Fox’s Jennifer Griffin Recounts Stunning Story of Working With Pentagon to Evacuate Benjamin Hall From Ukraine

Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin told People in an article published on Tuesday the remarkable story of how her colleague Benjamin Hall was evacuated over the border to Poland after he was wounded in Ukraine while covering the Russian invasion.

Hall was wounded last month outside Kyiv in an attack that killed Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and local  producer Oleksandra Kuvshynova.

Griffin said that a Pentagon reporter came to her and asked if the Fox News team in Ukraine was okay. Griffin hadn’t known what happened, so she phoned Fox News president Jay Wallace, who told her that Hall was wounded and that Zakrzewski and Kuvshynova were nowhere to be found.

“So at that point, I said to Jay, ‘Do you want me to help?’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Yes.’”

While the United States couldn’t get any troops into Ukraine to extract Hall, Griffin asked Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby whether the United States could get Hall to a military hospital were he to make it to the Polish border.

According to People:

Once off the phone [with Wallace], Griffin says, she turned to Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby, who happened to be standing just outside the Fox News booth.

While Kirby explained to her that the U.S. couldn’t assist in any sort of military effort inside of Ukraine (due to a presidential order that bans troops from crossing into the country), Griffin had another idea.

She proposed to Kirby that “if I can get Benjamin to the border, can you have a team from Landstuhl help him?” (Landstuhl refers to a major military hospital in a town of the same name in Germany.)

Griffin also contacted Sarah Verardo, of the group Save Our Allies, for help. The group, which works to evacuate people from war zones, agreed to help get Hall out of Ukraine.

From the report:

The plan to get to Hall and the Fox News staff — and get Hall into a hospital in Germany — had been set into motion. But first they would have to determine where, exactly, everyone was.

Griffin tells PEOPLE they knew Hall was in one of three hospitals around Kyiv, so she “put on [her] reporter hat” and worked with security teams in the area to determine that Hall was at a border guard facility there.

“We still did not know where Pierre and Sasha were at that point,” Griffin says. “They were still missing. So we thought: Where do we go from here?”

Eventually, Richard Jadick, a doctor, helped get Hall to safety in what was “a 12-hour journey to get Hall to the Polish border, which required transferring him to an ambulance and keeping him stabilized while traveling down pockmarked roads destroyed by Russian tanks in a country under attack,” according to People.

Once Hall arrived at the Polish border, the U.S. Army airlifted Hall to Landstuhl Hospital in Germany.

As of March 25, Hall is being treated in a Texas hospital.