On a dark, cold morning last year, Rye’s Lee Woodruff, pulled her well-worn buffalo plaid bathrobe around her to once again see her husband, Bob, off on an overseas journalistic assignment.
But this mission was different.
It had been 17 years since Bob, then anchor of “ABC World News Tonight,” had been reporting in Iraq when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb and he suffered a traumatic brain injury.
Now he was returning to the scene of the blast for the first time, and he was bringing his son Mack, a cinematographer, to help him make a documentary about that defining moment.
It wasn’t easy for Lee to watch her husband and son go.
“It was nerve-wracking at some level, but I also just had faith that it would all be okay,” recalled Lee, 64. “It provoked a lot of memory, but I knew this was something that Bob needed to do, just for his own closure, for lack of a better word. It was unfinished business.”
“A lot of veterans have the same feeling, that they left their team behind if they get yanked out before the mission was over,” said Bob, 63. “They just feel like the job was not done, and they want to go back and see the place that they left. Part of me felt the same way, because I had never been back. I wanted to go back to report again and see what Iraq is now.”
The trip was detailed in “After the Blast: The Will to Survive,” a documentary released last year. Now available on Hulu, “After the Blast” was nominated for two 2024 Emmy Awards: Outstanding Soft Feature Story: Long Form and Outstanding Promotional Announcement: News. Bob and Mack had collaborated previously on a National Geographic series called “Rogue Trip,” for which they traveled the world.
But going to Iraq, they both knew, would a very different, and highly emotional, kind of assignment.
“It was like the best ‘Bring Your Son to Work Day’ on steroids,” said Mack, who was 14 when his father was injured. “I finally got to see the guy that I always grew up seeing on TV in these random places and see what the life that he’s living is like in between those five-minute stand ups.”
In 2006, Bob’s injury upended his family. Mack was in middle school, his sister Cathryn was two years younger; and the twins, Nora and Claire, were babies. Lee had to pivot quickly to keep the kids on solid ground while helping her husband negotiate a bewildering new world. Bob had to relearn everything from how to walk to how to speak.
They credit the support they received from the Rye community for keeping them going.
“People were incredible in this town — meals and rides for the kids and cleaning the garage,” Lee said. “I mean, we’d only lived here four years, so I was astounded at the level of just love that was extended. This is a community that really cares. I am really grateful.” She detailed the experience in her memoir, “In An Instant.”
With luck and the outstanding care he received, Bob not only survived but regained his ability to speak. He estimates that he has regained 90 percent fluency.
The documentary retells the story of Bob’s injury, and includes footage of everything from his hospital stay to his return to Rye. It depicts the hard work it took to relearn language and to deal with the despair of the injury. And it takes viewers on their return to Iraq. When Bob and Mack arrived in Iraq, Bob caught up with some of the Iraqis he had interviewed and reconnected with some of the Iraqi military he had been embedded with.
As they approached the spot where Bob had been wounded, Bob broke down and Mack comforted him. As it turned out, this location, which has loomed so large in the minds of the Woodruff family, was an ordinary sidewalk on a busy road. There was nothing remarkable about the place.
“I envisioned an open field of sand in the middle of the nowhere,” Mack said. “We get there and it is as if it happened in the middle of I-95. I’m trying to get the shot, and I am getting honked at, nearly run over. We were causing a scene because we’re in the middle of traffic. We couldn’t even hear each other over the rush of the cars.”
Both said they did not experience any hostility toward them as Americans.
“Mostly, they are disappointed that America didn’t fulfill its promise of a better Iraq,” Bob said. “Life is still very difficult there and they feel abandoned.”
Mack added, “Some of them said that to our faces that they felt worse off than before the war.”
Both feel the trip brought them a measure of peace.
“I don’t need to go back again,” Bob said. “I felt guilty before, like I had let people down, but this helped me a lot.”
“Survivor’s guilt,” Mack interjected.
Bob is back to reporting longform news stories for ABC. But the family’s focus is on Stand Up for Heroes, a nonprofit the Woodruffs started in 2007 to “raise awareness about the tough challenges veterans and military families are facing and invest in solutions to help support them in the next chapter of their lives.”
Including a Nov. 11 fundraising gala this year (the foundation’s 18th), Stand Up for Heroes has raised around $195 million. This year’s event featured Bruce Springsteen (who has performed at every gala), as well as Jim Gaffigan, Norah Jones, Mark Normand, DJ Questlove, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jon Stewart.
“I was lucky to not only survive but have really good treatment,” Bob said. “And I had already been able to accomplish so much, I was 45 years old, a national news anchor, I had a powerful company that was very supportive, and I had a wife and four kids. Then I learned about those 21-year-olds that were nearly killed and now permanently disabled. Some lose their jobs; they end up divorced because of lack of support. I got a feeling of survivor’s guilt, as Mack said. That’s why we started the foundation, to try to make the support and care equal.”
Going forward, the wandering Woodruffs are not letting grass grow under their feet. They have already collaborated on another travel series called “Last Lands,” a look at the fight to save the world’s most endangered ecosystems. The series debuted in September on ABC News Live, and is available on Disney+, Hulu, YouTube, and Roku.
“I think one of the best things our father taught us was not to be scared of the world,” Mack said. “There are no dangerous countries, only dangerous people. I am just as likely to be hurt on the New York City subway as I am anywhere else. You can’t let it stop you from experiencing the world. There is no place not worth exploring.”