those who returned home from the Vietnam War received little or no treatment for post-traumatic stress and other ailments despite their sacrifices.On Jan. 29, 2006, Woodruff was with Canadian cameraman Doug Vogt and two other journalists when an IED or improvised explosive device was detonated beneath the Iraqi tank in which they were riding. They were in the lead vehicle, photographing the convoy near Taji, about 12 miles north of Baghdad. At the time, Woodruff was embedded with the U.S. 4th Infantry. It was his 27th day as co-anchor of the ABC World News.He and Vogt were wearing body armor, protective helmets and ballistic goggles – but they were outside the hatch. Metal shrapnel and rocks struck Woodruff in the head, neck and back, leaving him with serious brain injury. The combat doctors marked his case “expected” – as in not likely to survive.The newsman spent 36 days in a medically induced coma. One breakthrough occurred when Woodruff shed a tear upon hearing his 12-year-old daughter’s voice. His brain had swollen to the size of a rugby ball and much of it was visible, having pushed through the hole that surgeons had cut in his skull to relieve the pressure.Almost miraculously, he started to walk two months after the injury and was able to recognize some family and friends, but words for this once eloquent man came with difficulty.Woodruff, 48, has continued to report for ABC and earlier this year he returned to Iraq and Afghanistan to visit and thank the doctors, nurses, soldiers and helicopter pilots responsible for his survival, as well as his translator, Omar. Abiding by an oath to his wife and four children, he stayed away from the fighting on that trip, although it was not totally without danger.Woodruff hadn’t planned a career in journalism. Born in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, he graduated from the private Cranbrook Kingswood school in 1979 and earned a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University in 1983, where he also played lacrosse, finishing his career as the second-all time leading scorer.He graduated from University of Michigan Law School in 1987 and began working for Shearman & Sterling as a bankruptcy associate. While teaching law in Beijing in 1989 his life path took a major turn.Fluent in French, German and Mandarin, Woodruff was hired by CBS News as on-screen interpreter during the Tiananmen Square incident. He stopped practicing law to become a full-time correspondent, eventually moving to ABC News in 1996.Ten years later, he was named co-anchor of the ABC World News, succeeding the late Peter Jennings who died from lung cancer.”Bob went from reporting the news to being the news,” said his wife, referring to the widely-publicized incident.After his release from the military hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, Woodruff appeared on several national television shows in 2007 during which he exhibited word-finding problems. The journalist and his wife had already published a book, “In an Instant: A Family’s Journey of Love and Healing”, about the trials and tribulations resulting from his head injury.Among the couple’s talking points is that civilian medicine has been treating brain injury for decades, most of the wounds caused by car accidents, people who fall from rooftops or get struck with a baseball bat. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have forced the military medical community to follow suit because roadside explosions shatter the brain’s ne