His father, Roderick Hall, was born to a Scottish father and Filipino mother in Manila. Hall’s motivations are intertwined with family history. (The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 15 journalists were killed in Ukraine last year, and many reported being deliberately targeted by Russian troops.) What makes someone run toward disaster and mayhem, while most of the rest of us instinctively run in the opposite direction? Hall’s book - which comes out Tuesday, exactly one year after the day he willed himself up that slope so he could be seen and rescued - attempts to answer the question that has vexed families of war journalists for generations.
Hall’s book recounts his harrowing extraction from Ukraine and his arduous medical recovery. “I waved at it and grabbed dirt in my hands and threw the dirt at it and yelled out and did everything I could to make whoever was driving the car see me.” The same car came back from the other direction. He managed to drag himself up the hill and sit up.
He was thinking of his three young daughters. “I pulled myself along on my left side, clawing at the dry, orange dirt, moving inch by inch,” Hall writes. He realized the occupants of the car could not see him because he was at the bottom of a slope, on the side of the road. He stumbled toward Pierre and away from the car. His left thumb was hanging by a flap of skin and he had shrapnel in his neck and head.
He took a photo of his legs with his cell phone, which he had somehow located, though he had no reception. Then he realized half of his right leg was missing and his left was severely maimed. Hall’s legs were on fire, so he started rolling his body and patting his legs to put out the flames. Pierre was still alive and lying on the ground several yards from the car. When the blackness receded, Hall somehow managed to extricate himself from the car, which contained the remains of the Ukrainian soldiers and Sasha. He heard the voice of his eldest daughter Honor, then six years old: “Daddy, you’ve got to get out of the car.” In his new book “Saved” (HarperCollins), Hall describes what happened next. And then a second bomb, and then blackness. Minutes later a bomb exploded 30 feet in front of their car, igniting a stand of trees on the side of the road. Cannes Film Festival 2023: Live Updates of All the Looks From Red Carpets, Arrivals and Photocalls
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