Bob Woodruff: Turning Personal Injury Into Public Inquiry

The doctors and nurses are seen hugging Woodruff as he begins to learn more about the condition he was in at Bethesda. He said today that learning what his family endured during that time was the hardest part of this past year, and that watching the documentary brings up a lot of emotion.

"It's difficult for me, there's no question about it," Woodruff said today. "There's been a lot of tears."

He went on to say that he nearly died several times in the first weeks after the attack, and as he began his recovery he could not lift his left arm due to a shoulder injury. He's now regained enough movement to play tennis, has been skiing with his son, adding that his wife requests he not play basketball or soccer.

Woodruff's rehabilitation continues at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York roughly once a week, and he says that his recovery may never end. He occasionally struggles to find words, and says that while regaining 100 percent of his abilities is unlikely, he jokes that if he could be somewhere in the 90s "that would be pretty damn good."

The Human Cost of War

Later in Tuesday night's hour, Woodruff returns to Bethesda once again -- this time in a more-familiar role: that of a journalist.

It's there he meets Army Sgt. William Glass, who, like Woodruff, was struck by an insurgent's roadside bomb in Taji, Iraq, and suffered traumatic brain injury. When Glass' wife, Amelia, asks Woodruff how long it took him to recover, the reporter says, "It's still going on."

Many of the families Woodruff met with across the country express frustration at the lack of care TBI patients receive once they leave specialized rehabilitation centers and return home. Woodruff asks Secretary of Veteran's Affairs Jim Nicholson about the ability of local VA hospitals to care for brain-injured servicemen. "We have organized the VA with this priority for these combatants returning back," Nicholson says.

But following brain-injured Army Sgt. Michael Boothby from Bethesda back to the soldier's hometown of Comfort, Texas, Woodruff watches Boothby's condition quickly deteriorate as he awaits the arrival of the paperwork that would allow him to continue his treatment.

While the U.S. Department of Defense says that there have been about 23,000 nonfatal battlefield casualties in Iraq, Woodruff discovers -- through an internal VA report -- that more than 200,000 veterans have sought medical care for various ailments, including more than 73,000 diagnoses for mental disorders.

Nicholson plays down those figures, telling Woodruff, "A lot of them come in for dental problems. … We're providing their health care."

Woodruff reports that even these numbers may not tell the whole story: According to unreleased data from the Department of Defense, at least 10 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans may have sustained a brain injury during their service.