Resolute

When life knocks you flat—harder than you imagined possible—what will you do next? In Resolute, Benjamin Hall argues that resilience is not rare heroism; it’s your default human setting. He contends that survival and growth come from a sequence you can learn to run under pressure: trust your built-in resilience, accept reality without illusions, adapt fast, embrace small wins, and aspire beyond “back to normal.” But to do so, you must understand how mindset, community, meaning, and love actually work under fire.

Across battlefields, burn units, rehab gyms, and kitchen tables, Hall lays out the anatomy of resolve through his near-death bombing outside Kyiv (which killed colleagues Pierre Zakrzewski and Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova), his improbable extraction by Save Our Allies, and the long months of recovery at Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC). He weaves in stories from Ukrainian doctors, Invictus Games athletes, Israeli massacre survivors, a freed hostage (Maya Regev), and a small Kentucky town that reinvented itself after coal, opioids, floods, and Covid. The result isn’t a checklist—it’s a lived field manual on how ordinary people convert adversity into strength.

What the book claims—and why it matters

Hall’s core argument is bracingly simple: we are, as Richard Dawkins once wrote, “survival machines.” Resilience is our default. The trick is learning to trust it and to deploy it deliberately. That trust starts the minute you face a reckoning: moving from “I survived” to “what does rebuilding look like?” In Texas, doctors told Hall to expect two years inpatient. He quietly set a defiant goal—home to London by his 40th birthday six months later. Such audacious timelines, he shows, don’t ignore reality; they energize it.

These ideas matter because you will face your own Horenka: a diagnosis, a layoff, a betrayal, a disaster. Hall’s methods—cognitive reframing, tiny milestones, community activation, pain endurance, and meaning-making—scale down to daily life. If they work when a man wakes on fire and missing a limb, they work when you’re trying to re-enter social life post-burnout, parent through a crisis, or retrain after an injury.

What you’ll learn in this summary

You’ll begin with Hall’s reckoning at BAMC—how he moves from survival to will and defines resilience as “your built-in operating system.” You’ll then see why clinging to “back to normal” makes you slow and sad, and how he and his wife Alicia redesigned a home and a life instead. You’ll learn cognitive tools he used after a traumatic brain injury (TBI): turning threats into challenges, committing “scale errors” on purpose (from child-development research), and pre-building compensating systems.

From there, we’ll track micro-wins (his first stand and first step with a prosthetic), the choice to embrace challenge (even on a backyard trampoline), and the most transferable chapter of them all: how he “befriends” relentless pain using CBT-like self-talk to reach “the other side.” We’ll revisit stoicism and why it fails alone, as Hall opens up to Alicia about flashbacks in Portugal and fireworks-triggered surges in Sydney—then shows you how to define your core (family) and activate community without shame (think Brené Brown on vulnerability, paired with military precision).

You’ll also meet athletes at the Invictus Games who move beyond recovery to competition (“Masters of Our Fate”), and you’ll follow Hall back to Kyiv to interview President Zelenskyy inside Mariinskyi Palace—an act of personal and symbolic defiance. You’ll see faith reframed in a BAMC chapel, where doubt isn’t disloyalty; it’s part of a conversation with the “bigger thing.” You’ll finish in Israel (with survivor testimonies from Nir Oz and freed hostage Maya Regev) and in Hazard, Kentucky—two radically different communities proving that reinvention is a civic superpower, not just an individual one.

The promise of Resolute

Resilience isn’t denial. It is clear-eyed acceptance, rapid adaptation, joyful micro-wins, and bold aspiration—amplified by love, community, and meaning. You don’t bounce back; you grow beyond.

By the end, you’ll walk away with Hall’s most practical reframes—how to convert pain into an ally, how to reset goals upward once you stabilize, and how to “breathe” so you don’t miss life’s flashes of wonder (like the white-limbed tree outside his London window or the arrival of his fourth daughter, Sage). If you’re navigating grief, rehab, or reinvention, this is a map you can carry in your pocket—and a reminder that you’re stronger than you think, and closer than you realize.

Hall begins where every true recovery does: the reckoning. After a C-17 flight and a midnight ambulance ride into Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) in Texas, surgeons “took him apart” to audit the damage—amputated right leg below the knee, mangled left foot and hand, burns, eye trauma, skull fracture. Then came the question no doctor can answer for you: what will the rest of your life look like?

He doesn’t reach for platitudes. He reaches for history. Quoting General George C. Marshall—“campaigns and battles are nothing but a long series of difficulties to be overcome”—he argues that resilience, not bravado, shapes destinies (a view echoed by James L. Regens on resilience as a predictor of victory). The point: your biology and your lineage have preloaded you with a refusal to quit.

Default wiring: trust it fast

At the first prognosis—two years inpatient—Hall doesn’t rebel; he reframes. He quietly sets a target to be home in six months for his 40th birthday. That isn’t denial; it’s what psychologists call an approach orientation. He is leveraging an innate bias toward survival (he cites Richard Dawkins’s “survival machine”) and snapping it to an energizing, time-bound aim.

([Context] Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, found that prisoners who attached to a concrete future goal—“a why to live for”—withstood present suffering better. Hall is applying that logic in a burn ICU.)

Define your fight

From that hour, his “why” is non-negotiable: get home to Alicia and their girls—Honor, Iris, and Hero. That clarity becomes his filter. On the top-secret train out of Kyiv, he refuses to siphon attention from the mission. In Texas, it’s the compass he hands to every therapist and surgeon: point me toward home.

You can do the same. Pick one animating goal that dwarfs your doubts. Tie it to a date or milestone you emotionally care about. Make the daily grind answerable to it.

Set the clock—and move

Audacious timetables unlock energy. Hall’s six-month clock forces urgency without recklessness. He keeps pushing (and often needs clinicians to rein him in). But note the sequencing: audit reality first; then set the clock; then act. He never ignores infections, tissue limits, or surgical constraints. He just refuses to let them become identity.

Field move

At your next reckoning—medical, marital, financial—ask: What is my unarguable “why”? What is my six-month homecoming? Then work backward into this week.

Resilience here isn’t romantic. It’s practical. It’s the choice to be led by a meaningful future instead of a medical chart. In the ICU, Hall stops being a passive patient and becomes the point person of his own campaign. The danger in any adversity is slipping into fatalism. The antidote is setting your sightline and letting the body follow.

After six months, Hall lands in London and wants a graceful slide back into family rhythm. Reality vetoes the plan. The beloved terrace house—with three steep staircases and tight turns—doesn’t fit a man with a prosthetic leg, a damaged foot, and off-days in a wheelchair. The “olive tree” he planted when they bought the home—a symbol of permanence—now stands in someone else’s garden, unpruned and wild. That’s the lesson: normal is gone; a new life awaits design.

Grieve and let go—quickly, kindly

With consultant Phill Gill’s blunt advice (“You don’t want to feel disabled in your own home”), Ben and Alicia move. They add a ground-floor shower with a bench, a secondary bedroom for post-op stretches, and optimize pathways for wheels and prosthetics. The girls reframe the awkwardness—racing Dad up stairs as he scoots on his bottom. Grief coexists with play.

([Comparison] William Bridges’s Transitions emphasizes that every new beginning starts with an ending. Sheryl Sandberg’s Option B mirrors this: resilience expands when you stop arguing with reality.)

Design for the life you have

Clinging to “how it used to be” wastes energy. Hall channels that energy into design decisions: home layout, storage height, bathing sequences, even family rituals. He redefines “a good outing” from distance walked to time together. He and Bosco, the family Lab, resume park walks, both now limping—a scene both funny and holy.

Find joy in small steps

The point isn’t to erase difference; it’s to build a life suffused with moments that still feel like you. That can be as mundane as adjusting shower hardware or as beautiful as a kitchen conversation that doesn’t devolve into symptom management. Ben resists making the house a hospital; Alicia resists making identity a diagnosis. Together they choose a home that “works for us,” not a museum to yesterday.

Design question

If nothing about last year returns, how would you build this year—home, schedule, technology, rituals—so it serves who you are now?

Letting go of normal isn’t resignation. It’s responsible love. It allowed Alicia to protect the girls’ school rhythms and enabled Ben to reclaim dignity at home. Most importantly, it unlocked that heavy, hidden energy that gets trapped in “if only.” Once you release it, you can spend it where it counts.

In a quiet living room, weeks after coming home, a therapist asks Hall to explain the proverb “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” The words don’t come. Tears do. His traumatic brain injury (TBI) has left hidden deficits—in speed of retrieval, in juggling rapid-fire banter, in social stamina. The question shifts from if he can adapt to how.

From threat to challenge

The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “successfully adapting” via mental and behavioral flexibility. Hall makes that definition tactical. He reframes “I’m broken” into “I need a new method.” He shifts lunches with friends into shorter, structured bursts. Before high-stakes conversations, he frontloads research, anticipates likely questions, and builds prompts—more scaffolding, less improvisation.

([Comparison] Carol Dweck’s growth mindset sits beneath this: ability is expandable when you shift from performance to learning.)

Commit useful ‘scale errors’

Drawing on Karl Rosengren’s research, Hall borrows an idea from toddlers: kids sometimes attempt physically impossible tasks (like squeezing into doll furniture) because their brains don’t encode scale yet. What if, as adults, we choose similar “naiveté” when odds look poor? On the Kyiv extraction train, Hall acts “as if” he can handle 10 hours of agony without morphine. In rehab, he acts “as if” he’ll walk solo months ahead of schedule—and then trains to make the fantasy conform to reality.

Build compensating systems

He changes how he schedules life: time-boxing prep ahead of interviews; lightening loads before heavy cognitive tasks; insisting on environment details (where will I sit? who’s in the room?). He treats a wheelchair not as shame but as a tool to master (he even jokes about a future electric chair that “zips at 60”). Systems shrink shame.

Adaptation loop

Observe a friction → reframe as method problem → try a new scaffold → keep what works → discard the rest. Repeat weekly.

Adaptability isn’t a trait you either have or lack; it’s a muscle you keep under construction. Hall’s genius is demystifying it. He shows you how to convert humiliation in a living room into a working checklist—and how to turn perceived impossibilities into projects with deadlines.

One day in April 2022, two prosthetists, John Ferguson and Del Lipe, wheel into Hall’s ICU bay. They wrap his stump in cellophane, cast it, and—without fanfare—return with a crude plastic socket, a titanium pole, and a gray New Balance attached. “We’re just gonna pop this on…and then you’re gonna stand.” He does. The first stand becomes the first step between parallel bars the very next day.

Make the ladder visible

Hall calls it his “reconstructive ladder”: first stand, first step, first length of bars, first walker lap. Each rung is tiny; each is celebrated. The joy isn’t performative—it is primal. “We can’t remember our first steps as children,” he writes, “but I got to feel them again.” That awe supplies fuel far beyond dopamine hits.

([Context] This mirrors James Clear’s Atomic Habits and BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits: small, reliable wins change identity first—results follow.)

Embrace challenges deliberately

He chooses to do scary things. He clambers onto the backyard trampoline with his daughters—twists his ankle, rethinks the tactic, then invents a kneeling “troll” game they all love. In Sydney, against Alicia’s prudent “this is a bad idea,” he leaps from a pier into the ocean with prosthetics. He tears skin and bleeds on the ladder. Does he regret it? Not quite. The point is not recklessness; it’s refusing to be defined by fragility.

Reclaim symbols

As a boy, Hall played Amahl—the disabled child in Menotti’s Christmas opera who miraculously walks. Decades later, post-bombing, he literally learns to walk again. He rejects “magic stones” as fantasy but embraces the “magic” we can summon: love (Alicia and the girls), teams (BAMC staff), tools (CFI technology), and mind (positive framing). He converts story into strength.

Build your ladder

Write your next 5 tiny rungs. Celebrate each out loud. Identity changes fastest when progress is visible and named.

Micro-wins aren’t vanity metrics; they’re the bricks of a new self. When you can’t yet promise big outcomes, you can still script the next small victory—and let joy, not just grit, carry you.

The “Forklift Moment” is Hall’s rawest chapter. Days before a solo U.S. trip, an infected bursa balloons on his stump. He stubbornly tries adaptive skiing anyway, worsens it, and ends up navigating Heathrow on a public forklift—hoisted like cargo through the plane’s food door while onlookers gawk. In Washington, a non-accessible hotel room leaves him wet, half-in/half-out of a tub, crawling cold tile, defeated. The next night, a packed Correspondents’ Dinner traps him behind security perimeters and stairs. Mentally, he bottoms out.

When resolve collapses

Pain, he learns, is not just nociception; it’s meaning. The only lever within reach is interpretation. On the 10-hour Kyiv-to-Poland train—no morphine, just one Advil—he stops fighting the waves and changes his inner script: pain is an alarm; alarms signal healing; therefore pain is evidence I’m alive and repairing. “My pain and I are in this together.”

([Context] This mirrors cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) findings from the Washington University Pain Center; also Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR framing of pain versus suffering.)

CBT-like tools you can use

• Name the adversary without fear. “Okay, buddy—bring your next wave.” Detachment returns agency.
• Time-box to “the other side.” He reminds himself pain is not forever; there is a definable after.
• Stockpile proof. Each survived wave reduces future fear (“I’ve done this before”).
• Use meds wisely. He values analgesics but weans when fog impairs presence and control.

Endurance as accomplishment

He reframes surviving pain as an earned victory, not a null event. After a botched skin graft requires ripping off the wrong dressing—“akin to tearing off my skin”—he coaches himself between pulls: it will be bad, but I can handle it. He yells, then he invites the next pull. That’s not masochism; it’s mastery.

Pain playbook (Hall’s bullets)

Don’t flee pain; face it. Treat it as an ally in healing. Convince your thoughts of that truth. Count endurance as achievement. Bank every win so future pain scares you less. If the choice is pain or not surviving, be grateful for pain.

When he finally interviews Secretary Blinken on that trip, the victory isn’t airtime; it’s that he made it through without yielding to despair. In adversity, the win you need most is often invisible: you held the line inside your own head.

Hall’s upbringing prized stoicism. In Ukraine, he even lied low about 9/10 pain to avoid slowing his rescuers. But then, months later, a white truck passes their rental car in Portugal and—flash—his nervous system confuses it with a Taliban pursuit on a dusty Afghan road. In Sydney, New Year’s fireworks become incoming shells. Hypervigilance spills into family life. At first, he hides it. Then he tells Alicia. That conversation changes everything.

Rethinking stoicism

He interviews Kim Colegrove, whose law-enforcement husband, Jim, died by suicide after decades of unprocessed trauma. Her Pause First Academy now equips “first responders” (police, military, nurses) with mindfulness, peer groups, and pre-exposure resilience tools. The lesson is sobering: unshared trauma accumulates pressure. Silence isn’t strength; it’s a time bomb.

([Comparison] Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability mirrors this: strategic openness increases connection and courage; chronic armor breeds isolation.)

Define your core

Hall draws a firm circle: Alicia and the girls are non-negotiable ground. When fireworks or doorbells spike his nervous system, that core absorbs the shock. He doesn’t narrate every ache; he escalates what matters, including the flashbacks. From there, he decides whether and when to seek a professional. He remains open to therapy; he also preserves the mindset that’s working now.

Activate community

At BAMC, community looks like nurses whispering, “I got your back.” In London, it’s neighbors, teachers, kind shopkeepers, strangers who cede a queue spot, and military audiences who stand and clap at State. He notes how sometimes strangers are easiest to open up to—they offer help without history. He also gives back: talks for 800 military nurses at RAF Lakenheath, podcast interviews (Searching for Heroes), and candid stories for others on the edge.

Two questions

Who is my 100% core? What’s my first, smallest ask of community this week?

Courage here isn’t solo. It’s distributed. And the paradox is lovely: the moment Hall stopped carrying it all alone, his capacity to carry more grew.

One year after returning home, Hall flies to Düsseldorf to cover the Invictus Games—Prince Harry’s competition for wounded veterans. He’s there as a journalist, but also as a peer among people rebuilding bodies and identities. He arrives to a non-accessible hotel room (again), crawls the floor (again), and then decides: “screw the pain.” He will tell the stories he came to tell.

From coping to competing

He meets U.S. cocaptain Sergeant First Class Lauren Montoya (Afghanistan; IED; amputation), U.S. Marine Corporal Kionte Storey (IED; dark spiral; sports as lifeline), Technical Sergeant Kevin Greene (five sports; “these games give you life”), and his rehab friend Master Sergeant Justin James (parachute accident; now on a blade; “if you have resolve, you can tackle anything”). The unifying current isn’t recovery—it’s aspiration. They want medals, not moral victories.

([Context] Angela Duckworth’s Grit underscores this: passion and perseverance for long-term goals predict excellence. Frankl would add: meaning couples with striving.)

Reset the bar upward

Hall realizes his own goal can’t end at “back to work.” Watching wheelchair rugby, he locates the force animating the arena: specific, high aims pursued collectively. You stabilize, then you reset the bar—from “walk again” to “walk my kids to school,” from “back to the desk” to “frontline interview with Blinken,” from “cover a story” to “be part of a movement.”

Borrow strength; share it back

He sees an American athlete with a TBI lost near an exit, patient and calm. He waits with him until help arrives. Not dramatic, but instructive: warriors loan strength across small moments. That’s how cultures of resilience compound.

Motto to steal

From Henley’s poem Invictus—adopted by Team USA—aim to be a “Master of your Fate.” Stabilize. Then aspire.

Aspiration doesn’t deny scars. It alchemizes them. When Hall presents medals to archers and files his reports through stabbing foot pain, he proves a point: pain can ride shotgun to purpose. That’s not reckless; that’s adulthood with a mission.

614 days after the blast, Hall boards a blue-and-yellow Kyiv-bound train. The last time he rode this line, Save Our Allies hustled him aboard a top-secret diplomatic train as a near-ghost. This time, he walks on with a prosthetic. In Mariinskyi Palace, he lays flowers for the dead, then interviews President Zelenskyy about stalemate, Russian escalation, and attention fatigue in the West.

Return as defiance

Many asked: why go back? Because trauma metabolizes when you turn toward the hardest place. Because some pilgrimages are psychological proof: you cannot stop me. Because his daughters deserve a father who rejects fear’s veto power. He doesn’t make a show of bravery. He shows up, symbolically and professionally, to do his job.

Symbols matter

Zelenskyy awards him the Order of Merit, Class III—not to canonize him but to honor the journalists who were killed and those who keep reporting. The subtext is resilience: “If we preserve our resilience, we will end the war,” Zelenskyy says. Hall also visits the Kyiv surgeon who first stabilized him; the doctor weeps: “You were gone. It is a miracle you are here.” That handshake is bigger than two men; it’s a vote for the human will to repair.

Defy predictions—yours and others’

From the day he woke on asphalt—on fire, missing his leg—Hall never once believed he wouldn’t make it home. Later, he never believed he wouldn’t return to Ukraine. That isn’t magical thinking; it’s disciplined defiance. It’s also contagious. His return served as a mirror for viewers, clinicians, colleagues, and for Ukrainian civilians still repairing grids and water under shelling. Defiance, rightly aimed, is public service.

Your circle

Name the place you fear returning to—office, courtroom, hospital ward, studio. Go back on your terms. Small escort, firm spine.

Defiance here isn’t about ego. It’s about identity authored from the inside out. When you close your own circle, you become the kind of person whose past no longer dictates your horizon.

Across months of surgeries, there’s a room Hall passes often at BAMC: the chapel. One day he rolls in, prays for Pierre and Sasha, and talks with Chaplain William Breckenridge. He doesn’t resolve every theological question. He doesn’t need to. He rediscovers that faith can coexist with doubt, and that asking for help is not weakness; it’s alignment with the “bigger thing.”

Make space for the sacred

Hall was raised Catholic (Ben’s father once had him dig through a French dump to recover misplaced holy wine before a blessing). He’s also reported from wars where religion fueled atrocity—and where bombed-out churches left only an untouched cross and altar. In the chapel, he chooses a modest stance: pray, remember, ask. He quotes Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” The prayer lands because it’s paired with action.

([Context] This echoes 12-step spirituality: surrender what you can’t control; do “the next right thing.”)

Your person is a strategy

Hall calls Alicia his “secret weapon.” When burglars pry a London window at 1 a.m., she sprints downstairs while he straps on legs. She chases them off; he calls police. Roles shift; the partnership doesn’t. She’s also the one who, after initially vetoing an Israel trip, later gives a measured green light—with conditions. Love here is logistics, ethics, and courage intertwined.

Breathe—so you don’t miss the good stuff

Late in the book, Hall writes a letter to his newborn, Sage: the world is divided, but our “common moral backbone” is stronger; fight hard and pause to breathe. He notices a white-limbed tree out his window and finally understands his father’s joy in planting for a future you won’t see. He names what psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun call post-traumatic growth: new appreciation, deeper relationships, inner strength, new possibilities, and spiritual change.

A daily liturgy

Say thank you (to a person). Move your body (one rung). Do the next right thing (however small). Then breathe—notice one ordinary wonder.

Faith and family aren’t Hall’s escape hatches; they’re force multipliers. They sharpen his courage, steady his pacing, and remind him why the fight is worth having at all.

Resilience isn’t just individual. Hall goes to Hazard, Kentucky—once powered by coal, then gutted by industry collapse, opioids, historic floods, and Covid. If any town could have surrendered to statistics, it was Hazard. Instead, he finds a mayor named “Happy” (Donald Mobelini) and a main street reopening one modest enterprise at a time: a plus-size boutique (Hot Mess Express) launched mid-pandemic by Stephanie Callahan after she got clean; a bookstore (Read Spotted Newt) by Mandi Fugate Sheffel; nearly 50 new businesses and ~200 jobs in just a few years.

When industries die

For a century, Appalachia’s coal put food on tables and steel in U.S. cities. Then demand ebbed. Mines shuttered. Pain clinics surged. Overdoses spiked. Floods ripped homes from foundations. Still, Hall hears citizens refuse fatalism: “It does either one thing or another—it devastates you, or it fuels your passion to help those who are still alive,” says Jenny Combs.

Turning pain into enterprise

Stephanie Summons a baby as her sobriety deadline (“you’re not taking my son”), then opens a store neighbors said would fail. It thrives. Susan Brotherton rehires former employee Corey Shockey after she gets clean; Corey now manages stores and “makes me all kinds of money.” The recovery economy becomes the town’s flywheel.

([Context] NASA astrobiologist David Grinspoon notes humanity has repeatedly “reinvented itself” under existential pressure—Hazard is a municipal case study.)

Train the next generation

Mayor Happy points to ballfields tucked into mountains, to vocational training for inmates ferried to campus at night, to parking lots about to be repaved for Main Street capacity. He makes resilience visible to kids so they’ll stay. “I want to bring my kids around town and tell them I helped bring our community back,” says Terry Davidson.

Civic playbook

1) Name what died. 2) Celebrate every micro-opening. 3) Hire recovered people first. 4) Build kid-visible symbols (fields, fairs, fittings). 5) Let a “Happy” narrate the comeback daily.

Hazard proves that communities can do what bodies do: scar, rewire, and get stronger. If your team, church, company, or city is reeling, this is your pattern: local agency, small bets, public wins, relentless storytelling.