FROM WOODY TO PLASTIC MAN:

On the mend, with a mission: In 'To Iraq and Back,' Bob Woodruff talks about the limited care for soldiers suffering from brain injuries (Matea Gold, February 27, 2007, LA Times)

He occasionally searches for a word and has limited vision in the right corners of his eyes. But aside from some red scars that pocket his face, there are few outward signs that 13 months ago part of Bob Woodruff's skull was blown off by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

"I feel so lucky in so many ways," the ABC correspondent said Monday, seated in an airy conference room in the network's Manhattan headquarters. "I see what my family has gone through and I realize how difficult it has been."

In "To Iraq and Back: Bob Woodruff Reports," an hourlong documentary airing at 10 tonight on ABC, Woodruff tells the story of his recovery from the explosion that seriously wounded him and cameraman Doug Vogt. It's his first time on the air since an improvised explosive device hit the Iraqi personnel carrier they were riding in north of Baghdad in January 2006, just weeks after he and colleague Elizabeth Vargas had begun their short-lived pairing as co-anchors of the evening news.

The bomb shattered Woodruff's left shoulder and pelted his body with shrapnel, including a half-dollar-sized rock that pierced his neck, barely missing a key artery. In the immediate days after the explosion, he came close to death several times. The 45-year-old father of four was in a medically induced coma for 36 days.

When he woke up at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., Woodruff didn't remember his brothers' names -- or even the existence of his two youngest daughters. He couldn't read or write or recall basic vocabulary. In one scene in the documentary, his three daughters huddle next to him on his bed, coaching him how to say "belt buckle."

A year later, it's difficult to believe he's the same man whose skull was flattened on one side.